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Album Reviews
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(166 reviews)
Date: October 6, 1996 (recording)
Release: India Archive Music #1042
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I first heard of Debashish Bhattacharya from guitar master Nels Cline, who raved about this album on the “What I’ve Been Listening to Lately” section of his website. Cline gushed,
“What a find this man is! He rocks!! Besides his amazing phrasing and melodic invention (common among scary Indian classical players…), he adds some chording and fingerstyle to his improvisations with great effectiveness.”
Trusting Nels’ taste, I bought it cold, figuring that with a name like Hindustani Slide Guitar, it had to be good. Upon hearing the first few ultra-mellow minutes of the opening Raga Saraswati, I experienced a brief feeling of buyers’ remorse. In a snap judgment I thought, this doesn’t rock, this sounds like the spacey Indian mood music they play at the Bodhi Tree (an irritatingly Hollywood New Age megastore that sells such indispensable accessories as the chakra pillow, “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success” video, and of course, the Tao-Sex Decoder). I lit some Nag Champa incense, picked up a magazine, and decided to accept the album as pleasantly exotic background music.
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Date: 2006
Release: Light in the Attic #018
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It has been an angry week. Most music will do for soothing the more banal stresses of work and relationships, but these early months of ’07–with their pre-election madness, shooting madness, war madness–calls for something explosive, emotional and flat-out enraged. I pulled The Black Angels‘ 2006 release Passover off the shelf and have since had it on repeat to let it all out.
Formed in 2004 in Austin, Texas, the Angels rock a heavy mix of Velvet Underground moodiness, layered percussion and politically charged lyrics. With song titles like “Young Men Dead,” “Black Grease,” “Bloodhounds on My Trail,” and “Call to Arms” (all standouts), the band delves into some serious shit. But what could be a tedious exercise in self-righteousness instead becomes passionate, cathartic rock ‘n’ roll.
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Date: February 21,1954
Release: Blue Note #1521
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There are many things that could happen at a nightclub on a particular night. A guy might be drinking his paycheck, while his wife waits at home. A couple might be thinking of other people, or reaching for each other’s legs under the table. Someone might be in the corner resolving to change his ways. Any or all of these things could have been happening on the night of February 21, 1954 at Birdland in New York. I know because A Night at Birdland Volume 1 puts me there, sitting in the dark, listening to the sounds of sweat, smoke, sex and solitude. This was be-bop hardening into hard bop, and it was young lions feeling their influences and letting them fly.
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Date: February 10, 1964
Release: Blue Note # 7841702
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Ever seen the movie, "Bullitt?" The 1968 movie in which Steve McQueen chases the bad guys through San Francisco’s streets in a Ford Mustang at over 110 mph? How about the beneath-the-subway car chase in "The French Connection," the chase sequences in "Ronin," or the final truck chase in "The Road Warrior," in which Mad Max guns an 18-wheel tanker full throttle as hundreds of post-apocalyptic street trash pursue it, bounce off it, and finally bring it spiralling to the ground? If you haven’t seen these movies, it will be impossible to fully comprehend Wayne Shorter‘s tenor sax solo on the title track of the Jazz Messengers Free For All. In fact, the music on Art Blakey‘s seemingly run-of-the-mill 1964 Blue Note reissue will not only knock you out of your seat, but put you up on two wheels, flip you eleven times and drop you off the Golden Gate Bridge.
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Date: 1971
Release: Virgin #21899
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Eleven finely crafted songs from Bowie’s short-lived long-haired days. This album, with its breakthrough hit “Changes,” represents the closest thing that this musical chameleon ever came to fitting somewhere within the singer-songwriter tradition. It features clear and deliberate nods in the direction of Neil Young and Bob Dylan, as is obvious on “Song for Bob Dylan.” Still, this album was by no means derivative or one dimensional in sound and vision. “Andy Warhol” is a classic example of the arty-weirdness that Bowie would further explore in his groundbreaking collaborations with Brian Eno later in the decade. “Eight Line Poem” and “Quicksand” are crammed full of impossible to grasp lyrics of unmistakable genius. Glam is given a pre-punk make-over in “Queen Bitch,” a hard-edged epic vaguely about a femme-fatale transvestite, while homosexuality itself is practically paraded out of the closet in “Oh! You Pretty Things.”
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Date: 1970
Release: 32 Jazz #32070
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1970, the year of this recording, was a mighty exploratory year for jazz. The shock waves of the Miles Davis bombshell, Bitches Brew, were strongly reverberating in open minds. But not every innovator had to plug-in their instrument in order to crackle electrically. Indeed, demonstrates on this live date just how alive and creative acoustic jazz could still be in that pivotal year of 1970. Brooks drives his all star quintet, which includes the grossly underrated Woody Shaw on trumpet, the heavy-weight George Coleman on tenor, the unstoppable Cedar Walton on piano, and the fluid Cecil McBee on bass.
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Date: 1986
Release: POLYDOR #829 417-2
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James Brown invented Funk with a capital F, and remains the unchallenged Godfather, the Funky President, Soul Brother #1. The world moves to the beat of a different drummer since he has busted his infamous moves across the planet’s surface. The JB cannon represents a vast catalogue of recordings—the mother lode of beats— a righteously funky legacy of grooves for us to soak in, sample, and quote.
James Brown’s Funky People compiles some of the best side-project recordings he made with his band, the JBs, during their early ’70s reign. It was a time when the funk was still young, before disco beats and over zealous producers conspired to gum up the Sex Machine with too much cheese and not enough soul. All tracks were originally recorded on James Brown‘s own People Records label in the early ’70s. Technically speaking, this is not an actual James Brown album, in so far as he is not the featured vocalist on any of the tracks.
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Date: 1994
Release: Columbia
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If Grace (and Jeff Buckley‘s premature death, for that matter) teaches us one lesson, it’s that music has the boundless potential to impassion performers and listeners alike! Buckley’s career as a solo artist started back in the early ’90s in New York’s smaller clubs and coffee houses. Word of his diverse and captivating performances—in which he deftly peppered sets of his own songs with those from artists as distinct as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and MC5—buzzed about town, garnering him an avid enough following to support the release of his solo EP Live at Sin E in 1993.
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Date: 1979
Release: EMI / IRS #13153
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While the albums that make up the Buzzcocks‘ sacred late-’70s trilogy (Another Music In A Different Kitchen, Love Bites, and A Different Kind Of Tension) are all must-hear masterpieces in their own right, the Buzzcocks were, first and foremost, the premier singles band of Britain’s early punk movement. Therefore, no ‘Cocks collection–hell, no record collection, period–can be complete without their A-sides compilation Singles Going Steady, which not only sounds as fresh in 2001–the year of the Manchester band’s 25th (!) anniversary–as it did in 1979, but in fact sounds much more vital than some bordering-on-parody works by such better-known punk peers as the Damned and (yes) the Sex Pistols.
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Date: August 1963 – August 15, 1972 (recording)
Release: Polydor #79872
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Without Bobby Byrd, the world might never have known James Brown. It was Byrd and Byrd alone who persuaded his family to sponsor Brown’s parole from the Georgia penal system in 1952, rescuing the troubled but talented singer from a life of bad breaks by launching his music career. Sensing a huge talent, Byrd brought Brown into his well-established vocal group, the Flames. Under Byrd’s brotherly guidance, Brown got his act together and turned it loose, taking over the Flames (which he would later rename James Brown And The Famous Flames) and eventually conquering the world.
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