Album Reviews

One of the first “concept” albums, Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely invited listeners back in 1958 to pull up a chair and share the singer’s misery exquisitely expressed in a carefully collected set of tunes given sensitive, sumptuous backdrops by the late, great Nelson Riddle.

This triple gatefold, double time capsule captures the rapturous July 1st, 1998 Carnegie Hall Concert also filmed by Wim Wenders and released the next year. The music is old. The players were old&#151some in their 80s and ‘90s&#151and some have since passed away, but the old music was fresh to the ears of Americans and others who first heard it thanks to the World Circuit CD produced by Ry Cooder (later issued on vinyl by Classic Records).

Is this performance of one of Dvorak’s most popular and oft-recorded piano trios likely the most authoritative or finely played? Not likely, given competition from Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax and Young Uck Kim among the many others by well- established ensembles and/or instrumentalists. This trio does play it very well, however.

Recorded at L.A.’s famed United Recorders June 6th and 12th 1963 and arranged by Gerald Wilson (Anthony’s dad) for the spare and daring combo of organ, trumpet, tenor sax and drums, this Sarah Vaughan set of mostly familiar standards will confound your expectations with every note.

Lee Morgan’s 1959 solo debut recorded when he was just 19 is aptly named. It’s an album of standards in a quartet setting designed to show off the prodigy’s ability to wrap his big, warm tone around familiar melodies.

Psychedelic music may have originated as a raw, disorienting art form in the streets of Haight-Ashbury, or in L.A. crash pads, but as with all raw art forms, it was only a matter of time before it got sanitized, commercialized and made non-threatening for middle-brow Top 40 consumption.

Deerhunter opens Microcastle with a Pink Floyd-like grand musical flourish taken at midtempo lysergic trail speed. The floating, vibrating textures give way to an insistent, deliberate, Wire-like beat that the group rides for a while before switching to dream-like reverie resplendent of Eno’s ambient projects merged with moodiness the late Syd Barrett might be proud to call his own.