Music Reviews: Vinyl

Today, it’s rare to discover music without any prior knowledge of it. We usually have some vague sense of the genre, sound, or artist. But, I had no idea what to expect from Joshua Moshier before the needle hit his debut album’s grooves. It quickly became clear to me that Moshier is an exceptionally talented musician. And I further learned that he’s an Emmy-nominated composer, songwriter, and pianist who has crafted music for series, films, interactive media, and the... Read More

It seems like the only notifications in my inbox that come more often than Democratic Party money begs are Warner Records announcements of new Neil Young Archive releases. It's hard to keep up and so many are so good. Very little filler. There are 198 tracks in the upcoming Archives Vol. III (1976-1987) and I'v been sorting through that, though there won't be vinyl. Understandable! This recent one deserves your attention if you're a true Neil and... Read More

Barcelona-based Elemental Music has secured a significant deal with Motown Records to reissue a selection of classic albums from the iconic label's catalog. Dubbed the Motown Sound Collection, the series will feature over twenty titles. Jordi Soley, the founder of Elemental Music and producer of the project, explains, “For many of the albums that we’ll be putting out throughout 2024 and into 2025, it will be their first reissue since their original release.... Read More

This album arrived in the mail featuring jazz vocalist Teri Roiger, her husband and bassist John Menegon, both unfamiliar to me, plus always a joy to enjoy, Jack DeJohnette and Kenny Burrell (drums and guitar, but you already knew that). How this session happened—have DeJohnette and Burrell ever played together previously or ever again?—I don't know. But once I played it and heard Roiger's vocals I think I understood why those two did the gig, why I needed... Read More

David Murray was the tenor saxophonist of the 1980s and ‘90s, first as junior member of the World Saxophone Quartet, among the most innovative jazz groups of the era, then as leader of a dozen different ensembles of varying size, from duets to big band and everything in between, playing a range of music (much of it self-composed) from frenzied avant-garde to swooning ballads, his solos sweeping arpeggios in pleasingly jarring intervals laced with Sapphiric blue notes,... Read More

Prog rock and jazz fusion both have an otherworldly quality. I’ve never seen either live, so listening to recordings created with the intense discipline, musicianship, and complexity these styles demand, I’m often amazed that real people are behind the instruments. If you feel that way, you’ll find the late Chick Corea’s Elektric Band's latest live album, The Future is Now (Candid), a mostly accessible showcase of high-level musicianship combined with... Read More

Free was one of the great unappreciated late '60's era rock bands. Sure, they had a hit with "All Right Now", but like Stealers Wheel with "Stuck in the Middle", that song is catchy with a barbed hook, but that's about all. Free was a band that simmered: dark, brooding, deep and thoughtful. The albums leading up to Fire and Water didn't sell, and Highway, the one following the big seller, flopped too. The group did better in the... Read More

Because I was involved in the vinyl production of this record (credited as “Vinyl Shepherd”) I didn’t feel it appropriate to review it. So I enlisted Morgan Enos to do it. Mr. Enos’s partial resume: “Former Staff Writer at GRAMMY.com. His features, essays, and interviews, which encompass jazz, classic rock, hip-hop, and other spheres, have also appeared in Fortune, Billboard, JazzTimes, uDiscover Music, and other platforms”. The album debuts today with pre-orders on the familiar sites including the “buy now” button at the review bottom, where you can get more details.

The problem with records like this is that they tell you how mediocre sounding many of your records are—unless your collection consists only of "audiophile" records, of which there are two kinds: "sounds great, less filling", or more rarely, "sounds great, is filling". For younger readers, that's a play on the old Miller Lite commercial: "tastes great, less filling".McIntosh Sessions celebrates the company's 75th... Read More

Based on some of the comments on this site under the original announcement of these UHQR Bill Evans releases you might think the subtitle quote was someone's reference to Analogue Productions Chad Kassem, but it's actually from annotator Ira Gitler's original liner notes for Sunday at the Village Vanguard. His point was that being a jazz critic doesn't mean he can't melt into the music and drop the analytical side of his reviewer brain. These... Read More

In need of a feel good story? Here it is. There's even a hi-fi system tie in. The story as told in the booklet by Ricky Riccardi, Director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum (and author of three Armstrong biographies) begins almost a year after this BBC performance with Louis at home recuperating from two hospital stays playing for guests his new Tandberg reel to reel tape recorders his wife Lucille had installed as a surprise while he... Read More

On 1974's Court and Spark Joni Mitchell cautiously dipped her musical toes into the jazz pool, adding some studio players like Milt Holland, Wilton Felder and Tom Scott to the arranging mix and capping the record with a sly, startling cover of Wardell Gray and Annie Ross's "Twisted" found originally on Lambert, Hendricks & Ross!: The Hottest New Group in Jazz (Columbia CS 8198). Cheech and Chong added some of their zany comic commentary to the... Read More

Series curator Scott Billington says it all in his obi strip annotation: "In the 1960s James may have startled listeners the most, because the haunting quality of his music had only deepened with time". Scott was referring to James's eerie, almost ghostly falsetto vocals that first appeared on record back in 1931 on the Paramount label.This outing recorded January 9 and 10 1966 at Vanguard's 214 West 23rd Street New York City studio, is... Read More

It may seem odd for Blue Note to reissue Jason Moran’s Ten on two LPs as part of its Classic Vinyl series. For one thing, it was recorded in 2010, a bit recent to be deemed a classic. For another, contrary to the “hype sticker” (and unlike most titles in the series), it was not “mastered from the original analog tapes,” as the album was recorded digitally. (Blue Note has since acknowledged the error.) Nonetheless, the album fits the category. The sound quality, though... Read More

The sum - it’s said - is always greater than the parts. Rockpile may have only released one album, but 1980’s Seconds of Pleasure stands as a prime example of that adage. Nick Lowe (guitar, vocals) and Dave Edmunds (guitar, vocals) were the band's star power, but they brought more than just their entertainment acumen to the table; with them came their longtime musical cohorts Billy Bremner (vocals, guitar) and Terry Williams on “drums, drums, drums” (as the liner... Read More

Hi-Fi has long been very good to Duke Ellington, beginning in 1950 when long playing records and tape recording allowed him to finally deliver Masterpieces by Ellington an album of previously impossible to release to the home listening public, live concert length arrangements of his most popular and enduring compositions. Until then only attendees of his live concerts got to hear them.Finally Ellington was freed from the constraints of the three minute 78rpm... Read More

The mystery is why this 1959 Riverside recording wasn't released until 1964, and even then, according to Craft Recordings, only in the U.K. True, Riverside was essentially a jazz label, but then why record Hooker in the first place unadorned if not to release it? Hooker had been recording electric blues for Vee-Jay but Riverside wanted acoustic and in fact released in 1960 The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker recorded at the same sessions that produced this... Read More

For the initiated this project has mostly existed as a collection of poorly bootlegged video clips on YouTube. That is, unless, you ponied up for the 2010 archive release of Band On The Run, which included a polished DVD version of this 1974 documentary. But now Macca, ready to embark on yet another age-defying batch of live dates, has made these sessions official.So across two LPs (or two CDs), One Hand Clapping finally comes out of the bootleg protection program... Read More