Album Reviews

Date: 1981
Release: Motown #37463-5405-2
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I’ll never forgive MC Hammer for tampering with Rick James’s “Super Freak.” I’m not a Hammer hater. His debut remains in my CD changer. But I hate “U Can’t Touch This.” Hammer’s reworking of Rick James’s seminal “Super Freak” stripped the song of its ghetto edge, replacing Rick’s whooping vocals with Hammer’s jumbled, watered down raps. It doesn’t matter that “U Can’t Touch This” broke sales records, that song simply can’t touch the original. “Super Freak” appears on James’ 1981 masterwork, Street Songs, which Motown Records has recently reissued in an expanded package, which includes 12″ mixes of “Super Freak” and “Give It To Me Baby,” as well as an additional CD’s worth of material from Rick’s 1981 performance at the Long Beach Arena.

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Date: March 16 – May 22, 1970 (recording)
Release: CTI/Sony Legacy #61616
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Antonio Carlos Jobim is to Brazilian music what Duke Ellington is to American jazz—an innovative, prolific, and sublime pianist / songwriter whose art has come to symbolize a certain time and place. Influenced as much by the cool sounds of ’50s West Coast jazz as by the melodies of Claude Debussy and the rhythms of the Brazilian samba, Jobim wrote the songs that, when performed by the likes of Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, drove the global bossa nova craze of the’60s.

A subtle pianist and guitarist with a soft gravelly voice and a penchant for writing seductive melodies, Jobim always lived in the shadows of those who covered his songs and turned them into hits. While it was Jobim’s “Desafinado” that first put bossa nova on the map in 1962 (when Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd scored a surprise hit covering the song), the man behind the music lived in relative obscurity until he was “rediscovered” shortly before his death in the mid-’90s.

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Date: September 3-4, 1966 (recording)
Release: Atlantic #SD 1482
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“The purpose of art is mystery.”

—René Magritte

Not even relegated to the shadowy status of cult figure, Jamaican-born alto saxophonist Joe Harriott remains virtually unknown today. A key influence in the British free-jazz movement of the early ’60s, Harriott’s adventurous style earned him unfavorable comparisons with Ornette Coleman, even though he was far more boppishly swinging than his volatile American counterpart ever was. An unsung pioneer in the union of Eastern and Western music, Harriott began experimenting with Indian musical forms in the mid ’60s, incorporating its distinctive structures and rhythmic patterns into a jazz framework.

Harriott soon merged his working quintet with a five-piece Indian ensemble headed up by Calcutta composer, conductor, and violin master (he played in the London Philharmonic) John Mayer, co-leading this Indo-jazz “double quintet” until his untimely death in 1973. While the Joe Harriott-John Mayer Double Quintet certainly did not invent the mixing of jazz andIndian music (Ravi Shankar and Bud Shank were doing it in 1961), they were the very first group to use the term “fusion” in identifying their sound (don’t blame them…they only gave the genre its F-word name, not its derogatory connotation). Artists of the highest order, they were able to fully evoke the mystery of the East within a solid jazz context, a feat few contemporary jazz and world musicians have matched.

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Date: Aug 16, 1971
Release: Prestige 10035
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As a teenage Jimi Hendrix fanatic, I discovered What It Is by sheer luck. Although typical of the early ‘70s Prestige look, the album cover caught my pre-jaundiced eye with its angular shot of Jones wailing on his huge guitar, a look of pure pleasure on his face. I figured, hey, this guy rocks(!)…and Hendrix liked jazz…and its from that same time period…and…uh…the guy’s got a cool name…. So I bought the damn thing. Lucky me. Little did I know that this small purchase would help spark an expensive life-long obsession to seek out all equally great but obscure musical gems (and later, to turn that obsession into a profit-free website). A milestone in my musical self-education, I had really no idea that jazz could sound quite like this.

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Date: 2002
Release: Daptone #1
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Summertime is almost fully upon us, and it’s time to find some loud, sweaty music for all the barbecues and beach days the season brings. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I give you Miss Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings!

