Music Reviews: Vinyl

Honestly at this point with the Ward/Johnson team writing for Tracking Angle, I often feel inadequate writing about classical music but I'll do my best. The Spanish concert pianist Alicia De Larrocha (1923-2009) gained fame in America touring in 1954 with The Los Angeles Philharmonic. She left an extensive discography that included many sonically outstanding recordings for Decca/London, highlighting Spanish composers including Granados, Rodrigo, Falla, Albéniz... Read More

Neil Young has been perfectly and, for some, frustratingly in the moment since the 1960’s. But, what does that look like in 2025? Prior to the pandemic, Neil was recording and touring with Promise of the Real, a band largely made up of Willie Nelson’s kids. Decades younger, and with a vibrancy that goes hand-in-hand with youth, the members of Neil Young’s backing band seemed to be just as inspired by his fire as he was by theirs. That era in Neil’s music was truly... Read More

Lori Lieberman has released albums aimed at the so-called audiophile market for almost 30 years, but this one is the first (since her days on Capitol) with full analog bonafides. That's no guarantee of great sounding results, anymore than her previous digitally recorded ones did not have superb sound, because they did—2022's American Songbook themed Truly for instance. Here she's also gone "live in the studio", which adds considerable risk.... Read More

Freshly sprung from his contractual ties to the other Fabs, the McCartneys and Co. in January of 1975 lit upon New Orleans. With a batch of new songs that he was sure would surpass those on Band On The Run, contemporary reports found that Paul was feeling as toppermost as he had in years. And by settling on the Crescent City as his recording venue, he may have been hoping to recapture the magic (and the Grammy noms…) he’d found by once again working outside of the... Read More

Queen’s legacy is at the same ante as the Beatles, where one in every four households is likely to own their Greatest Hits compilation. Best known for crafting mini operatic suites and sports stadium anthems, the casual listener is probably not in tune with Queen’s hard-rocking origins. Hollywood Records focused on that era with the release of Queen I last year. Different release configurations transformed it from a remix of their self-titled debut into a period deep... Read More

Dylan Peggin did a great job writing for Tracking Angle recently when he gave us the back story of the making of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid album. He also gave us the scoop on the new Rhino High Fidelity pressing, giving it very high marks for packaging, music and sound.For comparison, he used the well-regarded 2006 Rhino pressing of Paranoid cut AAA by Kevin Gray, which was subsequently repressed on colored vinyl in 2015 for Vinyl Me Please. He also had the Rhino vinyl... Read More

The Doors are one of the most represented Record Store Day artists, guaranteed every year to have a special release. Whether it's reissues of long-forgotten mono mixes, singles, curated compilations, live recordings, or studio outtakes, RSD is a means for the most obsessive of Doors completists to stuff their shelves with the yearly limited edition offerings. No artist output has been nit-picked and criticized as much as the Doors' catalog, but the past few... Read More

In early 1928, in Avalon, Mississippi, John Hurt was awakened at 2 am by a knock on his door. He recognized the voice of Willie Narmour, a white man and a local fiddler who Hurt sometimes accompanied at dances. Narmour said "Get up John. Here's some people from New York want to hear you play some." Of course, Hurt didn't believe this incredibly unlikely story, but as a Black man, he knew better than to say so. "I didn't say anything to... Read More

Having owned a couple of copies of Mulligan Meets Monk, I’ve always felt that the stereo record magnified the differences between these two musicians by featuring them on different channels and casting too much of a spotlight on Mulligan’s sax. As good as those copies sound, including the 1980’s OJC LP and the AP 45 from the ‘90s, I had little experience with the mono recording that was made in the studio at the same time, except for a Fantasy SACD. So, when I heard... Read More

Roiled by political uncertainty and contention over race and identity, the late 2010s and early 2020s witnessed a resurgence of what’s now commonly called spiritual jazz. And close to the end of his life, with his final statement to the world, Pharoah Sanders found himself at the center of its discourse.The product of myriad cultural and ideological influences, this tenuously defined subset of the music nonetheless has identifiable hallmarks. It runs the gamut between... Read More

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of one of France’s most distinctive artistic voices: Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). When one thinks of French painting, they think of Claude Monet. When one thinks of French sculptor’s, they’ll likely conjure to mind Auguste Rodin; and when one thinks of French music, the melodies that enter their head are likely to sound a lot like those of either Claude Debussy or Maurice Ravel. Both composers contributed greatly to... Read More

In just under ten years, songwriter/instrumentalist/vocalist Kevin Barnes transformed Of Montreal from a unified collective to a one-person operation. Having churned out whimsical baroque pop albums like Cherry Peel and The Gay Parade within the confinements of a band, Barnes took to working solo by dabbling in sonic experimentation and, inspired by their first marriage to Nina Grøttland, started writing in a more personal style. The initial fruits of this new... Read More

This is a good time to be alive if you are a Neil Young fan. For years, Neil Young, an archivist like few others, has saved everything. And when I mean everything, take a gander at the Neil Young Archives. Here we find photographs, original lyric sheets, ephemera, videos, and all the music. The music quality, it goes without saying, is also presented in a similarly archival manner. For those who stream, you are treated to a digital source that is as close as you can... Read More

In Greenwich Village, directly across from The Red Lion on Bleecker Street, an unremarkable mixed-use building conceals an extraordinary legacy.From 1964 to 1970, the basement of the defunct Garrick Theatre housed the Café Au Go Go — a pivotal New York club that welcomed legends ranging from Jimi Hendrix and B.B. King to the Grateful Dead. It opened with a bang: in its first year, comedic groundbreaker Lenny Bruce was arrested by undercover police after a performance... Read More

To Nick Finzer, the pioneering trombonist J.J. Johnson is often taken for granted. A standout among the new generation of trombonists, Finzer released Legacy — a full-album tribute to his hero, last year — “He’s one of those figures where people know and are familiar with his name,” he told me. “But when you start to dig a little deeper below the surface, people don’t realize how transformative he was.”Transformative indeed: in retrieving the trombone from its... Read More

David Bowie was the alien-like rock and roll messiah to teenagers of the glam era, but none would’ve guessed that soul music was part of his musical DNA when his career started in the mid-60s. His initial flirtation with the genre stems back to his 1974 album, Diamond Dogs, with tracks like “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me” and the Orwellian-inspired “1984.” The influence grew more potent on the tour supporting the album, with his cover of Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood”... Read More

Dexter Gordon was a striking figure—6’6” (one of his albums was called Long Tall Dexter), with a dry wit, a voice as foggily husky as his tenor saxophone tone, and (as an iconic photo taken by Herman Leonard reveals), lungs capacious enough to hold what looks like an entire cigarette’s worth of smoke in one breath. (This last trademark-feature led to his death from emphysema in 1990 at age 67.) In his last decade, Gordon became a true star, owing to a celebrated... Read More

The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery, with Tommy Flanagan on piano and brothers Percy and Albert Heath on bass and drums, was the album that introduced electric guitarist John Leslie (Wes) Montgomery to the jazz world. It was recorded at Reeves Sound Studios in New York City on January 26 and 28 in 1960, when he was 35 years old. The album is now considered by many fans and critics to be the pinnacle of his recorded studio work, and it has influenced everyone... Read More