Danny Cohen
Museum of Dannys

Danny Cohen is indeed a very strange, eccentric, and indefinable character.
Although he started early with music, in 1961 he was already playing with his brother Greg (later bassist for Tom Waits and John Zorn), in the punk formation of the Charleston Grotto, only in recent years has he resumed dedicating himself to music continuously.
Before? Student, painter, writer, salesman, vagabond, secretary, journalist…

Behind his return to music is the hand of Mr. John Zorn, who, sensing Danny's immense talent, decided to release the album that marks the return of good old Cohen to the scene on his Tzadik in 1999, namely "Museum Of Dannys".
The album, which actually collects compositions even before the year of its release, is a magical kaleidoscope where ideas, suggestions, and influences take on the most bizarre and disjointed forms, a splendid container of emotions and musical genres: pop, folk, jazz, and blues are held together by an attitude and an approach that is consistently "free", unconventional, almost "punk", in the broadest sense of the term.
Danny's great skill lies in a romantic approach to music, disillusioned, almost childlike and carefree in a Daniel Johnston way, to understand, but equally deeply cultured and refined. Danny composes and blends small naïve paintings, rare gems with a genuine and disillusioned flavor, which inevitably recall his friend Tom Waits, but also in some cases the more eccentric Zappa, the nonsensical and deconstructed blues of Captain Beefheart and Syd Barrett, and the more existential vein of Nick Cave.

The album as mentioned moves across multiple genres, maintaining a direct line with the more genuinely "pop" tradition, a pop that, however, takes inspiration from American folk and blues tradition, but also from jazz and rock always with a compositionally disrupted and markedly literary style, in which the Californian, alcoholic ghosts of John Fante and especially Charles Bukowski echo.
His voice is the real instrument that organically holds the album together, an incredibly versatile voice capable of otherworldly and disorienting falsettos, but also of tracing harmonies and vocal lines that, as I said before, recall the good old Beefheart and Tom Waits (splendid "Rainting in The Street", the Zappa-esque "New Mexico", the crooked "Justice Done" and "Eternal Night").
Always the living personification of the American outsider, intolerant of any type of label, outside of any canon, and above all, detached from any logic of the record business, Danny Cohen is undoubtedly one of the champions of the American underground songwriters' scene, one of the best minstrels of recent years, one of the princes of overseas urban folk.

Highly not recommended for those who would not be able to accept/appreciate a song that ends with a burp. Highly recommended for those who would be able to accept/appreciate a song that starts with a burp.