Ok, so I arrived late to the Dap Dippin’ party. Released in 2002, I didn’t check out Sharon Jones until she was recommended to us by a hip couple on vacation in Palm Springs this past Christmas. Always skeptical of music recommendations from strangers (no matter how hip), I casually previewed Jones on iTunes for all of two minutes before I succumbed and bought the whole damn thing on Amazon. Maybe it was James Brown’s passing, but Jones and her Kings filled a void. With a voice somewhere between Bettye LaVette and Ann Peebles, and the brassy funk-soul rhythms of the four Dap-Kings (now famous for backing Amy Winehouse), Jones channels the past in her songs of love, loss, and righteous soul power on an album that could be a lost volume of Funky People.

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Date: March 6, 2001 (release)
Release: Astralwerks #29072
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Consistent with my post break-up habit of musical masochism, I’ve recently been over-playing Quiet Is The New Loud, encouraging its melancholy melodies to lodge themselves in my heart like salt on an open wound. Instead of letting my old punk records work their healing magic, I keep wallowing in the sadness of morbidly introspective artists like Nick Drake, Neil Halstead, and the Norwegian duo, Kings of Convenience.

Quiet Is The New Loud—it’s almost pathetic how perfectly this album title describes the dominant trend in my listening habits. As I get older, I’ve noticed the volume knob on my stereo progressively turning in the wrong direction (to the delight of my neighbors), even as the music itself has become gentler and more polite. Ten years ago I’d have trashed this record as unpardonably toothless and sissy-sweet, but now it strikes a chord. I’m not afraid to admit it—I’ve grown soft in my not-so-old age.

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Date: 1965
Release: Essential #483
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Mod-rockers from the mid-60s, the Kinks understood how to crank out three-minute pop songs that were as catchy as Beatlemania. While the Davies Brothers were no match for Lennon/McCartney or even Jagger/Richards, they definitely put a little of fire under the feet of their rivals that kept them from getting too complacent. Their classic “All Day And All Of The Night,” opens the album with punk-sounding guitar riffs and sexually-charged lyrics that point the way towards the future of Rock and Punk. The album’s next smash hit, “Tired Of Waiting For You,” demonstrates why the Kinks unique 60s sound has remained so influential and appealing.

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Date: November 22, 1968 (recording)
Release: Castle #481
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Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks once desperately, memorably sang of "nostalgia for an age yet to come," expressing a yearning for a simpler, happier time that actually never really existed. Now, Shelley may be one the finest pop lyricists the U.K. ever spawned, but it was a previous British generation’s staggeringly gifted songsmith who best captured this sense of bittersweet longing and loss of innocence.

That man was the genteel, smarmy-charmy Ray Davies, who in the Kinks‘ jaunty songs pined intensely for the romanticized, storybook Merry Olde England of his boyhood. But while his seemingly rosy-spectacled odes to the Golden Age Of Britain were populated with quirky, Dickensian characters and self-consciously clever anecdotes, it wasn’t all tea and crumpets and cricket games in Ray’s imaginary world, oh no. Read more »

Date: August 28, 1972
Release: 32 JAZZ #32094
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An extraordinarily gifted altoist, Eric Kloss first appeared on the scene at the age of 16, when his debut record won him critical acclaim as a blind child prodigy. By the time of this recording, the 23-year-old Kloss had lived up to his early promise, growing as an open-minded musician with experience playing with such jazz heavy-weights as Jaki Byard, Booker Ervin, Jack DeJohnette, and Chick Corea.

One, Two, Free is an avant-garde album of often funky music, with its strong rhythms rooted in the driving bass lines of Miles Davis-veteran Dave Holland and the vintage Fender Rhodes sounds of Ron Thomas. Kloss and guitarist Pat Martino stretch imaginatively on the 18 minute title track (seamlessly divided into three parts), crafting a memorable original that approaches the electric intensity of Miles Davis‘ work from the same era.

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Date: 1971 (release)
Release: MCA #549382
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Fela Kuti was the Nigerian born purveyor of funky tribal beats which continue to shake the world’s foundations. A recent casualty of the AIDS virus ravaging all of Africa, Kuti lived and played hard. Like Bob Marley, his music had strong consciousness raising power mixed into its heavy afro-funk rhythms. His political messages were not lost on the Nigerian military dictatorship he often sang about, and Kuti was imprisoned on several occasions. Still, he never lost sight of the fact that the music was as important as the message, and his bands were always tight and talented enough to muster much groove.

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