Articles by Colin Fleming

The Yardbirds: Live! Blueswailing July '64

by Colin Fleming
April 9, 2005

The Yardbirds Live! Blueswailing July '64 Castle 2003

As advice to anyone building a collection of live recordings, one could scarcely go wrong with the acknowledged classics--sets by Otis Redding, the Who, the Stones' Get YerYa-Ya's Out! Combined with a few esoteric items--the Shadows of Knight at theCellar Club, the Stooges' last show, and Hank Williams' Health and Happiness programs, one can actually span a range of genres and styles, charting how one era, ...

Curtis Amy: Mosaic Select 7

by Colin Fleming
April 7, 2005

Relatively unknown as far as storming tenor players go, Texas-born Curtis Amy perhaps wasn't so storming after all, as this set suggests.

Familiar to rock fans for his solo on the Doors' “Touch Me, Amy was more restrained, more a player of shadings and touch, than his reputation and birthright might lead one to believe. These sessions for the Pacific Jazz label, all cut in the early '60s, open with two albums of the then exceedingly popular combo of organ ...

Duke Pearson: Mosaic Select 8

by Colin Fleming
April 7, 2005

While even the most successful attempts at blending jazz with bossa nova rarely result in a form of musical expression that moves beyond the tendencies of either, here is a style that does just that--an exploratory music we can confidently term the innovations of Duke Pearson.

Compiled from the pianist's late sixties Blue Note sessions, with a few tracks from 1970 included, there is little in jazz that bears resemblance to what we encounter on these five studio ...

Cecil Taylor: Conquistador!

by Colin Fleming
October 17, 2004

More so than with any label, the greatest recordings on Blue Note, those that pull rank on the merely great and that we can most comfortably say will belong to all ages, seem to prove a burden for many listeners to embrace, no matter how enthralled they are by the sounds of Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Blue Train---the label's signature sounds, really. Consider Out To Lunch! and Point of Departure, often dismissed as acquired tastes, or worse, noise, and flouted ...

Herbie Hancock: VSOP Live Under The Sky and The Piano

by Colin Fleming
October 16, 2004

Strange, sometimes, an artist's need to revisit his creative past and experiment with the new technologies of the present, both within a short period of time.

These two Herbie Hancock albums, recorded in the late seventies, are oppositional concepts--the VSOP date from Tokyo, a reunion of Miles Davis' second great quintet, with Freddie Hubbard replacing Davis on trumpet, The Piano a footnote experiment in direct to disk recording, Hancock encrypting music at the most elemental level of sound preservation without ...

Miles Davis - Seven Steps: The Complete Columbia Recordings, 1963-1964

by Colin Fleming
September 22, 2004

Seven Steps : Review #1 | Review #2 | Review #3 | Discuss | Poll

Miles Davis Seven Steps: The Complete Columbia Recordings Of Miles Davis, 1963-1964 Columbia Legacy 2004

One of the more undervalued phases in Miles Davis' career, the years 1963-64 are typically deemed a fallow period, marked by a few mildly inventive studio creations and scattershot radio broadcasts. Davis' transformations were often stylistic, but this collection puts the bulk ...

The Essential Louis Armstrong

by Colin Fleming
September 7, 2004

Louis Armstrong The Essential Louis Armstrong Columbia Legacy Recordings 2004

A potentially unwieldy concept, the compilation--woe the artist whose work spans decades and styles at the prospect of the two-disc catchall.

As with Bob Dylan, George Gershwin, and Miles Davis, we must number Louis Armstrong among those truly ill-served by the roundup approach to popular music, a musician whose stylistic innovations were spread across fewer idioms, perhaps, but whose career ...

The Stone Roses: The Remixes

by Colin Fleming
July 12, 2004

The way the Stone Roses burst upon the British national scene in the spring of '89 couldn't have been more colorful. Loved primarily for their eponymous debut album, the Roses spawned everything from English populism to Oasis to a dance culture saturated with rock backbeats and neo-psychedelic allusions. And then, in what must have been the almost crippling pressure to follow up an album that had galvanized a generation, the Roses bogged themselves down with record label court cases and ...

Jumpin' at Apollo: Illinois Jacquet

by Colin Fleming
July 12, 2004

A top soloist and perhaps an undervalued ensemble player, Illinois Jacquet's crowded, busy style lends to a sort of jazz populism--the flashy horn man best known and celebrated for a few outstanding, transcendent performances wholly distinct from the typical quality of his work. In the realm of rock and roll, Jacquet might put one in mind of Alvin Lee and his Woodstock performance of “I'm Coming Home," or in jazz of Paul Gonsalves on “Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in ...

John Coltrane: The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording

by Colin Fleming
July 12, 2004

Composed almost entirely of violently shifting textures and a commitment to dissonance that all but blasphemes melody and musical forms, this document of John Coltrane's last recorded concert from April '67 is decidedly horrific, threatening, and appropriately staggering. Having forsaken his famous “sheets of sound" for a new, overly propulsive medium in the mid-sixties, Coltrane's last phase was nearly anti-jazz or, if one wants, almost anti-music. Yet on this recording it is Pharoah Sanders who truly has his way with ...