Tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter's Blue Note debut features the stellar rhythm section of McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones and Reggie Workman plus Lee Morgan on trumpet. Not a bad way to start a new label debut!

Shorter had issued a few records on Vee-Jay and had been with Art Blakey playing hard bop. Here he moves to a future music that's more contempletive and cerebral but less frantic and other worldly than John Coltrane's though superficially similar given the rhythm section.

This impeccably produced (by Norman Granz, who literall built Verve Records and later Pablo around her), career summing concert takes Ella from her beginnings with the Chick Webb Orchestra to her then current quartet featuring Tommy Flanagan, Keeter Betts, Joe Pass and Freddie Waits, all brilliantly choreographed by master showman/producer/record executive Norman Granz along with Newport producer George Wein. 

Poor misunderstood Steven Demetre Georgiou/Cat Stevens/Yusef Islam. Like Bob Marley or Barack Obama, he’s a “hybrid” and subject to misinterpretation and fear-mongering.

Born of a Greek-Cypriot dad and a Swedish mom, he was half Greek Orthodox and half Baptist and now he’s a devout Muslim.

In between, he’s had a remarkable and tumultuous career as a pop star. He’s had backup artists on his albums ranging from Peter Gabriel to Biff Rose. He’s cited influences as wide-ranging as the Gershwins, Leonard Bernstein and Muddy Waters.

The late New York Times rock critic Robert Palmer once wrote a Billy Joel review that was so scathing, so mean, so nasty and couched in personal terms, that even I, a fellow Billy Joel detractor (perhaps even a "hater" back then), cringed with embarrassment.

What would cause a critic to unload like that? Just listen to this record!

It's funny: while searching The Times website for that Palmer review (couldn't find it), I found a headline: "Billy Joel has hip surgery." I'm thinking, "not even surgery could make him hip." 

Neil Young's 1980's country music phase wasn't appreciated by his record label at the time but the fans accepted it, certainly more than they did what came previously: dips into computer music (Trans) and Rockabilly (Everybody's Rockin'), which was digitally recorded. Somehow digital recording and Rockabilly don't go together but it took Neil a while to figure that out. And that Rockabilly record had Neil in an odd mood. Read his biography "Shakey" and it was clearly a difficult time in his life.

To those of us at a certain age and religious persuasion, there's something bizarre about Iggy and the Stooges playing  Kutsher's Country Club, once one of the Borscht Belt's premiere venues. Of course Kutsher's and the Borscht Belt aren't what they used to be but Iggy and the Stooges still are!

Talk about a confusing pedigree: though the jacket reproduces an "electronically reprocessed for stereo" edition of this album, the tape used is  mono, thank goodness.

The "one sheet" says "...we reissue the original 1968 Folkways studio recording in its original form."

But when you listen, you'd swear this sounds much older than 1968. Look at the jacket liner notes and it says "Previously released as Verve/Folkways FVS 9019© 1960,1968."