Foné records’ Giulio Cesare Ricci is easily one of the most charming, entertaining and eccentric people I have ever encountered in an industry packed with such people. I spent some quality time with him and his lovely wife Paola Maria, who works in the fashion industry in Milan, during last fall’s Top Audio show there.

If you buy this and just hear some moldy old monophonic Dixieland you deserve to spend the rest of your life listening to Aqualung and Patricia Barber, not that there’s anything wrong with either that album or that artist. I don’t mean to insult anyone but the audiophile “pop charts” are depressingly mundane and predictable.

Produced by Bay area bluesman Roy Rogers (Hooker had moved there and opened a nightclub in 1997), this Grammy Award winning set of collaborations between the then 72 year old John Lee Hooker and Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, Robert Cray, “Canned Heat,” Los Lobos, George Thorogood and Charlie Musselwhite, plus two stirring Hooker solos and one backed by drums and bass, brought the blues great to a new audience.

There’s nothing not to like about this hard-driving, straight ahead jazz trio set first issued by Concord in 1984, led by the flamboyant, yet tasteful and ultra-clean pianist Alexander backed by the powerful Ray Brown and drummer Frank Gant.

Going from Soft Lights & Sweet Music is like going from the merely excellent to the spectacularly suave and sublime, both musically and especially sonically. Though not as “clean,” and not nearly as detailed and revealing as the newer recording, there’s a liquidity, transparency and timbral rightness about the older one that just puts your mind and emotional state in a different world. Nonetheless, the piano has that boxy ‘50s sound and the bass is a bit muffled. There’s something to be said for the newer recording in terms of reality but for magic, it’s the older one. Sort of like old movies versus new ones.

There’s so much to recommend here, starting of course with Gerry Mulligan. There’s also a great deal to live up to, given the legendary “Gerry Mulligan Meets….” series on Verve from the 1950’s, one of which (Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster) is reviewed elsewhere this month.

So great were Aretha’s hit making abilities during the peak of her Atlantic era that a blockbuster like “Think,” which leads off this set, did not make it to 1971’s Aretha’s Greatest Hits (SD8295). The track from this set making to the hits album was “I Say A Little Prayer,” given a less introspective, more energetic reading than the Dionne Warwick original.

Old-Time Standards the Old-School Way
With the eclipse of the Olympia Brass Band, it is generally acknowledged that the Trémé band, in all its multiple configurations, has now become the symbolic parade marshal for the Crescent City’s historic “street” jazz tradition. The mainstay of Trémé’s songbook are well-known New Orleans jazz tunes and old-time spirituals. With the rain pummeling the big tent into which maybe 500 or more of us had managed to jam ourselves, the band carried on as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

In the shoulder-to-shoulder crush I found myself standing beside a middle-aged woman with a tiny baby sleeping on shoulder. Behind her, a rugged-faced man stood guard at the helm of an empty baby carriage.

There was a moment early in the afternoon of the last Sunday of New Orleans’ first post-Katrina Jazz Fest when it appeared to me that everything about the event, my perception of it, and even my hopes for the damaged city I’ve come to call home for the past ten years, changed dramatically. I was standing just outside the Economy Hall tent listening to the Trémé Brass Band, one the city’s oldest and funkiest old-time-jazz aggregations, when it started to rain.

Up to that point, the festival had managed to avoid bad weather. First, it outlasted an early heat wave that had collapsed a week and a half earlier, just as music fans began streaming into the city, then it successfully dodged heavy periods of rain that fell overnight on the first weekend. Another wave of rain showers had passed immediately north of the city on the second weekend. Now, however, it seemed the festival’s luck had pretty much run out.

The original Warner Brothers label was gold colored with “Vitaphonic Long Play” on the bottom, separated by “Stereo” in red letters, boxed in black. In small red letter above that it reads “Warning:reproduce only with stereophonic cartridge and stylus. Pressure not to exceed 6 grams” (mono releases were originally gold as well, but were later changed to grey). This label continued into the mid-sixties. Original pressings of records like 1962’s Peter Paul and Mary (WS 1449) feature that label, as does Peter Paul and Mary’s Moving album (WS 1473) from 1963.
Promo copies were black and white