Album Reviews

Elvis Costello took a quantum songwriting leap on his third album and with a generous six weeks in the studio following a world tour with new songs written, came up with intricate arrangements and sonically sophisticated production that while complex, was not detrimental to the intense propulsion of the music.

More than enough has been written about this album for me to attempt to add anything of value to the mix. It's the best selling jazz album ever and continues to sell the way Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon does in the rock world.

How fast was Miles Davis moving in 1970? Listen to the title track on the double LP recorded late summer 1969 and released the next April and then play the version on the bonus live at Tanglewood CD recorded August 1970. 

Neil plays, Daniel "La-noise" manipulates. The result is a solo album—a man and his guitar— that takes on gargantuan proportions as it throbs, undulates, oozes, howls, flows, rattles and hums through a series of reminiscences, philosophical discussions, entreaties and proclamations of faith that only an older man could possibly produce and deliver with such rich and fervent authority.

It’s difficult to believe this November 18th, 1993 Sony Music Studios performance is almost seventeen years old. Though it aired on MTV a month later, it wasn’t issued on vinyl or CD until November 1st, 1994, six months after Kurt Cobain’s suicide.

Joni Mitchell’s move to jazz on this 1974 game changer upset her hippie contingent, who wished she’d remained a “lady of the canyon,” and it didn’t exactly thrill fans who considered themselves jazz aficionados either—not with the likes of “jazz-lite” guys like Tom Scott, Joe Sample, Wilton Felder and Larry Carlton involved.

Sadly, during the early '60s Muddy Waters and other Chicago blues masters were better known to white English youth than to their American counterparts. Mick and Keith weren't alone in their fandom. Search YouTube and you'll find an amazing Howlin' Wolf performance before an adoring audience of well-scrubbed English white kids that was probably never repeated in America where blues was dubbed "race music" and relegated  to the ghettos.