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Album Reviews
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(166 reviews)
Date: September 17, 1970 (recording)
Release: Prestige #24182
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With his towering physique and monstrous chops, Charles “The Burner” Earland dominated the jazz-organ bars once scattered across the cities of the “Chitlins Circuit”. From the late-60′s through the early-80′s, Earland gigged heavily throughout the black urban ghettos of the North, South and Midwest, conquering tough to please crowds with the blistering inferno of his fingers on the keys. It was in these rollicking live settings that Earland’s crowd-pleasing chops burned their brightest. As former Earland reedman Roy Nathanson told me shortly after the organist’s death in 1999,
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Date: August 19, 1969 – February 6, 1970
Release: COLUMBIA #65570
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I am here to report on a completely undocumented supernatural tragedy. At some unknown moment in the last thirty years, a violent rip in the Soul-Funk Continuum allowed The Best of Earth, Wind & Fire, Volume One to take root in everyone’s CD collection and sucked every other Earth, Wind & Fire recording into oblivion. Musicologists are already reacting with horror at the discovery, fully aware that a single-disc best-of package, no matter how jammed with huge pop-funk grooves, is a scientifically inadequate representation of a superfunk supernova like Earth, Wind & Fire. How will they account for the deep, delicious album tracks on hit-spawning discs like Spirit and I Am? Who will answer for the solid, sprawling jazz/funk excursions of Open Our Eyes or Last Days and Time?
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Date: December 19 – 21, 1966
Release: RCA 66551-2
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Before it spilled out onto the world, Duke Ellington‘s music existed in an inaccessible world of creative genius, a solitary realm deep inside his soul where uncharted sounds swirled wildly. His gift lay in his ability to move inside himself, explore, and return from solitude to forcefully express his inner musical visions. Duke was on intimate terms with his soul, and he understood how to conjure up emotional landscapes that could be felt by anyone else with hearts and ears. He didn’t simply commit his ideas to paper, but wrote out parts with the individual voices of his musical partners in mind. He knew how to get the very best out of saxophonists Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves, how to push and direct them so that they could flower in the fertile realm of his ideas.
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Date: 1978
Release: Point #536847
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It’s August 18, 1969, and Jimi Hendrix takes the stage playing the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock. In doing so, he puts the entire tenor of his times through his guitar. You can hear it: Vietnam. Civil rights. Riots. People dying in the streets. People dying in a far off land. Now compare this to a performance of the Boston Pops done that same year for the Fourth of July. It’s the same song, right? So why do we remember the Woodstock performance and not the Boston Pops? It is because music moved on. It moved beyond the sheer recitation of notes on a page into intangible qualities of texture. Through distortion, chorus, flanging, and a myriad of other guitar tricks, you had for the first time in music, synthetic sounds that directly approximated natural ones.
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Date: June 25, 1961
Release: Riverside #3RCD44432
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Ah…Bill Evans. Everybody loves Bill Evans, right? But who was he really? Clean-cut, mild-mannered, Clark Kentishly bespectacled with track marks up and down his arms, he tapped out aching incantations to bewitch us forever. An impenetrably enigmatic guy, Bill Evans the man remains irrelevant, a messenger for something bigger than his own biography. So do yourself a favor and forget about what people have to say about Mr. Bill. Just turn down the lights and let the music do its thing.
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Date: Sept 1963 – Oct 29, 1964 (recording)
Release: Verve #9210
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“Of all the people I knew, Gil Evans was one of the only ones who could pick up on what I was thinking musically…a person is lucky if he’s got one Gil Evans in his life, someone close enough to you to pull your coattail when something’s going wrong. Because who knows what I would have done or become if I hadn’t had someone like Gil to remind me?”
-Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography
Those who only know Gil Evans though his collaborations with Miles Davis will be astounded when they discover The Individualism of Gil Evans. The five recording sessions that went into the making of this album yielded music as compelling as anything Evans created with Miles. And that’s no minor feat, considering just how instrumental the trumpet playing genius was in helping Evans push the limits of jazz orchestration on such classics as Sketches Of Spain and Porgy & Bess. Forever known by his partnership with Miles, The Individualism of Gil Evans was the only album that the composer/pianist recorded as a leader during the period of 1961-1968, years when jazz clubs were closing, but, as evidenced here, the music was far from dying.
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Date: 1972 (recording)
Release: Collectables # 5526
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“My music was party music. I wanted the people to get the feeling of the music as a party. I wanted it always to feel like it was recorded live in some place. That’s why we have that kind of sound.”
–Bill Curtis, founder and drummer of The Fatback Band
One of the best-kept secrets of the early ‘70s, Let’s Do It Again is a classic feel-good party album loaded with some of the tightest instrumental funk jams around. Released in 1972, the album gave The Fatback Band its first successful single, “Street Dance.” An infectious in-the-pocket vamp that crosses the danceable grooves of the Meters and the JB’s with the driving Memphis soul of the Stax Horns, “Street Dance” hits its delirious high with a funk-jazz flute solo by future Charles Mingus band member George Adams.
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Date: 1970
Release: WESTBOUND
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One of the few instances where a band’s name totally describes its sound. With their 1970 self-titled debut album, we hear the raw funk rhythms of the Meters collide with the psychedelic soul sounds of Jimi Hendrix, giving rise to the musical revolution that was Funkadelic. A raw and nasty musical manifesto loudly expressing the madness of King George Clinton, founding father to the “extraterrestrial brothers” of Funkadelic and Parliament. This album is designed to answer the one burning question it asks in the title of the first track: “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?” Definitive bits of Clinton’s strange take on the universe are to be found throughout this hard-grooving acid-trip of an album, such as “soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper,” and “I got a thing / you got a thing / everybody’s got a thing.”
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Date: March 24, 1971 (release)
Release: Polygram International #548429
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“Ugliness has more going for it than beauty. It endures.”
Serge Gainsbourg
“The man who looked like a louche turtle cross-bred with a dissipated, chain-smoking wolf was also a singer, songwriter, actor, painter, cutting-edge composer, Eurovision Song Contest winner, novelist, screnwriter, film director, provocateur, sentimentalist, populist, intellectual, and the single most important person in the history of French pop music.”
Sylvie Simmons, Mojo Magazine
I wish I could speak better French, so that I might fully understand the words on Histoire de Melody Nelson. According to my trusted French friends, Gainsbourg’s lyrics are pure poetry, Read more »
Date: 1989
Release: Warner #25885
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“Without doubt one of the most beautiful and soulful recordings I have ever heard.”
–Brian Eno
I Will Not Be Sad In This World is an album whose gently defiant title should become our mantra in these times of terror. In the days immediately after September 11, 2001, my stereo fell silent as the TV mercilessly blared out its cacophony of bad news, brutalizing us with images of a new world. We held the Medusa’s head up to the mirror, and refused to accept that the image reflected might simply be a human one. In an exhausting marathon, I remained glued to the tube, wondering what in the hell was going on, wondering what happened to love, wondering what I’d tell my children someday–if I lived that long. In the panic, I had abandoned music–my love, my religion. For four days I lived without it, not realizing what I was doing to myself, until finally I heard that first healing note. I turned to this record, and in a brilliant moment, found serenity.
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