So far we've covered ska in Part 1, rock steady the singers in Part 2a and rock steady the groups in Part 2b. We now come to the deejays and how in the early 1970's they became Jamaica's most popular recording artists.Some of the most famous deejays got their start working for sound systems. As recounted in part 1 of our survey, these sound systems often consisted of a truck equipped with a turntable, speaker, cables and amplifiers. The owners,... Read More

On April 5, 1923, one hundred years ago, in Richmond, Indiana, at the studio of Gennett Records, King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band made the first recordings by African American musicians that are indisputably jazz. They are also the first recordings of Louis Armstrong, who, during the next eleven years, would revolutionize jazz and popular music in America and the rest of the world. Mixing African vocal techniques and concepts of improvisation and rhythm with... Read More

Classical music-loving audiophiles can sometimes feel like they've been left out in the cold with regard to all-analogue vinyl reissues. Not so rock and jazz lovers who are well catered to with excellent AAA reissues from Analogue Productions, Impex, Craft, Blue Note et al. Speaker’s Corner used to keep the classical reissues coming, but even their releases have dried up in the last few years - a great shame.However, relief is at hand. As reported by MF and... Read More

In the "Starting a Jamaican Music Collection" series, in part 1 we covered ska and in part 2a rock steady, the singer. We now come to rock steady, the groups. To recapitulate, ska lasted roughly from 1960 to the later part of 1966. Rock steady then took over the island. The fast tempi and thundering horns of many ska songs gave way to rock steady's much slower beat. Playing a much more prominent role in the new genre were the bass and drums and along... Read More

Tom Verlaine died on January 28, 2023. He was the guitarist, singer, songwriter for, and co-founder of the band Television. Their first album "Marque Moon", released in February 1977, is a masterpiece and, like all masterpieces, an expression of a unique talent and sensibility that fits in no category or genre. But the media and the streaming services insist that "Marquee Moon" is a "punk" album and Television was a "punk" band.... Read More

Forget the bloated “prequel” film trilogy by Peter Jackson. If you want to experience the real magic of J.R.R. Tolkien’s first novel, seek out a copy of this beautiful recording by the quirky Scottish actor, Nicol Williamson.Whenever I pop into a record store, I always make a point of checking out the Spoken Word section. There are many unusual treasures to be found here, usually at rock bottom prices. And if you’re lucky, you might score a copy of this 4-LP set... Read More

After finding a white-label seven-inch promo copy of the Stones' most controversial song, the author finds the alternate mono version of "Brown Sugar" to be both piercing and majestic. After considerable thought and listening came the discovery that the Stones' best work is also their most provocative and outrageous.

In Starting a Jamaican Music Collection—Part 1:Ska, we highlighted ska, the first of the big three genres (the others are rock steady and reggae) that made Jamaica famous worldwide. Indeed, this Third World country has carved out a place in 20th century music history that far belies its small size and population. And again, IMO Bob Marley is THE musical artist of the 20th century.Ska, which dominated from around 1960 to 1966, was essentially upbeat and boisterous... Read More

Which is actually quite odd, because Messiah was never intended by its composer as a Christmas piece - quite the opposite in fact. It was originally composed, in 1741, for performance at the most solemn time in the ecclesiastical calendar - Easter. The work tells the entirety of Christ’s story, culminating in His Crucifixion and Resurrection, with a meditation on the meaning of His life and death to Christians. So, this is hardly the stuff of Christmas levity.However,... Read More

A reappraisal of Low's Christmas (1999) and Double Negative (2018). In memory of singer Mimi Parker (1967-2022), who died in November.

My main job is national-security columnist for Slate. Every December since joining, back in 2002, my editors have indulged me to write a piece on the year’s best jazz albums. Here’s a link to this year’s column, which, as usual, includes a mini-essay about each album and a sound clip of an entire track. Most of these I’ve reviewed either for Tracking Angle (those designated with an asterisk *) or for Stereophile when I was a staffer there (marked with two asterisks **). I should also note that most of these albums sound very good (the Jamal and Waldron sound good); a few (#1, 2, 3, and 5) sound superb.

In 1960, Cadence Records created and funded a subsidiary, Candid Records so that Nat Hentoff, a writer and non-musician with no music business experience could do the fun stuff and be an Artists & Repertoire director/ jazz record producer. Hentoff (1925-2017), a jazz fan since his early teenage years, had enthusiasm as well as a love for and a deep knowledge of the music. He was a former jazz DJ, a former editor of Downbeat, a former editor of his own jazz... Read More

For a small third world country, Jamaica has produced an impressively large volume of exceptional music that has had an enormous impact on world consciousness. Bob Marley, in my opinion, is the 20th century's most important musical artist. Many Americans might not be aware of reggae's worldwide popularity since it had to compete over the U.S. airwaves with rock, disco and country music, but in major European countries including Spain, Germany, France and... Read More

(This piece originally appeared in slightly different form in Issue 73, the September/October 1991 issue of The Absolute Sound. It has been edited and updated for Issue 5/6 of The Tracking Angle, Winter 1995/96.)Beginning with his eponymous 1970 debut, and continuing throughout 11 Warner Brothers solo albums, Ry Cooder has demonstrated that in addition to being an extraordinary folk/blues guitarist—particularly on bottleneck—and a serviceable though hardly... Read More

Ry Cooder, in 1959, when he was 12 bought a copy of a ten inch record on an odd label with an amateurish paste-on cover and mimeographed liner notes tucked inside. The record was Get On Board by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, two middle aged Black men who had been playing blues for Black audiences for more than two decades, but now, probably to their own surprise, were becoming popular with young white people. Cooder began listening and woodshedding and we know the... Read More

In 1960, often referred to as “The Year of Africa,” seventeen former French and British colonies in Africa became free, independent nations. In the U.S., in February 1960, the struggle of Black Americans to attain the civil rights which had been promised them by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, entered a more aggressive, confrontational phase when in Greenville, North Carolina Black students, frustrated and angered by the slow progress in ending segregation,... Read More