Music Reviews: CD

My old friend Ken Kessler What's App'd me sounding more excited than I've heard him in years! The veteran U.K. based audio and watch journalist told me a U.K. label Roller Coaster Records had just released a CD reissue of The "Chirping" Crickets that used similar tech to what Giles Martin used to remix Beatles albums in improved stereo, but Ken said for some reason it worked much better on this old Crickets album that was recorded and released... 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).

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

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

Yen Records encapsulated bubble-era Japan’s artistic experimentation at a mainstream-adjacent level, though some artists never took off. Among them was Tamao Koike, whose new CD TAMAO - Complete Yen Years documents her short-lived '80s attempt at techno-kayō stardom. Partially produced by Yellow Magic Orchestra, Koike's music deserves rediscovery.

Just in time for the holidays, A Lovesome Thing—pianist Geri Allen and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel playing duets at the Philharmonie de Paris on Sept. 5, 2012, for nearly an hour, five tunes, mainly standards, unrehearsed—is a welcome and ravishing balm.The two had played together just once before—the previous July, when Allen briefly sat in with Rosenwinkel’s quartet at the Jazz Standard—and never together as a duo. Yet they make a perfect fit, Allen’s lush chords,... Read More

Sullivan Fortner is best known as singer Cécile McLorin Salvant’s main pianist, but he was dazzling New York jazz aficionados for a few years before that gig materialized, and, like Salvant, he keeps getting better—more imaginative, more ambitious, more open to taking big risks. His latest, Solo Game (Artwork Records), is two very different albums in a single two-CD set. The first, Solo, is an acoustic-piano solo session, covering a wide array of jazz and pop... Read More

Darcy James Argue has evolved over the past 15 years, into one of our era’s great big-band composers and leaders, second only to Maria Schneider and, increasingly, a force worth taking on the same level of seriousness. His 4th and latest album, Dynamic Maximum Tension—his first in six years and his debut on the Nonesuch label—is his best to date: a work of stunning versatility and complexity, but thoroughly accessible, borderline passionate, for all its intricate maneuvers.

(This review originally appeared in Issue 5/6, Winter 1995/96. A 25th Anniversary double vinyl LP issued by Omnivore with new liner notes and three previously unissued outtakes is currently available—see clickthrough at page bottom).When I was a child, I had a middle-aged second cousin Sophie who lived in far away California. She came to visit one cold New York winter in the late 1950s, bearing crates of tissue wrapped oranges, and jellies and jams from a place with a... Read More

(This review originally appeared in Issue 7, Spring 1996.)It is at once comforting and depressing to hear a band of (relative) youngsters writing and performing songs, most of which could easily be dropped into a cassette tape compilation from the early 70s and segue way so smoothly you’d never know they were new. Since I choose comfort over depression every time, I’m enjoying the hell out of this set of alternative shitkicker music which gracefully slips and slides... Read More

(This review originally appeared in The Tracking Angle Magazine Issue 7, Spring 1996.)Bryan Ferry covering Gogi Grant’s dramatic “The Wayward Wind” has always been one of my musical dreams, but Neil Young does a more than adequate version to open this long neglected mid-80s Young country album. While he doesn’t bring the kind of “camp” to the tune Ferry could, he’s got the spirit right, with cascading strings (17 count ‘em pieces), Waylon Jennings on guitar, and Bela... Read More

As I’ve noted a few times in this space, Jason Moran is the most versatile, virtuosic jazz pianist on the scene. Around the turn of the decade, as player and composer, he focused on elegiac melodies, deceptively simple in form, rich in harmonies and textures, stirring, even spiritual, in their quest. Some tracks on this album from that period, The Sound Will Tell You, resemble movie music (but deep movie music); two of them were written for the HBO adaptation of... Read More

For anyone more familiar with John Barry’s 50s and 60s discography and his early scores for spy films like the James Bond series or The Ipcress File (1965), encountering his late-career work on films like Dances with Wolves (1990) and Chaplin (1992) can be a bit of surprise. Gone are the stylings of his era-defining London mod classics like “Hit and Miss” and “Beat for Beatniks”, let alone his genre-defining “James Bond Theme” (Barry's arrangement of a melody by... Read More

Cécile McLorin Salvant has reached the point in her career where she can, apparently, get away with doing whatever she wants. Dreams and Daggers and The Window solidified her status as the preeminent jazz singer of our time. Ghost Song, her debut on Nonesuch Records, cracked open all genres, covering a range enveloping Kurt Weill, Kate Bush, Harold Arlen, a 19th-century folk ballad, and a half-dozen original songs, which matched the album’s standards for wit, swing,... Read More

The best reissues provide fuller context to the material, guiding listeners to (even) more favorably reassess the work without seeming forceful. As more recent installments have generally grown in size and curation quality, the series has become essential for anyone with more than a passing interest in Dylan. The latest set, 'Fragments: The Bootleg Series Vol. 17,' is the definitive collection of session material and tour recordings surrounding 1997's 'Time Out Of Mind.'

Jason Moran’s latest album, From the Dancehall to the Battlefield, is a staggeringly ambitious work, nothing less than a stab at reconceptualizing jazz history, hoisting a fairly obscure figure—the composer-bandleader James Reese Europe (1881-1919)—onto the pantheon of major innovators, a project that forges new links and traces a new path of the music’s evolution, with Lt. Jim Europe (as he was also known) at the—or at least a—center.