Album Reviews

This performance and recording with Eiji Oue conducting the Minnesota Orchestra emphasizes the "symphonic" while downplaying the "dance" aspects of Rachmaninoff's composition.

Does it have to sound this bad fellas? We all love your brand of fist pumping, T-Rex boogie, rhythm guitar riffing rock.

A funny thing happens as you age: time compresses. When I was 20, music from the 1940s seemed old. Robert Johnson was positively pre-historic, and to my ears the sound was equally cobwebbed. Oh, like everyone else, I bought CL 1654 after seeing it on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home and reading one of the breathless cover dissections in a magazine. Back then every cover prop "meant" something. 

"My girlfriend loves everything at the beach except the sand, the surf and the sun."  That lyric pretty much sums up the playful, sensous, and dangerous kitsch-world of this exotic six person  L.A. group fronted by the black widow spider persona of the sexy Cambodian pop chantreuse Chhom Nimol whose fixation with '60s Cambodian pop fuels the music. 

Cleaned up, hair cut, even shown bowling in the gatefold photo layout, James Taylor, many felt at the time, had clearly sold out to corporate America by signing with Columbia Records. By 1977 his long hair, hippie days were over and so were ours, but many diehards resented the slick shift and were appalled by the whole thing, starting with the cover photo.  

Do you need to add yet another Beethoven symphony cycle to your record collection? What's that you say, you don't have even one? That's not good. Every record collection should include at least one set of Beethoven symphonies even if you don't like classical music.

Pure Pleasure’s musical archeological digs have managed to find some interesting obscurities, this Gil Evans session from 1959 being one of them. It certainly deserves to be brought to your attention. However, its appeal will be limited to aficionados of Evans’ arranging excellence than for any other reason, though many fine players are involved, particularly and obviously trumpeter Johnny Coles as well as Steve Lacey, among others.