Music Reviews

Ella backed by a small jazz combo was an unusual musical setting for Ella in the studio, which makes this album recorded and released in 1961 a catalog standout. Pianist Lou Levy leads the quartet that also features guitarist Herb Ellis, bassist Joe Mondragon and on drums Stan Levey. Clap Hands...is also highly regarded for its excellent sonics, recorded somewhere in Los Angeles. Since producer and Verve founder Norman Granz was also Ella's long time manager and... Read More

When Norman Granz organized and produced in 1980 The Trumpet Summit Meets The Oscar Peterson Big 4 (Pablo 2312-114), Peterson was fifty five years old, Ray Brown was fifty two, Bobby Durham was forty three, Joe Pass was fifty one, Dizzy Gillespie was the "elder statesman" at sixty three and Freddie Hubbard was the youngster at forty two. By today's age standards none of them were "old", but jazz at that point—at least the kind of jazz these... Read More

The past few decades have brought an array of New Order compilation albums, yet 1987’s Substance, the original New Order singles compilation, still reigns supreme. In a time when “greatest hits” releases are mostly obsolete, there are several reasons for this. One is that New Order were (are?) primarily a singles band who released their best work as five- to eight-minute 12” singles. Older fans’ nostalgia for Substance is also a factor, but most importantly, Substance... Read More

Maria Schneider is the preeminent big-band composer and leader of our time. She’s been at it for a little over 30 years, recorded nine albums in that span, and this, her 10th, Decades—a lavishly packaged, limited-edition three-LP boxed set, on the Artist Share label—is a celebration, a sort of best-of anthology tracing her evolution. It also marks the first time any of her work has been pressed on vinyl, in this case 180-gram vinyl, the lacquers cut by Chris Bellman... Read More

In the mid-2000s, Kaiser Chiefs finally exploded onto the post-punk revival scene. After a failed attempt in the music business as Parva, they scrapped everything to forge ahead with a new musical voyage. In a musical climate dominated by American groups like The Strokes and The Killers, Kaiser Chiefs provided a strong British influence, borrowing elements from Britpop and 70s punk rock. The group’s ability to craft stadium anthems, such as “I Predict A Riot” and the... Read More

“Ambient is the space, the afterglow left when the centre has collapsed. It’s in the amorphous, beatless oscillations of post-rock, the multiple releases of abstract electronica which criss-cross the twenty-first-century skies like fading vapour trails. It implies an absence of subject.”David Stubbs, “Mars by 1980, The Story Of Electronic Music”, Faber & Faber, 2018, p304 Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet) is an English electronic producer who does not necessarily make... Read More

Not since Veronica Swift's This Bitter Earth (Mack Avenue MAC1177LP) has a record cover been so at odds with what's in the grooves as this filled with funky covers Groove Note title from Vanessa Fernandez. Think of it this way: there are eleven tunes here from Childish Gambino, Prince, Lenny Kravitz, Barry White, Maurice White and a few others and the mostly celebratory funk is in the air (with a mellow stop over in Bill Withers territory), produced by a... Read More

So much of interest to write about this EP and its vinyl reissue. Back in 1995, Tracking Angle magazine writer Carl E. Baugher wrote that the Alice In Chains 1995 reunion album eponymous release (the one with the three legged dog on the cover) "..combines the range and creativity of Jar Of Flies with the slam and drama of Dirt. He also described Alice in Chains as "... the heaviest of the hard n’ heavy bands out of Seattle."I took Carl's advice and... Read More

Why didn’t “The House That ‘Trane Built” release this Alice Coltrane record when it was originally recorded in Carnegie Hall February21st, 1971? It couldn’t have been because the musicians accompanying her weren’t worthy: Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Jimmy Garrison, Cecil McBee, Ed Blackwell, Clifford Jarvis and two lesser knowns. It wasn’t because it was poorly recorded. The engineer was David Jones, best known for recording the two classic Bill Evans Trio’s... Read More

Craft Recordings releases The Sound of Music soundtrack complete for the first time, including every piece of music used in the film and even some cues that were not. (Your editor feels it necessary to write to readers not at all interested in TSOM to please read film editor Paul Seydor's essay. It is filled with fascinating details and insight into film production and criticism. Don't miss it).

