Album Reviews

“Any chimp can play human for a day/and use his opposable thumbs to iron his uniform/and run for office on election day/and fancy himself a real decision maker/then deploy more troops than salt in a shaker,” Jenny Lewis sings with a droll lilt on “It's a Hit,” this album's catchy opener. Hmm. I wonder who she's singing about?

If you�re not yet familiar with him, Matisyahu is a 28-year-old white, Chassidic Jewish reggae-rapper/rocker from West Chester, Pennsylvania. Now read that over a few more times, do you have a mental picture yet? He dons the traditional dress of The Hasidic Jews, wears a long beard and sounds a bit like �Jr. Gong� Marley. In addition he�s a self proclaimed former-Deadhead, loves Phish and is an adept beat boxer. Now that I�ve got you scratching your head wondering if I�m making this all up, it would be a good time to add that he�s also a talented songwriter, and his album, Youth is quite the unique musical experience.

Joan Baez recorded this Vanguard debut in 1960 at age 19. With her impossibly high and pure quavering voice and matching pristine finger picking guitar, she and this album created a sensation that helped shift the "folk-revival" back to authenticity from the commerciality into which it had drifted. Though while she sounded like a barefoot waif recently arrived from the Appalachian mountains, she was born on Staten Island. Her Mexico-born father who grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a minister, was a Stanford PhD credited with co-inventing the X-ray microscope. Her Scottish mother's father was an Anglican priest.

Trumpeter Kenny Dorham brought Joe Henderson to Blue Note and on the late tenor saxophonist's second lead album gives him strong support as the two chase each other through some zig-zag bop thickets. "Teeter Totter," the fast-paced Henderson-penned opener alone is worth the price of admission but the other tracks simmer with equal intensity.

Through her early EMI recordings, among others, the late Hungarian violinist Johanna Martzy has achieved fame, notoriety and a cult following that escaped her during her lifetime.

Crescent, John Coltrane’s 9th Impulse! Album, released in the summer of 1964, followed a pair of live albums (Live at Birdland and Impressions [mostly live tracks from the Vanguard dates]) and a pair of collaborations (Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman) with Ballads—a quickly recorded album of standards sandwiched in between.