Album Reviews

These loose, swinging 50+ year old sessions recorded in the summer of 1958 and winter of 1959 and sounding incredibly life-like tonally, offer Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn on piano fronting small combos of legendary horn players, some not normally associated with Ellington, Joe Jones on drums and a few added musicians to spice up the mix.

This slab of red vinyl got plopped on the turntable and listened to before the unnoticed press blurb stuffed into the gatefold jacket made returning it from where it came impossible.

The indie rocker Sufjan Stevens brings a surprising and delightful buoyancy and sense of wonderment to his orchestral suite commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its “Next Wave” Music Festival. The original debut performances were in November of 2007.

Icy cold vistas, shards of broken electronic glass, relentless thumping disco beats and possible mysteriously encrypted bits of dialogue may not sound like something that would be particularly inviting on a full range audio system, but somehow Fuck Buttons makes it so on this album of artificial mayhem and just plain noise.

In the wake of Norah Jones’ smash debut Come Away With Me, Nellie McKay issued the Geoff Emerick produced double CD set Get Away From Me.

Was this the greatest rock and roll concert recording ever as some suggest? Is it deserving of deluxe box set status? The producers of this ultra-sumptuous box obviously thought so!

Villa-Lobos’s folk-oddity “The Little Train of the Caipira” from Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2 is a delightful, evocative piece of music, as colorful as the cover artwork and a sonic spectacular guaranteed to delight even the most classical music-averse audiophiles.