Date: August 19, 1969 – February 6, 1970
Release: COLUMBIA #65570
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No other musician in the 20th Century explored the possibilities of music as fiercely as trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis. He frustrated critics and fans alike as he opened himself up to unexpected directions in musical thinking while continuously shaping and refining his remarkable skills on trumpet. Critics tried and tried to squeeze his musical journeys into a box called “jazz,” but Miles would have none of it. And then, in August of 1969, Miles decided he’d put all of us in an impenetrable box and dare us to break out.
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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 »
