December 2021
Tangerine Records TRC-2107
Format: CD
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
Let’s begin with a quiz: There are 99 individual performances on this extensive six-disc overview of singer-pianist Ray Charles’s career. How many of the songs do you think he composed?
October 2021
Gearbox Records 1571CD
Format: CD
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
If you followed popular music in the late ’60s and early ’70s, you likely remember the hype surrounding so-called supergroups. Bands like Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were touted as truly special things by the rock media.
August 2021
Blue Note B096C185JM
Format: 8 CDs
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
Like me, you probably have a few recordings you’ve played so many times you know every note, every nuance.
July 2021
BAG Production BAG018
Format: CD
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
I credit my father for indoctrinating me with a love for the clarinet. As a young man, long before my time, he immersed himself in the music of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw the way I would later cleave to Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman. And before either of those guitarists were making records, my father was filling my ears every Sunday morning with the sounds of Goodman, Shaw, Jimmy Dorsey, Woody Herman, and others who had made the clarinet the equivalent of the Fender Stratocaster or Gibson Les Paul in his day.
June 2021
Modern Recordings
Format: CD
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
In a less-fragmented musical landscape, composer-arranger Vince Mendoza might be a household name on the scale of Burt Bacharach or Henry Mancini. After all, the 59-year-old has won six Grammy Awards (and been nominated for a total of 34) and worked with stars like Björk, Elvis Costello, Sting, and Joni Mitchell. As it is, Mendoza’s reputation is largely confined to the jazz community, where he’s made his name by furthering so-called “third stream” music with the Metropole Orchestra and soloists like trumpeter Randy Brecker.
April 2021
ECM 2702
Format: CD
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
I’ve never completely bought into the idea of a distinctive “ECM Records sound,” by which is meant an austere, spacious, dry soundstage developed by label head Manfred Eicher for the artists he records. For one thing, the ECM catalog is far too broad, and the studios and engineers they employ far too diverse, for there to be any such uniformity. Another argument against the concept is that Eicher is too much a believer in capturing the true nature of artists to impose a soundstage on anyone. That’s not to say that he isn’t known for imposing his opinions on his artists, but they are more about artistry itself and not sonic aesthetics.
March 2021
Intakt 354
Format: CD
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
There’s a truism in music that well-trained classical musicians can’t improvise or swing enough to play jazz, and that jazz musicians who read well can perform the classics but can’t sound authentic playing folk music like country or blues. It’s not really a knock against musicians; you wouldn’t want a brain surgeon to replace your hip, either. The fact is, the deeper you go into a specialty, the more constrained you are.
February 2021
Edition EDN1168
Format: CD
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
If history tells us anything about what we’ve all been living through in the past year, it’s safe to predict that millions of words will be written about the lasting effects the pandemic and our various forms of isolation will have on how we live. One of the most thought-provoking observations I’ve heard directly came from the gifted young jazz pianist Christian Sands.
January 2021
Resonance 2048
Format: CD
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
Instrumental virtuosity can be a mixed blessing, even if some of us would put it in the category of “nice problem to have.”
December 2020
The Nels Cline Singers: Share the Wealth
Blue Note 0737079
Format: CD
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
Dave Douglas: Marching Music
Greenleaf Music 1078
Format: CD
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
Jimi Hendrix’s epochal “Machine Gun” in the time of Richard Nixon, the Clash’s unforgiving “Clampdown” in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Bruce Springsteen’s elegiac “Long Walk Home” in response to George W. Bush: musicians frequently have created some of their best work in response to autocratic leadership and social oppression. Those artists who employ vocals can easily make their opposition known; for composers who work in instrumental settings, it’s a higher bar.
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