Music Reviews: Vinyl

Repertoire both familiar and welcomingly unfamiliar is put through its paces by this nascent collaboration between one of the world’s top orchestras with its dynamic new Chief Conductor.  This gorgeously appointed set is not only a compelling snapshot of a new musical era at the Philharmonie, it’s also a great way for classical novices to introduce themselves to an eclectic range of music in first-rate performances. 

There's a misconception among some that King Crimson was Robert Fripp centered around a revolving door of personnel. The group's ever-changing style followed a new age philosophy of the music finding its players, leading to constant reinvention and being purely progressive. By the mid-1970s, King Crimson’s third lineup consisted of guitarist Robert Fripp, bassist/vocalist John Wetton, violinist David Cross, and percussionist Bill Bruford. This incarnation’s... Read More

The jacket is for a mono record so guess what? I played this record using a mono cartridge. Someone, (I thought in a comment but now I don't see it) claimed the recording was in stereo so upon returning from a trip to Seattle I played it using a stereo cartridge and? Yes, it's a fine stereo recording! Fine in that RVG kept it "natural", using stereo simply to produce space. Collapsing it to mono either with a mono cartridge or a "mono"... Read More

1971 was a pivotal year for R&B/soul music. Stevie Wonder's Where I'm Coming From was released in April. Marvin Gaye's What's Going On was released in May. Maggot Brain by Funkadelic was released in July, Curtis Mayfield's Curtis in September, and Sly's There's a Riot Goin’ On in November. All of these albums were entirely composed of original music and expressed the disappointment, despair, and anger of young Black people living... Read More

In 2019 Yuya Uchida, the father of rock & roll in Japan, passed away at age 79. Uchida was not an instrumentalist, and he never found fame as a singer, but his fingerprint was on much of the guitar-driven music infecting Japan from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. After a brief career releasing some early Elvis-inspired rock and roll singles at the dawn of the 60s, his passion was reinvigorated when the Beatles came to Tokyo in 1966 to perform five nights... Read More

Of all the '60s era artists that expanded their craft to unfathomable heights, The Velvet Underground was arguably the most adventurous. Few if any other contemporaries sought to work in unorthodox approaches to both instrumentation (drones, detuned guitars, and distortion) and subject matter (drug use, S&M, and prostitution). These approaches appear prominently on their first two albums, The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/White Heat. A key... Read More

The trio of pianist Bill Evans, bassist Scott LaFaro, and drummer Paul Motian is one of the most influential in jazz, yet the group laid down just three recording sessions over an 18-month period from December 1959 till June 1961--two studio sets (which formed two separate albums, Portrait in Jazz and Explorations) and one live date (spread out over two albums, Waltz for Debby and Sunday Afternoon at the Village Vanguard). The live albums, which rank as the best... Read More

Reading the press release while listening to this effervescent, ornately orchestrated instantly likable set of new, yet nostalgic tunes, it wasn't surprising to discover that modern day "crooner" L.C. Franke's musical roots at least for this record were anchored in his grandmother Elsie's "dusty" record collection (crooner in quotes because his singing style is more straightforward, though the tunes and arrangements could be used by... Read More

Rarely does regret sound so affirming, loss so found, emptiness so filling, distance so near and dated so au courant as do those dark sentiments on this collection of woe filled songs that though relentlessly morose, somehow bring to the listener peace and resolve.Though the Welch/Rawlings musical style remains fixed in mountain balladry and many of the themes are timeless, there's modernity too in "Hashtag"—an unrelentingly down road song about chasing... Read More

Imagine a young Miles Davis fan's excitement back in 1973 spying a new compilation titled BASIC MILES The Classic Performances of Miles Davis (C32025) only to find that it was a seemingly haphazardly chosen set of tracks, and worse, that the asterisked ones had been "Electronically Re-Recorded to Simulate Stereo". But reading the discography on the jacket before putting it back in the bin, the second track "Stella By Starlight" listed the... Read More

Impex Records releases a new 1step, 45-rpm remastering of Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra, one of Sinatra's most important albums yet one that is often neglected despite the fact that it occupies a watershed place in his development as a singer and recording artist.

In old school animation—the way Disney and Warner Brothers did it way back when— rough drawings of the action were sketched on paper by the animators, who then flipped through the pages to see what they've drawn come to rough life. Once these roughs met with their approval they handed them off to secondary animators usually referred to as "in-betweeners" who produced the drawings that go in between what the animators hand them, thus producing the... Read More

Whether the members of Cream were considered “cream of the crop” players or ELP debuting before a crowd of 600,000 at the Isle of Wight, supergroups became a hot-button commodity that granted success in the late 1960s. Although Humble Pie may have included members of Small Faces, The Herd, Spooky Tooth, and the Apostolic Intervention, they were keen to distance themselves from any preconceived connotations by the music press. The foursome established a sound rooted in... Read More

The years after the liberation of France from German occupation in August 1944 were not easy ones for the great guitarist Django Reinhardt. Somehow, during the occupation, he had managed to remain in France and continue to play professionally with great success and even record while hundreds of thousands of fellow members of the Romany ethnic group were murdered by the Nazis.After the war, he and violinist Stephane Grapelli, on several occasions, the last in 1948, had... Read More

When jazz aficionados see the phrases Miles Davis and Prestige Recordings in the same sentence, they think of the “marathon sessions” of 1956, where the trumpeter and his quintet (known in retrospect as his 1st Great Quintet: John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones) blazed through four albums’ worth of material (released over the next few years as Relaxin’, Steamin’, Workin’, and Cookin’) in just two days (May 11 and October 26), to complete... Read More

David Bowie recorded Station to Station—one of his greatest records IMO—at Cherokee Studios sometime in 1975 the same year as this Basie, Bellson, Brown album was put to tape in the same place. Bowie was in mid-career greatness, the jazz masters were clearly playing prime time but not at peak musical creativity, nor, to be honest, were most jazz fanatics paying much attention. Norman Granz started the label to give these greats an outlet, almost as a tribute space.... Read More

I can't better describe this than the annotation's second sentence, but might as well begin with the first: "The celebration of YULE in Northern Europe harks back to a transition from ancient Pagan Germanic culture to the more formal spirituality of the newer Christian rite. Christmas, as we mostly now call it, gave us hymns, processions and chants, and in between, silence in church. Yule meant a vibrant pre-Christian secularity, with feasting and... Read More

By 1971, things were finally starting to come together for Genesis. Vocalist Peter Gabriel, keyboardist Tony Banks, and guitarists Mike Rutherford and Anthony Phillips initially churned out short baroque pop pieces on their 1969 debut, From Genesis to Revelation, while they were still pupils at England’s prestigious Charterhouse boarding school. Producer Johnathan King fought to keep the group’s arrangements concise to a simple pop formula, but Genesis was keen to... Read More