Jazz Articles
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Pink Floyd: Pink Floyd At Pompeii MCMLXXII
by Doug Collette
Listening to any Pink Floyd these days, now over fifty years since the release of Dark Side of the Moon (Capitol, 1972) compels all manner of 'What if?...' hypotheses. And hearing At Pompeii MCMLXII, work preserved for posterity during the gestation of the aforementioned breakthrough album, evokes particularly thought-provoking notions about the evolution of this quartet (or subsequent line-ups) if the musicians had retained the proclivity to improvise as in their earliest days as a band. It is ...
Continue ReadingBob Dylan: Fragments - Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997): The Bootleg Series, Vol. 17
by Mike Jurkovic
Dylanologists of every stripe and level of Dylanalia had it partly right when Bob Dylan released Time Out Of Mind (Columbia) in mid-September 1997. “Great album!" They/we/us all screamed. “Great songs!" “Dylan's best since the totemic Blood On the Tracks!" (Columbia, 1975) “Mid-career masterwork!" “The Bard's New Relevance!" If you weren't there the first time it really was a Category 5 idiot wind of biblical proportion. In the chalk dust arena of popular punditry, the second enfant ...
Continue ReadingSteve Khan: Arrows
by AAJ Staff
By Steve Khan With The Blue Man not selling as well as Tightrope, Dr. George Butler requested that I have a co-producer for the next CD. I was lucky to be able to land the engineering / production talents of my old and dear friend, Elliot Scheiner. Elliot and I had recorded together on countless sessions, but perhaps most people link us together because it was Elliot who recommended me to Donald Fagen and Walter Becker for AJA, which, of ...
Continue ReadingMiles Davis: The Bootleg Series Vol. 7 That's What Happened 1982-1985
by Ian Patterson
Eventually the steam roller that is the Miles Davis Bootleg Series was going to trundle into the trumpeter's 1980s comeback era. The preceding six volumes in this series have all been uniformly excellent--essential listening for the Davis completist. Volume 7, however, does not reach those heights. It is an uneven bag, much like Davis's 1980s output you might say. In a nutshell, there are three discs. The first two are studio outtakes from the Star People (Columbia, ...
Continue ReadingOscar Brown Jr.: Sin & Soul
by Robert Gilbert
Oscar Brown Jr. was a singer, songwriter, playwright, poet, author, performer, Civil Rights activist, television host, political candidate and serviceman, to name but a few of the hats he wore throughout his life. He also recorded one of the most dazzling debut records that has ever been released, 1960's Sin & Soul on Columbia Records. It remains a startling and refreshing listen. There is an enduring mystique about the debut album, that first opportunity accorded an ...
Continue ReadingBob Dylan: Rough And Rowdy Ways
by Doug Collette
Bob Dylan's Rough And Rowdy Ways is a uniformly excellent piece of work. On these ten new original songs, the Nobel Laureate blends folk, blues and country music with just the slightest dash of gospel and, accompanied with sensitivity by his touring band (plus a few additional musicians including Blake Mills and Fiona Apple), the seamless sound makes this thirty-ninth Dylan studio album superior to both of the other standouts of recent years, Time Out Of Mind (Columbia, 1997) and ...
Continue ReadingMichel Legrand: Legrand Jazz
by Patrick Burnette
Michel LeGrand is best known for his long and fruitful career in movie soundtracks, but as a young man in 1958 he was featured in an arranger's showcase with a collection of jazz masters, including Ben Webster, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Miles Davis. Columbia Records in 1958 had an unparalleled roster to offer the young French phenom; the label also had the studio chops to make the result an audiophile treasure sixty years later (Impex Records reissued ...
Continue ReadingMiles Davis: Milestones
by C. Michael Bailey
Milestones was Miles Davis' third Columbia release after 'Round About Midnight (1957) and Miles Ahead (1957). The recording was made during one of Davis' most creatively intense periods, preceding his recording of the soundtrack for Ascenseur Pour L'echafaud (Fontana, 1958) in late 1957 and the subsequent recordings of Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else (Blue Note, 1958) and the repertoire that would become Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959). Milestones is significant as a creative hinge period between Davis' bebop/hard bop ...
Continue ReadingBob Dylan: Triplicate
by Doug Collette
If Bob Dylan's Triplicate, the thirty-eighth studio album of his fifty-year plus career, proves anything, it's that he's very serious about his exploration of the Great American Songbook. Not only is this his third straight studio recording devoted to such material, he deigned to be interviewed close to the March 31 2017 release of the recordings (spending more than a little time on the subject) and, on the current leg of his touring schedule, devotes at least a handful of ...
Continue ReadingMahavishnu Orchestra: Apocalypse
by Julian Derry
Well, there's not much to say about the new release of Apocalypse. Well, not as much as many Mahavishnu fans had hoped; rumours of a long awaited and much needed remastering of this legendary album, making the rounds of the mailing lists were alas, premature. So what is this CD? Answer: it's the exact same, level-for-level digital copy as Sony (né Columbia)'s previous release--slapping the audio files into your favourite audio comparison remastering detection software, and positioning the track profiles ...
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