AAA Vinyl

In this, the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birthday, Yarlung Records offers a recording worthy of the master, a delectation from the Janaki String Trio that was originally recorded in 2006 in Zipper Hall. The sonics are as inviting as the playing.

If you are too young to remember but want to experience the turmoil and dread that marked the end of the tumultuous 1960's and you want to view it through west coast music that veers from bucolic to anarchistic, from sublime to self-indulgent with a force and power rarely heard in today's noodling rock, here it is.

Saxophonist Jerome Sabbagh's 2014 Kickstarter funded release The Turn was a musical and sonic success. It got great reviews here, in the Boston Globe, Stereophile and the L.A. Times. Now Sabbagh is back with another Kickstarter funded project but this time instead of recording analog and cutting from digital because of the extra expenses involved, he's going for an all-analog production.

Joan Baez recorded this Vanguard debut in 1960 at age 19. With her impossibly high and pure quavering voice and matching pristine finger picking guitar, she and this album created a sensation that helped shift the "folk-revival" back to authenticity from the commerciality into which it had drifted. Though while she sounded like a barefoot waif recently arrived from the Appalachian mountains, she was born on Staten Island. Her Mexico-born father who grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a minister, was a Stanford PhD credited with co-inventing the X-ray microscope. Her Scottish mother's father was an Anglican priest.

Joe Jackson's "angry young man" stance came late in the cycle and so at the time was less than fully convincing. Elvis and Graham had already been there and done that. The picture of Jackson on the back cover of his debut Look Sharp just wasn't convincing.

Simon split from Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield broke up. So did The Youngbloods, The Lovin' Spoonful and of course The Beatles. Yes, many '60s groups remained together, like The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead, but as the tumultuous '60s came to a close, others fragmented with leaders going solo.

Not that it’s any of my business, but I was disappointed reading that Joni Mitchell had nixed Taylor Swift’s playing her in a biopix. “All you’ve got is a girl with high cheekbones” she’s reported to have said.