Album Reviews

Leonard Bernstein was probably the first classical musician to boldly champion rock music when he enthusiastically endorsed The Beatles back in 1964-well before the group's true artistry flowered. Bernstein wrote a short, joyous, almost inappropriately flowery introduction to Geoffrey Stokes's 1980 book “The Beatles,” which you can read at http://www.frederickchorale.org/Beatles_2.asp.

Produced, recorded and performed with love and respect for the “genius of soul,”-the artist for whom musical boundaries and genres had no meaning-this album of duets is nonetheless neither an important, nor an essential Ray Charles album. That doesn't mean it isn't an immensely pleasurable one, or one not worth owning and enjoying. It's just that there are a dozen or so Charles albums that should be in your collection before you buy this one. On the other hand, this isn't exactly a bad introduction if that's what you need. Do you really need one?

Record collectors are demented and sad-- obsessive- compulsive freaks that only have one thing on their minds; the next record they need. You see, "want" is only for the completely normal and well adjusted individual who went to the mall to pick up U2's latest but came home happily instead with a totally rippin' new shirt from Old Navy. Lucky shit- bet he even has a girlfriend and a cool car.

If the point of this record is to transport the listener back in time to an intimate late-1800's musical recital in some well-to-do mid-westerner's or southerner's living room parlor, perhaps overlooking the Mississippi River, then it is a complete success. Even if it has some other purpose and I'm totally wrong, the record is a winner.

When Quantegy, the last analog tape manufacturer, went into bankruptcy late last year, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy was quoted in a Wall Street Journal story saying something to the effect that the tape upon which his albums are recorded may become worth more than the recordings themselves and that the tape may have to be recycled so the group could continue recording.

This mostly fabulous sounding 10 LP set cut almost exclusively from original analog master tapes puts into focus a so-called “in between” period for Miles: between the end of the Kind of Blue era and the beginning of the Miles/Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams quintet era chronicled on Mosaic's The Complete Studio Recordings of The Miles Davis Quintet 1965-1968 (Mosaic MQ 10-177).