Album Reviews

Gary Wilson inhabits a musical and cultural space somewhere between Donald Fagan, Son of Sam and Frank Zappa. The cult favorite is a creature of the night who obsesses about girls and his hometown of Endicott, NY just outside of Binghamton. He should live in a basement apartment if in fact he doesn’t.

Listening to a straightforward, blues/gospel-drenched comping session like this reminds you that jazz has lost its soul today and aims mostly for the head. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s good to get back to the essential, visceral nature of the genre. This set, recorded in New York at an unidentified studio or studios on three days during the summer of 1963, let’s you know why.

This is neither the time nor the place to extol the virtues of this classic album that has more than stood the test of time. You already know about it and perhaps own a copy or two. If you don't, then you can buy this new Capitol 180g reissue and be sure you have a competently produced, reasonably priced reissue, though clearly cut using a digital source that produces a record that's a thin, pale imitation when compared to earlier reissues.

True, The Who were once called The High Numbers, but can you imagine a more self-loathing album title than The Who By Numbers? Painting by numbers or doing anything by "the numbers" usually connotes rote work. It was an honest assessment of the album.

In the early �70�s, with the second great rock era in its death throws, the rock intelligensia hungered for something, anything that might reinvigorate the softening musical firmament.

Dennis Wilson didn�t sing very well in the conventional sense of the word: his pitch was frequently off, he warbled, his vocal timbre was raspy and calling his range �limited� would be an overstatement.

Very few singers can get this close to a dry microphone, be balanced way forward of the backup band and sound as good as Peggy Lee does on this series of standards backed by a pair of small ensembles, recorded in 1953 and 1956. Neither the original nor the reissue notes explain the album’s temporal context so perhaps there’s no story there.