Music Reviews: Vocal Jazz

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.

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

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

(This review originally appeared in Issue 7, Spring 1996.)Joni Mitchell may have written “The Circle Game,” but it took Cassandra Wilson to grab pop by the throat and drag it around in one of the widest, deepest grooves of an unlikely circle you’ll ever hear, reconfiguring it as simmering, steamy jazz/blues. If you start this disc on the third track, “Solomon Sang”—a Wilson original—you might even be fooled into thinking it was Joni in her most recent smoky... Read More