Album Reviews

Zappa ’88: The Last U.S. Show contains mostly unreleased material capturing Frank’s full Nassau Coliseum Long Island, NY performance plus additional tracks from MD and RI shows. The ’88 band, a well-oiled machine intended to be Frank’s Fox television show “house band”, included some of the finest musicians that had ever worked with him. Naturally, Frank was to have complete show control including guest selection. He intended to choose people with wildly different backgrounds and viewpoints, but at the last minute, Fox pulled the plug.

On Sunday January 15th, 2006 following a blizzard, the late musical greats trumpeter Roy Hargrove and pianist Mulgrew Miller flew into Newark Liberty International Airport, cabbed it to 449 seat Merkin Hall in the Kaufman Music Center near Lincoln Center—a venue with near perfect acoustics—and with no soundcheck or preparation and after standing in the wings and calling out some tunes, stepped onto the stage and delivered some of the remarkable music making documented on this two LP set. A second equally impromptu performance almost two years later (November 9, 2007) at Lafayette College in Easton PA where Miller lived with his family fills out the set of mostly standards indelibly performed.

Pikefruit - a duo (Alex and Nicole) from the Pacific Northwest that creates ethereal, electronic music - recently released a new album titled, Inflorescence. Iridescence? I know what that is. Fluorescent? I get that. Incandescent? Got it! But, inflorescence? I have to admit, even this English major was a bit stumped on that vocab word. Good old Webster’s was able to help out, of course: inflorescence is “the mode of development and arrangement of flowers on an axis” or “the budding and unfolding of blossoms.” As their first full-length reveals, Alex and Nicole are indeed blossoming.

You don’t hear much about the band Pantera in either the audiophile or even in the vinyl community. Its music and lyrics come across as brash, and thrash metal definitely isn’t the first genre that comes to mind when thinking of records to show off the sonic capabilities of one's stereo equipment.

Some people collect Tone Poet Blue Note reissues the way some people amass baseball cards. I know more than a few Tone Poet enthusiasts who, after buying one, had a Bert Lahr Lay’s potato chip moment and couldn’t stop buying them—at least until they encountered the late pianist/composer/arranger Andrew Hill’s Blue Note debut Black Fire (ST-84151/B0029975-01).

I meant to review this album of Norah Jones "extras" that she released last year but it kind of slipped through the cracks. It plays like a carefully thought out thematic song cycle but it isn't. Instead it's a set of "leftovers" from a series of collaborative efforts, many of which were released as singles. You might even think it's a personal "break-up" album, particularly given the album title, but it's not that either.

Is it possible to now write anything that hasn’t already been written or said about this record? I haven’t any fresh insights to offer that might advance what you probably already know. A good Kind of Blue pressing puts you in the 30th Street studio to hear the performance. Ashley Kahn’s “Kind of Blue” book sets the pre-recording stage, offering both musical and technical details and puts you as much in the control room as in front of the band.