Alto sax bop legend Art Pepper (1925-1982) had accrued a lot of mileage but few OnePass points when he blew into London with his trio in June of 1980 to play a fortnight gig at the famous Ronnie Scott’s Club.
I can’t get enough of these Candid reissues from Pure Pleasure. The original label was short-lived and the distribution limited. Candid was originally a subsidiary of Archie Bleyer’s Cadence Records (Bleyer had an unlikely ‘50’s hit single with “Hernando’s Hideaway” from the Broadway hit “Damn Yankees” and scored big with The Everly Brothers). The label was sold to pop crooner Andy Williams, a seemingly unlikely customer, who reissued some of both Cadence and Candid titles on his label Barnaby, distributed by Columbia Records.
The iconoclastic singer Harry Nilsson lived hard and mostly sang softly. His Los Angeles debauchery with his pal John Lennon and the resulting outcast behavior including being tossed with Lennon from The Troubadour for heckling The Smothers Brothers is well known, as are many of the songs he wrote, including "One" covered by Three Dog Night and "Cuddly Toy" covered by The Monkees.
In 1989 digital was all the rage. New vinyl records were on the verge of extinction. And Kate Bush remained silent - four years after her chart-topping album Hounds Of Love. Her famously loyal fans were literally chomping at the bit for the next release from the mystical chanteuse. The Sensual World was just around the corner. Would it be brilliant or bizarre?
The Blue Note reissue explosion continues with these attractively packaged XRCD24s from Audio Wave. We’ve got two current purveyors of Blue Notes: Music Matters and Analogue Productions, each having gained access to different catalog titles.
What better time than now for the all-analog resurrection of this Chesky classic? Easter is three weeks away (though “Oh Great Mystery” is really about Christmas) and home lock down in a dreary time is here now.
MP3s spread “virally.” Large corporate interests didn’t push them. Vinyl is resurgent for the same reason. It’s a ground up movement. Construct that way and you have a strong foundation for a long-lasting building. That’s what gives hope for vinyl’s long term growth and sustainability.
This is a weird, squooshy, watery record. The music is soft and squooshy, the lyrics are soft and squooshy. Songwriter Art Halperin’s voice is particularly squooshy, the background musicians play softly and squooshily, and even the veteran recording and mastering engineer Barry Diament has captured it squooshily in real stereo in a pleasingly reverberant church using a pair of carefully placed microphones.
When Buffalo Springfield broke up, Neil Young set about building his solo career. The high-production work with Jack Nitzsche that had created classics like “Expecting to Fly” and “Broken Arrow” brought Neil back to the producer/keyboardist/orchestrator, who gained fame working with Phil Spector but the results on Young’s eponymous debut album were not as memorable. In fact, many critics and fans alike back in 1969 considered the album a disappointment and a misstep.
Draw Me A Silence is the first long-player from Azu Tiwaline, a project of the electronic producer and DJ Loan, who has “origins which take root in the Sahara and El Djerid region in the south of Tunisia”. This new incarnation creates “a sound from the desert drawing on Berberian and Saharan trance music that connects human beings with Nature” according to her Bandcamp page.
I don't what Rudy Van Gelder was thinking or doing when he recorded the opening tune "Zoltan," by Woody Shaw who's on trumpet here. Rudy's got Elvin Jones' drum kit mixed way up front in the right channel and he's positively nailed Jones' muscular cymbal sound. And he's got Young's Hammond B-3 appearing three-dimensionally well-focused and forward of a line between the speakers. That's unusual for Rudy. He gets great presence from Shaw's trumpet in the left channel and Joe Henderson's tenor in the right.
What better time than during a period of self-isolation and social distancing could there be to explore Bach’s “Suites For Unaccompanied Cello”? Arguably, there’s no finer recorded performances than the ones Janos Starker performed for Mercury Records April 15 and 17, 1963, September 7-8, 1965 and December 21-22, 1965 (though some may prefer other performances by Casals, Rostropovich, Yo-Yo-Ma, etc.). I'm not here to argue with you. The finest version of these historic recordings, is without a doubt, this latest one from Analogue Productions and the sound is unassailable.
They’ve been out of commission for 22 years, but you’d never know it listening to Mission of Burma’s powerful, bracingly-fresh, time-warp of a post-punk/art-rocking noise assault, recorded last year. It sounds more like someone lowered the stylus on a record that’s been spinning silently for decades than the premier effort of a re-formed trio of middle- aged geezers who sound as youthfully exuberant as they did in 1979.
Equipped with John Mellencamp's then recently acquired vintage 1/4" reel-to-reel 1955 Ampex 601 mono tape recorder and a pair of iconic 50's era RCA ribbon microphones ( a 77 DX and 44 used singly) presumably supplied by producer T-Bone Burnett, the duo, accompanied by Mellencamp's wife Elaine, who shot the album's cover photo, hit the road during a break in last summer's Bob Dylan-John Mellencamp-Willie Nelson tour to record thirteen freshly penned songs Mr. Mellencamp had written over thirteen prolific days.
Hard to believe, but the legendary Rastapunkspeedmetal band Bad Brains began life in the late 1970’s as a Washington, D.C. based jazz/funk group called Mind Power. Then one of them heard The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks and the first black punk-rock group was born. You’ll hear the influence of The Clash and maybe The Stooges, but these guys invented their own sound, adding a fluidity and precision to the genre’s usual breakneck speed that no other band that I’ve heard managed to duplicate. The Sex Pistols may have inspired them, but Bad Brains demonstrated punk’s micro-groove musical possibilities because they could really play.