LATEST ADDITIONS

There’s an air of unreality about issuing a 7 CD set honoring the 50th Anniversary of The GRAMMY Awards. For one thing, the GRAMMYs award commercial, not artistic merit, though occasionally the two intersect. But more importantly, in an age of iTunes, where you can grab the tunes you want for a buck a piece, there’s something outdated and inefficient about packaging and marketing 16 tunes per category on a CD. What if you only like a few of them? Why be forced to buy all of them? Guess what? You’re not. NARAS (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences) and Shout! Factory decided to issue these 7 discs anyway.

This set, recorded a few weeks shy of fifty years of when I’m writing this stars a 51 year old Hawkins leading a well- recorded session date featuring J.J. Johnson, Hank Jones, Ocar Pettiford, Jo Jones, Barry Galbraith (guitar) and Idrees Sulieman. I had no idea who Barry Galbraith was until I read the liner notes, so I’ve listed his instrument in case you’re unfamiliar as well. Perhaps I’m just showing my ignorance. If you don’t know the others and what they play, you’re showing yours, though trumpeter Idrees Sulieman is not exactly a household name now and wasn’t even one in 1957.

Bacharach and David walked a fine line between brilliance and kitsch during their collaborations with Dionne Warwick, creating for her a musical persona that was the original “desperate housewife,” though of a much more helpless and vulnerable variety.

The acclaimed violinist Salvatore Accardo commissioned arranger Francesco Fiore to re-imagine his dear friend Astor Piazzolla’s “Adios Nonino,” for, violin, piano and orchestra. Not a bandoneon can be heard on this lush, extraordinarily moving tribute to the great tango composer’s father, whose middle name was “Nonino.”