Every so often, the artist usually known as Dean Blunt emerges from his residence in Hackney, London to appear at an event—to prove his existence, to reassert his status as art music’s most shadowy figure of current importance. The latest appearance was a DJ set at Miami Art Basel in December, for a party hosted by NTS Radio and NFT conmen Bored Ape Yacht Club. What did the rich NFT bros’ money get them? A fogged up stage and a bored Dean Blunt blasting Sleep’s... Read More

Vinyl Me Please could have had a home run with this beautiful-sounding and essential reissue, but fails miserably with an ugly cover sourced from a late '80s-era compact disc.

(This review originally appeared in Issue 7, Spring 1996.)This 2CD set documenting comedian Lenny Bruce’s legendary February 4th, 1961 midnight concert at Carnegie Hall is a slightly expanded version of what was originally issued in 1972 as an attractively packaged 3LP set by United Artists (UAS 8900). The concert took place the night after a gigantic blizzard had literally closed down New York City. Bruce almost didn’t make it into town, and when he did, he hardly... Read More

(Los Angeles – February 3, 2023)— The Marley Family Tuff Gong, and UMe commemorate Bob Marley’s 78th birthday....with a series of events, including a dozen limited-edition Bob Marley vinyl LPs each numbered and press exclusively at the legendary Tuff Gong International headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica featuring nine original studio an two original live albums plus Legend the world's best-selling reggae album.Interesting fact #1: The limited-edition albums were... Read More

Veteran journalist Allan Kozinn and documentarian Adrian Sinclair set out to climb "Mount McCartney" over three massive volumes that place the ex-Beatles solo career under a new microscope.

This year's 12 Verve/Impulse! titles were announced today, all cut by Ryan Smith using the original master tapes. First to be released will be The Oscar Peterson Trio's Night Train.

Cohearent Recording, Kevin Gray's new living room studio, which he jokingly calls "Hackensack West" was the venue for this, the first record released on Cohearent Records. The all-analog all-vacuum tube recording chain used to produce sound every RVG fan will swoon from was outlined in a video Gray recently posted on YouTube we've embedded here. So-Cal based jazz saxophonist/educator Kirsten Edkins, who's played in Bill Holman's Big Band,... Read More

When discussing high-end cartridge brands with fellow audio enthusiasts I find that many companies like Ortofon and Audio-Technica don’t elicit from them the same respect and brand panache recognition they pay to some of the smaller cartridge manufacturers—especially in the multi $1000 price range, where many want to own a cartridge they feel was built by an “artisan”.While having an artisan single-handedly craft your cartridge is certainly appealing, overlooking or... 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.

What's unusual here is not the big band. James Brown toured and recorded with one throughout his career. "Soul On Top" is an outlier in the Brown catalog because he's backed by a jazz band— Louie Bellson's 18 piece orchestra—with arrangements by Oliver Nelson, who tried to conduct. Only saxophonist Maceo Parker, Jr. from Brown's band The J.B.s came along for the ride.Brown's 28th album, released in 1970 on King Records (KS1100) was... Read More

John WilliamsEven within the context of his catalogue of one classic film score after another, the three films that John Williams scored for the Harry Potter franchise - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) - occupy a very special place. But you wouldn’t necessarily have known that to judge from the somewhat parsimonious manner in which the soundtrack scores... Read More

Patricia Barber albums take up a lot of shelf space real estate here. Over the years her many albums have been issued and reissued on vinyl with every reissue sounding better than the previous one, though of course Jim Anderson recorded all of them digitally. Nightclub was recorded to 3348 multi-track and mixed through a Neve analog desk to both digital and analog mix down masters. Anderson said in an email that "....we've always run digital and analogue on... Read More

Frank Kimbrough, who died in December 2020 at the age of 64, was one of the great undersung jazz pianists of our time and an only-belatedly-appreciated composer of much talent as well. (Soon after his death, Newvelle Records assembled 67 musicians, in various ensembles, to play 58 of his pieces, many of which had the ring of standards. The resulting download-only album, "Kimbrough," was one of the best jazz albums of 2021.) Now Palmetto Records, his main... Read More

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

And as a recent perusal of the usual audiophile retail sites reveals, the latest limited edition reissue from ORG (Original Recordings Group) of this unique and spectacular record is very much in stock (even in some cases discounted), and so I felt it was the perfect time, indeed essential, to introduce Tracking Angle readers to this magical record.First, some background.The Mysterious World of Bernard Herrmann was just one of a series of records Bernard Herrmann... Read More

The pianist-composer Marta Sanchez has lived and actively worked in New York since moving here from Madrid in 2011; but, despite four albums as a leader and wide respect from fellow artists, she’s not nearly as well-known as she should be.Her latest album, SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum), on Whirlwind Recordings, available as a CD and as three sides of vinyl (2 LPs, one of them blank on one side), is a stellar display of her talents. She leads a standard jazz... Read More