Album Reviews

A funny thing happens as you age: time compresses. When I was 20, music from the 1940s seemed old. Robert Johnson was positively pre-historic, and to my ears the sound was equally cobwebbed. Oh, like everyone else, I bought CL 1654 after seeing it on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home and reading one of the breathless cover dissections in a magazine. Back then every cover prop "meant" something. 

By the end of the '70s, rock was dead, prog-rock had grown grotesquely self-indulgent, and the angry punk/new wave deconstruction had begun. It was a long-overdue musical cleansing. The Sex Pistols and The Clash were at opposite ends of the dividing line: one unabashedly stupid, the other worldly and literate. The late Joe Strummer was anything but working class, but he kept his upper-class roots tightly wrapped beneath a veneer of growling anger and disgust. He was hardly alone in towing the image line.

This 1962 release is a pick-up session plain and simple, made interesting by the presence of the adventurous multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk and the always-tasteful pianist Tommy Flanagan&#151not that the snare-popping Haynes isn’t a superb and exciting drummer and Henry Grimes doesn’t acquit himself well on bass.

Sonny Rollins sparring with Freddie Hubbard (title tune only) backed by the reunited Coltrane drum’n’bass section of Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison sounds like an enticing lineup for this May, 1966 session at Van Gelder’s and it is!

Universal ushers in a new era of limited-edition Pete Townshend solo 180g 1LP reissues with a pair of Abbey Road Studios half-speed-mastered editions: 1) Rough Mix, Pete’s September 1977 collaboration with Ronnie Lane, and 2) April 1980’s Empty Glass. Read Mark Smotroff’s combo review to see how these two new half-speed-mastered versions stack up with the originals. . .

Having been drowned to within an inch of its life, New Orleans, source of great musical innovations and revivals, birthplace of early jazz and classic rock, purveyor of fundamental funk, and mother of idiosyncratic geniuses beyond number, is still in the process of washing off the mud and putting the pieces back together again.