Album Reviews

Ella's lushly orchestrated songbook albums were popular when first issued in the '50s and '60s and again more recently as reissues. They were not just popular. They were transformational, whether she was re-interpreting Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Ellington, Irving Berlin or Jerome Kern.

Van Dyke Parks: singer, songwriter, arranger, session musician, producer, creator of soundtracks, music video audio-visual pioneer...raconteur, (I'm sure I'm missing a few)...and above all, an artist. I can't think of another figure in recorded music for whom the title "Renaissance Man" would be more fitting.

A few months ago my friend and fellow Stereophile writer (not to mention Pulitzer Prize winner, author of a new book "Insurgents" about General Patraeus, etc.) Fred Kaplan and I were lamenting the absence of reissues of Thelonious Monk's Columbia catalog.

The issue here isn't Norah Jones, it's the amount. While Jones "burst upon the scene" more than a decade ago while still in her early thirties with her debut album come away with me, she was hardly an overnight sensation. What's heard on that memorable debut is the result of years of live playing at The Living Room, an intimate, lower Manhattan club that encourages artistic growth over headliners.

Dear Diary:

Dirty Projectors has been around for a decade. This is the group's, what? sixth album? but only the first I've heard since becoming aware of it only a few month ago. How totally clueless have I become?

When I write about Swing Lo Magellan do I fake it and write as if I've known about the group for a decade? I can't do that. So I'll have to admit how unhip and out of the loop I've become.

I know! I'll blame The Beatles and all of the reissues I have to cover. Right!

"Don't want my MP3," Neil Young protests on side two's "Drifting Back (Part 2)".

Young's lifelong obsession with sound quality is well known and of course welcomed around here. He was one of the first musicians to express serious reservations about digital recording and playback. Back in 1993 he appeared on an MTV News piece along with Peter Gabriel and me too. You can watch it here. "We've lost the sound" Neil laments—and that was before the scourge of MP3.

The late Arthur Lee exited a California prison in December of 2001, having served more than five years of a twelve year sentence for negligent discharge of a firearm. The long mandatory sentence resulted from California's ridiculous, now repealed "three strikes you're out" law.

Before being incarcerated Lee had resurrected his moribund career by teaming with a talented group called Baby Lemonade (named for a Syd Barrett song) much as had Brian Wilson with The Wondermints. Once out of prison, Lee took up where he left off, touring the world as Arthur Lee and Love.