Music Reviews

Gabe Gurnsey is the former drummer of “post-industrial” band Factory Floor, but on the late 2022 LP “Diablo” he has teamed up with vocalist and girlfriend Tilly Morris to produce an electronic opus to dancing and lust. This release comes from Phantasy Records, run by English DJ Erol Alkan. Phantasy is also home to electronic producer and DJ Daniel Avery, and house and techno artists such as Fort Romeau and Red Axes. There is a strong flavour of 1980s electronic pop to... Read More

The Brazilian Bossa Nova flower had not yet bloomed in America when in 1959 the movie "Black Orpheus" became the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize Winner. The movie is a re-telling of the Orpheus legend set in Rio de Janeiro with the Mardis Gras as backdrop. The music was by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa, one of whom, Jobim, would become a household name if not in 1963 when Stan Getz released Jazz Samba, then a year later when Getz/Gilberto exploded... Read More

Every so often, the artist usually known as Dean Blunt emerges from his residence in Hackney, London to appear at an event—to prove his existence, to reassert his status as art music’s most shadowy figure of current importance. The latest appearance was a DJ set at Miami Art Basel in December, for a party hosted by NTS Radio and NFT conmen Bored Ape Yacht Club. What did the rich NFT bros’ money get them? A fogged up stage and a bored Dean Blunt blasting Sleep’s... Read More

Vinyl Me Please could have had a home run with this beautiful-sounding and essential reissue, but fails miserably with an ugly cover sourced from a late '80s-era compact disc.

(This review originally appeared in Issue 7, Spring 1996.)This 2CD set documenting comedian Lenny Bruce’s legendary February 4th, 1961 midnight concert at Carnegie Hall is a slightly expanded version of what was originally issued in 1972 as an attractively packaged 3LP set by United Artists (UAS 8900). The concert took place the night after a gigantic blizzard had literally closed down New York City. Bruce almost didn’t make it into town, and when he did, he hardly... Read More

Cohearent Recording, Kevin Gray's new living room studio, which he jokingly calls "Hackensack West" was the venue for this, the first record released on Cohearent Records. The all-analog all-vacuum tube recording chain used to produce sound every RVG fan will swoon from was outlined in a video Gray recently posted on YouTube we've embedded here. So-Cal based jazz saxophonist/educator Kirsten Edkins, who's played in Bill Holman's Big Band,... Read More

What's unusual here is not the big band. James Brown toured and recorded with one throughout his career. "Soul On Top" is an outlier in the Brown catalog because he's backed by a jazz band— Louie Bellson's 18 piece orchestra—with arrangements by Oliver Nelson, who tried to conduct. Only saxophonist Maceo Parker, Jr. from Brown's band The J.B.s came along for the ride.Brown's 28th album, released in 1970 on King Records (KS1100) was... Read More

John WilliamsEven within the context of his catalogue of one classic film score after another, the three films that John Williams scored for the Harry Potter franchise - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) - occupy a very special place. But you wouldn’t necessarily have known that to judge from the somewhat parsimonious manner in which the soundtrack scores... Read More

Patricia Barber albums take up a lot of shelf space real estate here. Over the years her many albums have been issued and reissued on vinyl with every reissue sounding better than the previous one, though of course Jim Anderson recorded all of them digitally. Nightclub was recorded to 3348 multi-track and mixed through a Neve analog desk to both digital and analog mix down masters. Anderson said in an email that "....we've always run digital and analogue on... Read More

Frank Kimbrough, who died in December 2020 at the age of 64, was one of the great undersung jazz pianists of our time and an only-belatedly-appreciated composer of much talent as well. (Soon after his death, Newvelle Records assembled 67 musicians, in various ensembles, to play 58 of his pieces, many of which had the ring of standards. The resulting download-only album, "Kimbrough," was one of the best jazz albums of 2021.) Now Palmetto Records, his main... Read More

And as a recent perusal of the usual audiophile retail sites reveals, the latest limited edition reissue from ORG (Original Recordings Group) of this unique and spectacular record is very much in stock (even in some cases discounted), and so I felt it was the perfect time, indeed essential, to introduce Tracking Angle readers to this magical record.First, some background.The Mysterious World of Bernard Herrmann was just one of a series of records Bernard Herrmann... Read More

The pianist-composer Marta Sanchez has lived and actively worked in New York since moving here from Madrid in 2011; but, despite four albums as a leader and wide respect from fellow artists, she’s not nearly as well-known as she should be.Her latest album, SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum), on Whirlwind Recordings, available as a CD and as three sides of vinyl (2 LPs, one of them blank on one side), is a stellar display of her talents. She leads a standard jazz... Read More

In 2019, Hilary Hahn, one of the world’s leading violin virtuosos, announced she would be taking a one-year performing sabbatical. Little did she know, that period of time would see a prolongment of several months due to factors outside of her control. Her triumphant return to the concert hall in the spring of 2021 was an emotional experience for her, and from those first few concert programs back, we now have a new double LP set of recordings, her latest release on... Read More

Might I interest you in a solo bass album? I hope so. Bassist Rick Rosato has been living in New York City since 2007 and touring worldwide (he's featured on vibraphonist Joel Ross' 2022 double LP The Parable of The Poet and on many other records). Then Covid hit and like many other musicians he found himself without gigs and spending a lot of time at home.For his first album as leader, Rosato decided to go solo, inspired by his home alone pandemic... Read More

If you didn’t know anything about Karen Dalton when you dropped the stylus on one of her records, you’d quickly get the sense that her life probably hadn’t been an easy one. Mournful, and sung in a voice that parsed the terrain between Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin, the songs on the 50th Anniversary Edition of the singer’s second and final long player can be a tough listen. But thanks to multiple reissue campaigns, her work has filtered on down through five plus... Read More

In April 1958, Lester Young moved into the Hotel Alvin, a seedy hotel at the corner of Broadway and Fifty-Second street in New York City, which, because it was cheap, was home to many musicians. Lester owned a house on Long Island in which his wife and two children lived but the Alvin was directly across the street from Birdland, and that was where Lester wanted to be.Lester wasn’t playing at Birdland or any of the other major clubs in Manhattan. His chronic... Read More