It takes a rocker with "brass in pocket" to deliver a jazz album. It takes more than that to produce a great one, which is what Hynde does on Valve Bone Woe, the title of which was her trombonist brother's "beatnik haiku" response to hearing about the passing of Bob Brookmeyer. Hynde here is no jazz pretender.

Multi-talented saxophonist Charles Lloyd celebrated his 80th birthday last March at Santa Barbara's Lobero Theater in concert with musical friends including guitarist Juian Lage, pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Reuben Rogers, and dummer Eric Harland plus special guests Booker T. Jones and bassist and Blue Note President Don Was joining in halfway through the show. Lloyd's new album 8 Kindrid Spirits (Live From The Lobero) documents the show in a limited edition Blue Note Records box that includes the full performance on 3 LPs, 2 CDs and a DVD along with a 96 page hardcover book and 2 photo prints. There will also be a standard LP/DVD, DC/DVD edition containing just the first set.

Unless you are official press, you are not invited to the XVX noon press preview lunch Friday January 17th, but feel free to reserve a seat during one of the hourly "Happy Hour Listening Sessions" from 4PM through 8PM at Innovative Audio by rsvp-ing before limited space is all booked. The website says 5PM-9PM....so better check with Innovative!

At the 2019 Rocky Mountain Audio Show, "Cynthia, the Audio Belle" asked if she could interview me. Of course I said "yes" and that turned into 47 minutes worth that she's edited and split into two parts. I'm posting before watching so I hope it's okay!

I honestly suck at keeping up on new music. Sure, I’m shoving out another mostly negative Review Explosion every three weeks when some artist past their prime pushes out another hour of dreck (or when Earl releases a stupidly annoying, half-baked 15 minute “album”) but I still don’t feel that I spend enough time covering what actually matters. As in, what’s actually good and worth talking about. Unfortunately, one music critic with their own taste and near-daily spins of IGOR can only do so much; no matter how hard I work, there are always a dozen supposedly great albums that I’ve fallen behind on even hearing.

For every reason, from mastering to pressing to packaging and annotation—and pricing, Craft’s 5 LP Chet Baker Riverside box scores the highest marks.

The recent RSD mono release of It Could Happen to You—Chet Baker Sings signaled what this set might and turned out to be. For those fans who might have some of these albums on original or OJC reissues, you can be sure the audio here soundly beats those.

Bob George The Archive of Contemporary Music's founder and director was scheduled to participate in a "Making Vinyl Hollywood" panel discussion I moderated last fall, so to prep for it I called Mr. George and proposed a visit to the Archive during which we'd discuss his participation. As you'll see in the video, by the time I visited last September I'd forgotten the reason for the visit!

Six years have passed since the original review here of the Record Doctor V a $199.95 manual-turn vacuum based record cleaning machine (RCM). At some point since then it went out of production but it's back now at $199.95 and there's a new upgraded 20th anniversary Model VI priced at $299.95.

priced at $299.95

Neil Innes, Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band co-founder, Rutles member and writer of all of that group's hilarious Beatles parodies and Monty Python member/contributor died suddenly and unexpectedly Sunday night, December 29th. According to his family, he'd not been sick and the cause of his passing has of yet not been determined.