Album Reviews

The British progressive rock group Gentle Giant never achieved exalted status among the genre's aficionados, though they were well respected and their following was loyal and vociferous. When I was on "free form" FM radio in the mid 1970s I'd get calls from fans requesting Gentle Giant, but when I played through the albums, I heard nothing that I thought would grab listeners.  Listening today to this and to Free Hand (ALLUGV03)—the two albums falling midway in their recording career— makes clear why that was so,  and why they are deserving of a second listen almost forty years later. 

How many Diana Krall albums does one need? That's a personal decision of course. However, if you have more than three but no Shirley Horn albums in your collection, you have a few too many. Ditto Sarah Vaughan, Ella, etc. That's not meant as a slight against Krall. In fact I think she'd probably agree with me.

It's an unacceptable prejudice and this review has nothing to do with me, but I admit to having had a problem with Lionel Hampton because he was a Nixon supporter. Isn't that ridiculous? I mean having a problem with it, not that Hamp supported tricky Dick. His politics are his of course, but this prejudice took hold during the 1970s.

Rock ‘n’ roll historians invariably trace the roots of the now-expansive, constantly morphing music to a Mississippi bluesman named Robert Johnson, a 1930s guitarist who ostensibly made a deal with the devil – trading his mortal soul for stellar talent - one night at a rural intersection (a “crossroads”). Johnson’s canon of songs, bolstered by his pioneer legacy and dark mythology, is embraced universally as being instrumental to the very structure of rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s difficult to believe this November 18th, 1993 Sony Music Studios performance is almost seventeen years old. Though it aired on MTV a month later, it wasn’t issued on vinyl or CD until November 1st, 1994, six months after Kurt Cobain’s suicide.

Joni Mitchell’s move to jazz on this 1974 game changer upset her hippie contingent, who wished she’d remained a “lady of the canyon,” and it didn’t exactly thrill fans who considered themselves jazz aficionados either—not with the likes of “jazz-lite” guys like Tom Scott, Joe Sample, Wilton Felder and Larry Carlton involved.

Sadly, during the early '60s Muddy Waters and other Chicago blues masters were better known to white English youth than to their American counterparts. Mick and Keith weren't alone in their fandom. Search YouTube and you'll find an amazing Howlin' Wolf performance before an adoring audience of well-scrubbed English white kids that was probably never repeated in America where blues was dubbed "race music" and relegated  to the ghettos.