Yes, was a clickbait headline. Guitarist Anthony Wilson did not "meet" the rhythm section when last year they stepped into Kevin Gray's Cohearent Recording studio A/K/A "Hackensack West" to record this album live to two track tape, mixed "on the fly" as Rudy did. Wilson has been playing in Diana Krall's band for years with drummer Jeff Hamilton and bassist John Clayton, Jr.. Following this session, they were immediately back on... Read More

Ethan Iverson may be best known as the original pianist for The Bad Plus, a trio that made an improbably huge splash in the early 2000s by grafting jazz rhythms onto such pop and punk tunes as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” Aphex Twin’s “Flim,” and Abba’s “Knowing Me Knowing You”—and doing it with energy, wit, virtuosity, and genuine cross-genre feel for idiom: no nudge-wink po-mo irony. The group’s drummer and bassist, Dave King and... Read More

There is a moment in the 1950 French film of the Orpheus legend by legendary poet and director Jean Cocteau when the hero enters the shadow world to find his dead wife by passing through a mirror. He stands before the mirror - tentative - and then as he reaches out his hands to begin his journey, they appear to pass through the mirror’s surface.It’s an indelible image that remains iconic to this day, achieved through simple analogue means, that still brings gasps to... Read More

ORG Music continues their rollout of selections from the Westbound Records catalog that have been remastered and reissued on vinyl for the first time in several decades with a rare release from later in the label’s history, Eramus Hall’s, Your Love is My Desire (1980). Armen Boladian founded Detroit’s Westbound Records 1968 and it became a soul and funk dynamo, especially during the years following Motown’s exodus from Motor City. ORG’s series recently included the... Read More

The term “supergroup” heralds a level of heightened pressure and expectation. If bands like Cream, Blind Faith, or Emerson Lake & Palmer had instant success granted to them, Bad Company found themselves in good company. The group formed from the ashes of three of England’s beloved groups: Free, Mott The Hoople, and King Crimson. Vocalist Paul Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke had enough of Free’s guitarist Paul Kossoff’s drug abuse and unreliability. Guitarist Mick... Read More

Afric Pepperbird by the Jan Garbarek Quartet with Terje Rypdal, Arild Andersen and Jon Christensen was an early ECM touchstone, and the beginning of five decades of cooperation between producer Manfred Eicher, engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug and the four Norwegian players. It gets its first vinyl reissue since 1976 in ECM's Luminessence series.

If the above title scans, then you’re probably already familiar with the well-worn tale of ex-Beatle gone rogue to the far reaches of Nigeria. If not we can refer you to Wikipedia where tales of poor studio conditions, robbery and physical exhaustion all did their best to derail Sir Paul’s fifth solo attempt at getting back into the upper ranks of the pop realm.But if you just glance at the charts from the years before he, the memsahib and Denny Laine set off on... Read More

Have you seen the 2022 movie “Armaggedon Time”? It’s a coming of age movie set in 1980 Queens, New York about a creative, dreamer of a young man who wants to become an artist but his traditional Jewish parents are of course against it, preferring he become a “professional”. His musical tastes are rock’n’roll but after befriending a Black classmate, he’s introduced to Hip-Hop.Not that the movie is about music, but music represents the cultural crosswind at the time in... Read More

Herbie Nichols, who died of leukemia in 1963 at the age of 44, was a jazz composer-pianist of vast talent, wit, and virtuosity, but little luck. He recorded just four albums (three for Blue Note, one for Bethlehem), none of which sold well; his music may have been at once too formalistic and too quirky for its time. He had a playful style, not unlike Thelonious Monk's, who was a friend and contemporary, though Nichols' sense of structure and harmony was... Read More

The pantheon of guitar gods from the 1970s consists of the usual players that come to mind: Jimmy Page, Tony Iommi, and Ritchie Blackmore, just to name a few. Best known for being the original guitarist in KISS and adopting the makeup persona of “The Spaceman,” Ace Frehley is a self-described anomaly. His unorthodox approach to guitar playing left a mark on teenagers who spent their adolescent years learning his solos note-for-note. KISS’ on-stage theatrics enabled... Read More