Frank Zappa’s sprawling 1969 soundtrack from a movie (he correctly supposes in a speech balloon) “….you will probably never get to see”, has ripened beautifully with age.
Chamber music at a corner dive? Not likely, but this Kickstarter financed double LP set bears witness to the unlikely success of what sounds like an impossible combination of Beethoven and beer at an ex-polka bar located in the recently gentrified but once less than savory area now known as Cleveland, Ohio's Gordon Square Arts District.
This ravishing beauty, originally released in 1960 or fifty three years ago, has been a long-time audiophile classic. It's also considering to be among the finest if not the finest performance on record or any other format.
I don't know what "defo" is, but judging by this record, life after it is achingly melancholic. Actually after writing that I did web search and learned that "defo" means something like "certainty". So who can argue that life after certainty would leave you anything but melancholic or worse?
Warner Brothers put Randy Newman on a college tour in 1969 with Ry Cooder and Captain Beefheart. The idea was to familiarize college kids with the label's eclectic artistic mix.
In 1972 and '73 you'd hear this classic album playing in every hippie crash pad and college dorm room in America. It was a "chick" album guys could dig. Her friend James Taylor had encouraged the veteran song writer to sing her own songs.
What would Mobile Fidelity do without a master tape? It doesn't exist. Or at least it can't be found. A Mo-Fi person asked me what I knew. I told them I knew the tape's been missing for years but that I'd check with the late Levon Helm's people to see what they might know. A search of Levon's tape library didn't produce it and a someone else I know checked with Robbie Robertson's people. No master.
How to follow up Highway 61 Revisited released in the summer of 1965? Dylan had an impending nine-month world tour to deal with and a band to assemble. He hooked up with an outfit called Levon and the Hawks and after a few weeks of rehearsing and well-received live performances in Texas, he took the group to Columbia Studios in New York.
Over the past few Record Store Days Sony/Legacy has been slowly rolling out on 180g vinyl, much of the Miles Davis catalog mastered from original analog tapes. This coming Record Store Day, November 29th, the label will release on vinyl Miles and Monk at Newport, Jazz Track and Kind of Blue.
At that point, all nine mono vinyl titles will have been released. The same nine mono titles will debut on CD in a new box set MILES DAVIS: The Original Mono Recordings to be released on November 11th of this year
Like Marshall Crenshaw’s debut, Cyndi Lauper’s first album would be difficult to top and neither she nor Crenshaw managed to do it. Better to peak early than not peak at all—not that either of them didn’t release some very good follow-ups.
I'll never forget the first time I heard well-recorded vibes on an audio system. It was at an E.J. Korvette's in Douglaston, NY on a pair of their XAM "house brand" speakers playing in the store's record department. I bought a lot of records there. The album was Terry Gibbs Quartet's That Swing Thing (Verve V6-8447) recorded live at Shelley's Mannehole in Los Angeles.
Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" composed in 1723 is an enduring set of four violin concertos so popular and oft-played that even folks who are not fans of classical music will be recognize it—especially the opener “La Primavera” (“Spring”).
Probably not by accident was this second Blood, Sweat & Tears album not called Blood, Sweat & Tears 2, even though that’s what it is. Child Is Father to The Man the first BS&T album, a jazz infused production featuring on occasion a string section and heavily under Al Kooper’s influence, including the some would call grotesque album cover, was a critical success and a commercial flop.
The late Carl E. Jefferson's Concord Records, (now owned by Concord Music Group, which owns Fantasy, Prestige, Riverside, Stax, Specialty, Telarc, Hear Music etc.), founded in 1972 at a time when the pioneering jazz "majors" Blue Note and the above mentioned Prestige, Riverside, etc. had been bought and turned into catalog to be "asset managed" with little or no forward direction, remains, like Norman Granz's Pablo Records, among the most underrated and undervalued on the used LP market.
Note: What's directly below is a very personal review of Sony/Legacy's late 2000's In A Silent Way 180g vinyl reissue originally published on musicangle.com, followed by an update review of Mobile Fidelity's recent AAA reissue.-ed.