Album Reviews

It's easy to imagine a generation of young guitar students wearing out the grooves of this set of  "urban instrumental surf music."

Laura Nyro’s most personal, mature and intense album of love’s struggles proved to be the stopping point for many fans of the earlier gospel-y good time Nyro who sung “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “Eli’s Comin’,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” “Stoney End,” and even “And When I Die,” which was celebratory despite the song’s morbid title.

Let the Blue Note reissue riot continue! Fans of the cool, bluesy, gospely Blue Note sound can’t help but feel blessed at the output, whether from Classic in mono or from Analogue Productions and Music Matters in stereo.

The arranger Gil Evans was on a roll when this cool, yet raucous big band set of standards was recorded in New York City back in 1958. The California native and big band veteran had already arranged Miles Davis’ Miles Ahead and the cool and deep Porgy and Bess. Featured soloist Cannonball Adderley’s Blue Note classic Somethin’ Else had also hit big by then (okay, it was really a Miles Davis album, but Cannonball’s playing heated up Miles’s cool show).

In the early �70�s, with the second great rock era in its death throws, the rock intelligensia hungered for something, anything that might reinvigorate the softening musical firmament.

Subtlety was not in Neil Young’s game plan when he sat down to write the tunes here, probably in a burst of creative energy born of frustration with the war in Iraq and other Bush administration activities over the past few years. Young’s moved quite a ways since his romance with the Reagan administration.

There’s no better time than now to release a live performance of Civil War era “lifeline” spirituals dedicated to Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave herself, who is best known as an “Underground Railroad” organizer personally responsible for smuggling to freedom hundreds of slaves, first to the North and then after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 that allowed the recapture of freed slaves in non-slave states, to Canada.