Album Reviews

Date: June 25, 1962
Release: Riverside #94342
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I was a 15-year old Jimi Hendrix fanatic looking to expand his record collection. Knowing that Jimi liked jazz, I figured I might as well check out this music that I had long associated with old people and elevators. I went to the record store, and, having nobody to steer me in the right direction, began browsing the jazz section by album cover alone. The record that finally grabbed me featured a huge pair of black hands playing on a hollow bodied guitar. This one looked like something Hendrix might have been listening to, so I bought it. My arbitrary selection turned out to be none other than Wes Montgomery’s Full House, one of the finest jazz guitar albums of all time. This lucky score would have a life-changing impact on my listening habits, breaking the hold of rock and roll and pushing my tastes into new directions. Sixteen years and hundreds of records later, I wonder whether I would have become such an ardent jazz fan had my first purchase been any less brilliant.

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Date: September 24, 2002 (release)
Release: Sub Pop #600
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Mos Def will make you believe in hip hop again. What’s that? You don’t listen to that crap? This album is reason to re-evaluate that stance. If you’re one of those that “Used to Love H.E.R.”, check out Mos’ debut and fall in love all over again.

Although the popular first single from the album (“Ms. Fat Booty”) may seem like standard fare, the opener “Fear Not of Man” is a tribute/update of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti‘s “Fear Not For Man”–a bold step away from the strict American/Jamaican musical orthodoxy of Hiphop. This sets the tone for the album; in the spirit of Fela he deals with real issues such as environmentalism (“New World Water”), under-education and other social/economic inequities (“Mathematics”), and racism (“Mr. Nigga”).

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Date: 1968 (recording) / April 19, 1999 (release)
Release: Immediate #414
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The story of Billy Nicholls is a sadly familiar one. It parallels the tragedy of Shuggie Otis, a young child prodigy who delivered an incredibly great album to his record label (1974’s Inspiration Information), and got dropped in return. It’s a life story lived by legions of gifted artists, who, through lack of commercial success, burn through their prime creative years in muted obscurity, waiting for a public embrace that always seems to comes too late, if at all. At 16, Billy Nicholls was a total unknown, a kid with more guts than talent. As the story goes, the teenaged British songwriter had the chutzpah to approach George Harrison and enlist the quiet Beatle’s help in landing him a record deal (clinched with then Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham’s new and edgy Immediate label).

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Date: 1973
Release: Soul Jazz Records #12
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The Arabs gave the world the concept of zero. America’s own School House Rock taught us that “three is a magic number.” And Chinese numerologists revealed which numbers carried good luck and bad. All these developments set the stage for the release of eight songs recorded by eight Puerto Rican-born African-American musicians who took their name from the Spanish word for the number eight, Ocho. One of the defining bands of the ‘black and proud’ NuYorican scene of the early 1970s, Ocho masterfully fused elements of Latin, funk and jazz. From 1973-75, they recorded four LPs (all reissued by Soul Jazz Records) that are on par with almost anything released by Ray Barretto, Joe Bataan, and Eddie Palmieri. The cream of the crop is Ocho 1, a glorious record loaded with exactly the kind of sounds I have in mind when I tell people that I’m into Latin music.

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Date: March, 1993
Release: CAROL 2335-2
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When Peter Gabriel started the Real World recording label in the late ’80s, he created an important new outlet for the distribution of the world’s foremost musical talents. At least, that was the idea. Like any other business venture, Real World has had its share of hits, but a lot of what comes out on their label is garbage, regardless of what continent the music hails from. Some discs, though, like this one by Kenyan musician Ayub Ogada, are absolute treasures.

Ogada plays the lyre-like Nyatiti, an instrument integral to the rituals and social customs of his Luo people. The music floats out hypnotically, inducing trance: plucked notes circle in soothing, drone repetitions, bathed in sleigh bells and some lightly rhythmic percussion. These are not the complex, pulse-accelerating rhythms of say, Afro-funkster Fela Kuti or Prince Nico Mbarga. Rather, this is an unhurried, playful music, perfect in its sparseness, that goes down easy.

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Date: 1974
Release: Luaka Bop #50473
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“Inspiration Information is a record for people that have heard a lot of music, maybe too much, and are looking for a new musical romance.”

–Steven Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

Imagine how it must have felt. Three years of your life spent obsessively working your ideas out, stretching and revising and perfecting them until finally you’re ready to set them down. In the studio you experience the magic of complete artistic control, handling almost all of the instrumentation, production and arrangements, fully realizing every bit of your uniquely inspired musical vision. It comes out exactly like it sounded in your head. Your record hits the streets–an album of nine songs–and you think to yourself that one of them might even be a hit. Then you wait…and wait…and nothing happens. Your record label drops you, and you wake up to find that your once promising musical career is dead at the age of 21.

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Date: 1972
Release: TICO #1303
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Before the heyday of Salsa, Eddie Palmieri functioned as a path-breaking phenomena from Puerto Rico. His lingering influence on Latin music cannot be overstated. This album perfectly combines Palmieri’s experimentalism with the heavy rhythms that kept him ahead on the street. Playing for the toughest of crowds imaginable–the inmates of New York’s notorious Sing-Sing prison–Palmieri and band tore through an ambitious and aggressive set of funky salsa tunes that had the guards dancing in their towers. The prisoners responded with riotous enthusiasm to the music, whose gritty sound came out of the poverty of the Barrio, in South East Harlem, in the Bronx, and other places where bad breaks abounded. This, after all, was THEIR music, and anybody familiar with the condition of America and its prisons in the early 70s (remember Attica!) can understand why the aggressive rhythms of Palmieri resonated so deeply with the incarcerated audience at Sing-Sing.

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Date: May 15, 1953
Release: Debut/OJC OJCCD-044-2
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I’m not a superstitious guy, but still. From a stack of 15 or so CDs I pulled from my collection as candidates for review, Jazz at Massey Hall presented itself first. I fed it to my CD player and read the original liner notes, written by one Bill Coss back when liner notes were printed on the LP liner. The personnel for this live show taped in Toronto in 1953 was–get this–Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Charlie Parker on alto, Bud Powell on piano, Charles Mingus on the bass, and Max Roach on drums. The five giants tinnily played along in low-fidelity. I had just about decided not to write about it (Bird hadn’t gotten to his solo yet), but then I saw on the liner notes that the show had been on May 15–48 years ago to the day.

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Date: 1952
Release: VERVE #833564-2
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Charlie “Bird” Parker was a peerless musician who needs no further introduction. Despite his vast discography, there are few good-sounding recordings where the majority of the tunes run any more than 5 minutes in length. Jam Sessions is one of the notable exceptions. Backed by an all-star band (including such giants as Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, Benny Carter, and Oscar Peterson), Parker stretches with leisurely exuberance across lengthy jams (every track is over 13 minutes). The assembled talent really come together and hit their stride on the album’s two blues numbers. “Jam Blues” kicks off the record in an up-tempo, surging forward with one inspired solo after another, including a genius guitar solo by the great Barney Kessel, who swings with an almost rockabilly edge. Trumpeter Charlie Shavers and saxophonist Flip Phillips deserve much greater acknowledgment after their work on these sessions.

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Date: 2000
Release: Mosaic #197
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Horace who? Not Horace Silver, another Blue Note star, no, not him. Don’t fret. I had never heard of Parlan either, not until the founder/publisher of this site sent me this box set to review. I was a little distrubed after hearing this box that I hadn’t heard of him. I don’t blame myself, of course. There must be some reason why is this amazing virtuoso has drifted in the outer darkness despite his proximity to many of the brightest stars of the jazz universe?

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