This record makes Scott Walker’s last two bleak outings sound positively festive. Harvey has never been an easy listen throughout her decade plus career. She could be dark, abusive, angry, pained, vulnerable, strong and raw-edged, but she could never be easy and she’s not here, as ghostly and pained a musical figure as you’re likely to encounter on record.
Before the folk revival of the 1950’s and ‘60’s fomented by the likes of The Weavers and later The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary, there were the originals like Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. He was born in the 1880’s (exact date unknown) and he died in New York City, December 6th, 1949 of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, better known as “Lou Gehrigs Disease.”
To live as the non-English speaking world experiences our pop music, you might try this record of familiar Leonard Cohen songs sung in Swedish by Jan Erik Lundqvist. So popular are Mr. Lundqvist’s interpretations that he’s put out two volumes. This first one dates from 2002, which Meyer records reissuing it on 180 gram vinyl more recently. Leonard Cohen apparently approves.
The audio industry may have lost a legend and a prolific innovator in Henry Kloss a few years back, but it still has another affable, creative eccentric in Peter Ledermann. In the mid-1970s, Ledermann was director of engineering at Bozak, where, with Rudy Bozak, he helped develop a miniature bookshelf speaker and a miniature powered subwoofer. Before that, Ledermann was a design engineer at RAM Audio Systems, working with Richard Majestic on the designs of everything from high-power, minimal-feedback power amplifiers and preamplifiers to phono cartridge systems. He was also an award-winning senior research engineer at IBM, and the primary inventor of 11 IBM patents.
Like West Meets East (Angel/EMI 36418 LP) the famous Ravi Shankar/Yehudi Menuhin collaboration from 1966, this 1992 get together between the guitarist/musicologist Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, a classically trained Indian musician you may have unknowingly seen playing the Mohan Viña (an instrument he devised) in the DVD “A Concert For George,” attempts to mesh Eastern and Western musical sensibilities.
This lovely set of intimately arranged and meticulously recorded covers, originally issued in 2000, is precisely the kind of semi-obscure album in need of a quality all-analog reissue.
Lovers of chamber music in general and Heifetz in particular, will find this “Living Stereo” oddity from 1961 a sonic and musical treasure. “Oddity” because it’s an album pieced together from two studio recordings made at either side of “the pond.”
At a time when the shortsighted have all but declared the album form either dead or dying, Suzanne Vega's latest one (issued on CD July, 2007 and more recently on vinyl by Classic Records) is a cool reminder that putting together a coherent program of well-produced (and carefully recorded) tunes remains a most satisfying musical art form. The album won a well-deserved Grammy, this past February (2008), for "Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical."
This 1962 release is a pick-up session plain and simple, made interesting by the presence of the adventurous multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk and the always-tasteful pianist Tommy Flanagan—not that the snare-popping Haynes isn’t a superb and exciting drummer and Henry Grimes doesn’t acquit himself well on bass.
Never mind the much-vilified Marine and ex-Obama pastor Reverend Wright, if you want to hear the unvarnished, angry, hurtful truth of an era not so long past, listen to this stark, musical reminder of race relations in early ‘60s America.