Album Reviews

Even if you generally find Jones's voice too nasal, too cat-like, too small, too thin, too whiney and especially too nasal, her cool, slinky and smartly laid-back vibe on this impeccably arranged and played double LP set will surely win you over.

The irony wasn't lost on Stones fans when ABKCO and Universal simultaneously issued Rolling Stones vinyl box sets back in 2010. ABKCO, which owned the group's British Decca-era catalog, hired legendary mastering engineer Bob Ludwig to handle mastering of its catalog while Universal, which controlled the group's own label, released a box set with no mastering credits.

“Peace and love” is the defining mantra of Ringo Starr, one of two surviving Beatles. It’s sappy, cheesy, and agonizingly overused, but in all seriousness, it’s a message the world desperately needs. Though there’s a lot to hate, love is, in my mind, the true meaning of life. Keep in mind, I say this having learned it from others, namely the musicians I admire. Ringo, now 80 years old (he really doesn’t look it), is one of many who gather conclusions from a long, rich life. It’s here, on this EP, where the superstar shares his wisdom.

A funny thing happens as you age: time compresses. When I was 20, music from the 1940s seemed old. Robert Johnson was positively pre-historic, and to my ears the sound was equally cobwebbed. Oh, like everyone else, I bought CL 1654 after seeing it on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home and reading one of the breathless cover dissections in a magazine. Back then every cover prop "meant" something. 

By the end of the '70s, rock was dead, prog-rock had grown grotesquely self-indulgent, and the angry punk/new wave deconstruction had begun. It was a long-overdue musical cleansing. The Sex Pistols and The Clash were at opposite ends of the dividing line: one unabashedly stupid, the other worldly and literate. The late Joe Strummer was anything but working class, but he kept his upper-class roots tightly wrapped beneath a veneer of growling anger and disgust. He was hardly alone in towing the image line.

This 1962 release is a pick-up session plain and simple, made interesting by the presence of the adventurous multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk and the always-tasteful pianist Tommy Flanagan&#151not that the snare-popping Haynes isn’t a superb and exciting drummer and Henry Grimes doesn’t acquit himself well on bass.

Sonny Rollins sparring with Freddie Hubbard (title tune only) backed by the reunited Coltrane drum’n’bass section of Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison sounds like an enticing lineup for this May, 1966 session at Van Gelder’s and it is!