Album Reviews

The Modern Jazz Quartet would never have been signed to Blue Note. The group’s Bach-influenced button-down counterpoint was a bad fit with Blue Note’s gospel and blues influenced soul-jazz.

One side of this 1975 release gives you a smokin’ hot live recording of mindless, Texas-style speed-boogie music (the mind is not a terrible thing to waste!), while the other is a somewhat more introspective studio set.

This summer of 1955 set probably recorded at United in Los Angeles August 23rd and 25th 1955 just a few days after a successful Hollywood Bowl appearance finds Holiday covering standards in fine voice backed up a great small combo.

Krall’s cool, detached yet available look on the front and back covers of this popular 2002 release let you know from whence the emotions flow here. She sells these standards intimately yet barely rising above a warm smolder, leaving you to crack the code.

I recently drove to Boston to visit three old friends I’d not seen for 30 years. I met them when I was in my mid-twenties and they were even younger. While most of my other friends and I sought shallow “hipness” through aggressively consuming what was new and avidly rejecting what was old, these guys didn’t filter their likes through time. They seemed to be as enthusiastic about Cab Calloway in 1972 as his fans must have been back in 1931 when he sold a million copies of “Minnie the Moocher.”

Jenny Lewis can be coquettish, seductive, aggressive, sweet, warm, nostalgic, empathetic and, yes, acid tongued— though it’s a literal reference on the title tune.

The long running outfit known as Mercury Rev (first album, Yerself Is Steam issued 1991 on the UK Mint Films label and 1992 on U.S. Columbia) didn’t take its name from the liquid element. The first album’s back jacket offers a clue: with or without permission, it reproduces the ‘Stereo 35MM’ logo found on cloth-spined Command Classics LPs and that’s fine with me. “Fine”&#151get it? Fine? It even reproduces the part of the logo that says the recording was on 35MM magnetic tape, but I doubt that album really was. (Hint: those Commands were recorded by the legendary Mercury Records engineer (and mastered by George Piros for that matter).