Album Reviews

Even if this record evaporated in a cloud of smoke after one play like the "Mission Impossible" tape it would be worth buying just to hear young Clifford Brown's suave take on the ballad "Easy Living", reproduced with such graceful authority on this double 45—especially if your previous reference was either the CD or the 1974 UA/ Blue Note compilation Brownie Eyes (BN-LA267G), which was all I've previously had. 

The problem with an album like this is that there are two basically disinterested constituencies: Nino Rota fans who want to hear the actual soundtracks and people who don't know who Nino Rota is, or Fellini for that matter, and don't really care who they are or what The Umbrellas have done to interpret Rota's music.

Viewers of late night American television during the 1970s and 1980s surely know Romanian pan-flutist Zamfir. His albums were direct marketed all over the tube back then. The ads were kitschy, with Zamfir playing pan flute versions of standards. The vibe was Liberace on a pan flute—an image I apologize for leaving you with.

The poet/singer Gil Scott-Heron struck a raw nerve in the early '70s  with "The Revolution Will Not be Televised," a sarcastic, simmering three minute taunt set to a flute, drum and bass soaked jazz backing track that  sounds today more like Beatnik parody than jazz.

This is not Sam Beam's (A/K/A Iron and Wine) latest album. It dates from 2007. His first release, The Creek Drank the Cradle, was released back in 2002. Somehow that one, this one, his newest and all of his work escaped my attention until last year's AXPONA audio show in Jacksonville Florida where I saw the collected works in the bins of a Florida audio store owner who had a room at the show. I asked to hear something and he played a cut from this introspective, atmospheric and sonically enticing and well-produced album. I was hooked.

Keb' Mo's mellow protest album recycles classics from the '60s and '70s, recasting them for the 2004 mindset witnessing the greatest strategic foreign policy mistake in American history. 

Clearly a fan, producer Steve Lipson places Jeff Beck's guitar in a distant reverberant  space that decreases its solidity but increases both its size and its mystery, evoking a God-like presence hovering above a lush, string-drenched orchestra. Or you could see Beck playing perched on a craggy, windswept rock surrounded by white-capped water. The album very much has a Pacific Ocean vibe.