Album Reviews

Best known for playing the traditional jazz it was founded to preserve fifty years ago, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band here celebrates its next fifty with a forward looking program of audacious, often raucous and sometimes mischievous new originals mostly written by 41 year old Ben Jaffe, son of the hall's founders Allan and Sandra and current Creative Director

Real name Sarah Joyce, the 34 year-old singer-songwriter who goes by the name Rumer (after the English writer Margaret Rumer Godden), was born in Islamabad, Pakistan and is most often described as having a Karen Carpenter-like soothing, dreamy voice.

The daughter of a British woman whose British engineer husband was assigned there to work on a dam, Rumer and her six older siblings lived isolated in an ex-patriot community. Not until she was 11 and her “parents” divorced and the family moved back to England did she and her siblings discover that her father was the family’s Pakistani cook.

As you know, digital is "perfect", so it shall remain a mystery why Part 1 of the Rolling Stones Box Set feature originally published on musicangle.com in 2011 got lost in the conversion to analogplanet.com. Part II made it. The omission was discovered recently when a reader asked about the recent ABKCO individual clear vinyl reissues. He was told to read the two part story because according to ABKCO, the new clear vinyl reissues were sourced from the files that produced the box set's excellent results, but of course Part 1 was nowhere to be found on the site. So belatedly, here it is.-Ed.

Only side one was actually recorded live at New York's now shuttered Half Note back in June of 1965; the other side was taped during an Autumn studio date at Van Gelder's place in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. The Kelly Trio, which included Jimmy Cobb and Paul Chambers — the rest of Miles Davis' former rhythm section — is joined by one of the world's most original jazz guitarist, the late Wes Montgomery, on a smooth set that goes down easy both because of the straight-ahead swing of the playing and Van Gelder's superb recording. The live side captures Montgomery's rich sound better than any other recording I've ever heard, and the studio side is only down a notch from that.

The late Carl E. Jefferson's Concord Records, (now owned by Concord Music Group, which owns Fantasy, Prestige, Riverside, Stax, Specialty, Telarc, Hear Music etc.), founded in 1972 at a time when the pioneering jazz "majors" Blue Note and the above mentioned Prestige, Riverside, etc. had been bought and turned into catalog to be "asset managed" with little or no forward direction, remains, like Norman Granz's Pablo Records, among the most underrated and undervalued on the used LP market.

Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" composed in 1723 is an enduring set of four violin concertos so popular and oft-played that even folks who are not fans of classical music will be recognize it—especially the opener “La Primavera” (“Spring”).

Like Marshall Crenshaw’s debut, Cyndi Lauper’s first album would be difficult to top and neither she nor Crenshaw managed to do it. Better to peak early than not peak at all—not that either of them didn’t release some very good follow-ups.