When Pharoah Sanders initially recorded with Theresa in 1979, he was still under contract to Arista. Arista refused to let Sanders be pictured on the cover or mentioned in the title, resulting in the album being issued as Ed Kelly & Friend, although anyone with even a passing knowledge of Sanders’ style immediately recognized his playing. The reissue corrects the title situation and adds five 1992 bonus selections by pianist Kelly to fill out the disc. The first six tunes comprise the original session, and they established a pattern that Sanders faithfully followed throughout his Theresa tenure. They included curious remakes of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” and “Pippin” from the Broadway show of the same name, the anguished, wailing “You’ve Got to Have Freedom”…
Category: *editions*
At Iridium 2004 is a vast work. Cecil Taylor also leaves behind similarly vast territories of sound: the 10-disc Feel Trio recordings 2 Ts For A Lovely T (Codanza Records, 1995) or the monumental In Berlin ’88 box (FMP, 1989). Within jazz, his music stands like a monolith-challenging and imposing. Cecil Taylor Orchestra Humane’s At Iridium 2004 continues the tradition.
Taylor’s hallmark intensity remained undiminished at the Iridium residency. Contemporary accounts suggest that these performances functioned less as conventional free-jazz engagements than as laboratories for large-scale compositional thinking. The music confirms that Taylor’s technical command and imaginative reach were fully intact. His pianism-still astonishing…
Bruce Springsteen began Saturday night with a speech. Ever since President Donald Trump was elected for the second time, Springsteen has taken the extraordinary step of not letting his music speak for itself at the start of his shows.
Instead, when he stepped on stage at 7:30 p.m. sharp at the Xfinity Mobile Arena in South Philadelphia for the final date of his “Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour,” the Boss came out swinging.
Labeling the Trump administration “corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous,” he asked his audience to join him in embracing a communal, inclusive version of America that he believes runs counter to the president’s. (The president has frequently hit back…
…This remastered edition restores the album’s original running order and features new artwork by Greg Cartwright.
Time Bomb High School is much more than another garage tribute to soulful ’60s Brit-rock. But the sophomore effort from the Reigning Sound is something less than the band’s minimal, country-folk debut. During knockouts like the Rolling Stones-flavored “Straight Shooter” and “I’d Much Rather Be with the Boys,” Greg Cartwright and his Memphis combo’s sound is as pure, and as well-grounded, as anything since Exile on Main Street. With 14 tracks, however, the material and arrangements are spread just a little too thin, and too many average tunes are allowed in the mix. A bit of a stylistic return for…
Newly remastered and now with a previously unreleased bonus track, “Hammer and Nails”.
Laura Cantrell knows and loves good music too well to be a purist, and while her first two albums, Not the Tremblin’ Kind and When the Roses Bloom Again, were firmly grounded in her great fondness for country music, she expands her boundaries a bit on her third set (and first for Matador), Humming by the Flowered Vine. While the feel of Humming by the Flowered Vine isn’t radically different than her previous work, the sound and arrangements offer some new wrinkles, with producer J.D. Foster and a superb cast of musicians edging Cantrell into an inventive pop direction. The pensive love song “14th Street,” a strong but sorrowful reading of “And Still,”…
There is nothing ordinary about Fantastic Negrito. From his given Christian name of Xavier Dphrepaulezz to his career revitalization as a roots artist combining blues, soul, funk, and rock along with album titles ‘Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?’ and ‘Please Don’t Be Dead’ (3 nabbed GRAMMY’S), Negrito avoids following any existing blueprint.
That’s especially apparent when listening to Fantastic Negrito Alive, released July 17 via Storefront Records. Compiled from a recent tour’s most earth-quivering performances, this is the epitome of how a concert album should sound. Its 13 tracks veer way off-course from their studio versions, feeding off the audience’s energy, which then ramps up his own. His eclectic nature is fully exposed for this generous hour and…
On June 17, 1976, the formidable Relayer lineup of YES – Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Alan White, and Patrick Moraz – performed in front of a capacity crowd at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, NJ. The quintet was captured mid-tour during a live broadcast on New York’s WNEW-FM. While the performance has remained one of the band’s most popular bootlegs for decades, this release marks its first official appearance.
The recording finds the band at a creative peak during the “Solo Albums Tour.” Following the success of Relayer (1974), the members spent 1975 recording five individual solo projects; this 1976 tour was the first time these new arrangements were integrated into the live set. The performance balances full-band epics…
There was a fusty, claustrophobic aura surrounding Cardiacs’ 1988 debut album, A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window. Released 14 months later, On Land And In The Sea captured them basking in psychedelic sunshine. Less a transformation than a giddy blossoming, it showcased their self-created world of imagination, wonder and squint-eyed eccentricity.
Leader and chief songwriter Tim Smith may or may not have been thrilled by an increasing amount of attention from the music mainstream, momentary approval from Steve Wright on Radio 1 included, but his music spoke only of feverish, mischievous delight. The primitive, angular clatter of Cardiacs’ earliest efforts had grown into something bigger and more ambitious.
The deluxe edition features 15 additional tracks: rare remixes, live versions and instrumentals.
On their sixth album, the increasingly prolific neo-psych outfit Portugal. The Man look to the past for inspiration on In the Mountain in the Cloud. The album represents a breakthrough for the band on a couple of levels, the most obvious of which is their signing to major-label Atlantic, which comes as a big step up after years of quietly working their way through the indie circuit. The other is the less tangible artistic breakthrough. With such a rigorous release schedule, Portugal. The Man has been a band that listeners have been able to watch hone their craft step by step, slowly tinkering and adjusting things and growing into a band that’s not only hit their stride, but is in full…
…includes three bonus tracks: a previously unreleased alternate mix of “Dogtown”, “I Don’t Know Why” (Demo) and “Walking on Thin Ice”.
Born in the shadow of incredible grief, Yoko Ono’s fifth solo album, Season of Glass, holds a specific place in her greater body of work, its vivid expressions of a spectrum of painfully raw feelings frozen in place by tragedy. Released in 1981, Season of Glass arrived just months after Ono watched her husband John Lennon be murdered as they were returning home from a recording session. Infamously, a photograph of Lennon’s blood-spattered glasses served as the cover art for the album, a creative choice Ono fought for against pushback from label executives who felt it would horrify the record-buying public.
When Conal was released in 1981 on the Norwegian independent label Uniton Records with an initial run of 4,000 LPs, Conrad Schnitzler had already long been known beyond the borders of the Federal Republic of Germany and was now appreciated worldwide as a media artist and musician. In addition to the many cassette and LP editions he released himself, international labels were now increasingly releasing his music. In the same year as Conal, for example, the album Control was released on the American label DYS, followed in 1986 by Concert in the USA and Consequenz 2 in Spain. Schnitzler worked tirelessly and his total work of art, including his music, was becoming increasingly multifaceted. Conal is a good example of this development.
On Wednesday night at a sold-out Nationals Park, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had just reached the end of “Streets of Minneapolis,” the song the Boss wrote about the ICE murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the resistance put forth by the citizens of Minneapolis and St. Paul in reaction to “Operation Metro Surge” (it was no accident that this tour opened in the Twin Cities). As recorded, it’s a fine folk ballad. But when performed live by the E Street Band, the song flips from black and white to technicolor, with Springsteen opening the song solo acoustic and the band swinging in on the chorus.
There’s a line in the last verse which is set up as potential crowd participation: “In our chants of ‘ICE out now!’ our city’s heart and soul…
Freddie & the Dreamers were the clowns of the British Invasion, playing their pop music for laughs while the other groups of the time were dead serious. Lead singer Freddie Garrity began playing in skiffle groups in the late ’50s, switching to rock & roll in the early ’60s.
After the Beatles broke the American market wide open, Freddie & the Dreamers followed in the flood of acts that tried to duplicate the overwhelming success of the Fab Four. The group’s hits were more numerous in the U.K. than in America, where they had only one Top Ten hit, the number one “I’m Telling You Now.” As 1965 turned into 1966, the group stopped charting in the U.S. and the hits began to dwindle in the U.K.; by 1968 the original group disbanded.
Ordinarily, a Bruce Springsteen show is a ferocious, three-hour rock’n’roll display. But his performance Sunday at TD Garden was no ordinary Springsteen show. It was a ferocious, three-hour, rock’n’roll display of righteous anger, a conscious political act. Dubbed the “Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour,” Springsteen made plain what it was about in the tour’s announcement: “we will be rocking your town in celebration and in defense of America — American democracy, American freedom, our American Constitution and our sacred American dream — all of which are under attack.” It is no accident that the tour kicked off in Minneapolis, the city where, a few months ago, Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE agents, an event that precipitated the latest…
Seattle indie-folk icons The Head and the Heart commemorate the 15th anniversary of their landmark debut album with the release of a 2011 live show at their beloved hometown venue Neumos. This CD captures a vibrant live set right at the moment the band was breaking out. Live at Neumos (2011) features all the songs from The Head and the Heart’s platinum-selling self-titled album, plus two previously unreleased songs: the original “Long Time Away,” and a cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ “T is for Texas (Blue Yodel #1).”
The Head and the Heart are an acclaimed indie folk band whose influences include Americana, country-rock, and classic Beatlesque pop. The band was formed in Seattle by a group of Northwestern transplants and broke…
Since 1980 at the very latest, guitarist Kim Simmonds and whatever group of ringers he chooses to call Savoy Brown have been playing bad, late-’70s boogie rock disguised as the blues. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an “original” or a cover, Simmonds and Savoy Brown sound tired on virtually every cut of this set, which covers the years 1992-2007. And his playing, while capable, is simply a reflection of the guitar god imagery of the ’70s. Check out his Robin Trower-ized version of Lowell Fulsom’s classic “Monday Morning Blues,” both the author and Trower (a true electric bluesman) should be insulted. In Simmonds’ hands, the tune becomes a generic, wah-wah-pedaled, psychedelicized blues number with a hint of faux soul thrown in, as does his reading of Willie Dixon’s…