Vinyl Music

March 2024

Craft Recordings / Contemporary Records / Acoustic Sounds Series CR00706
Format: LP

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

Jazz saxophonist Art Pepper’s recording and performing life was often interrupted by periods of incarceration for drug offences. Pepper was a heroin addict; he finished recording Smack Up in October 1960, and soon after was arrested for trying to score the drug. It was his third offense, so he was sentenced to 20 years at California’s notorious San Quentin prison. He would record one more session in November (Intensity, released in 1963) before starting his jail term. He was out within four years, but was in and out of prison for most of the ’60s for parole violations. He didn’t record again as a leader until 1975.

Read more …

February 2024

Craft Recordings CR00683
Format: LP

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

In 1953, the original release of Jazz at Massey Hall on Debut Records listed Charlie Parker as “Charlie Chan.” Knowledgeable jazz fans probably knew that Parker’s common-law wife, Beverly Berg, was known as Chan Parker. They also might have recognized that the alto player pictured on the left side of the album cover was Parker, although the photo does not show his face. Parker was with another label and Debut could not release the album with his name listed on the cover.

Read more …

October 2023

Reveal
Craft Recordings CR00548
Format: LP

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

Accelerate
Craft Recordings CR00550
Format: LP

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

Drummer Bill Berry left R.E.M. in 1997, due to health issues. The group carried on as a trio for five more albums, bringing in other drummers for sessions and touring. Craft Recordings has reissued R.E.M.’s last four albums on vinyl, making them available in that format for the first time since their original release dates. I’ll be looking at the vinyl reissues of Reveal (originally released in 2001) and Accelerate (2008). Kevin Gray of Cohearent Audio cut the lacquers for the new pressings using Bob Ludwig’s digital masters, and the LPs were manufactured by Memphis Record Pressing.

Read more …

July 2023

Contemporary Records / Craft Recordings / Acoustic Sounds CR00594
Format: LP

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

Bassist Leroy Vinnegar was born in Indianapolis and moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s, where he appeared on albums by nearly every jazz musician who passed through LA or was based there. He played on sessions with Stan Getz, Benny Carter, Kenny Dorham, and many others. He was the bassist on popular trio sessions with Shelly Manne and André Previn, including My Fair Lady (1956), a Contemporary Records release that was one of the label’s biggest sellers. He played on another big seller, Swiss Movement, a 1969 live collaboration between Les McCann and Eddie Harris.

Read more …

June 2023

Contemporary Records / Craft Recordings / Acoustic Sounds CR00390
Format: LP

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

André Previn’s long career included well-regarded work as a pianist, composer, and conductor in classical music, film soundtracks, and jazz. Previn appeared on many recordings for Contemporary Records in the late 1950s, both as a solo pianist and in a trio setting, and recorded three Broadway-themed albums with drummer Shelly Manne and bassist Red Mitchell. Manne himself recorded albums of show tunes for Contemporary, on which he was the bandleader, with Previn on piano and Leroy Vinnegar on bass. Manne’s My Fair Lady (1956) was the first of those albums. It was so popular that Contemporary encouraged him and Previn to continue making records consisting of tunes from various shows.

Read more …

July 2022

Columbia Records / Legacy Recordings 19439955761
Format: 2 LPs

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

As everyone knows, life seldom deals you a second hand. Snooze, lose, and all that.

Read more …

January 2022

Columbia Records/Legacy 19439900841
Format: 2 LPs

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

I like a band with some tension in it.

Say what you will about the music made by artists who truly like one another—even after touring together in a cramped vehicle for weeks and suffering through the endless hassles of life on the road—I’ll take the music of musicians like Ray and Dave Davies, or Sam Moore and Dave Prater, people who could barely tolerate one another offstage but could create magic together once they faced an audience. From that tension comes great art.

Read more …

November 2021

Impulse! Records B0034291-01
Format: 2 LPs

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

Pianist McCoy Tyner was only 26 when he left John Coltrane’s band in 1965, and interviews with him over the next 55 years, prior to his death in 2020, rarely failed to touch on Coltrane and the saxophonist’s towering legacy. It seems no one was inquisitive enough—and I include myself here; I interviewed him twice—to ask him if Coltrane had performed his cornerstone suite, “A Love Supreme,” more than a single time in 1965, at the Antibes jazz festival in France, and one other time at a Brooklyn fundraiser. It was just a given, and a large part of the myth surrounding the composition, that the saxophonist never returned to his masterpiece after those two occasions.

Read more …

Blue Note Records BST 84338
Format: LP

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

The true geniuses of contemporary music—Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, to name just three—have had a tendency to flame out like supernovas. Like the massive astronomical objects that become supernovas, these musicians have also tended, at their peak, to obscure anyone else in their immediate orbit. From bassist Tommy Potter—at Parker’s side for his finest recordings—to bassist Noel Redding—one of Hendrix’s two closest collaborators—those who play alongside the biggest stars have struggled to establish their own musical identities.

Read more …

August 2020

Craft Recordings CR00281
Format: LP

Musical Performance

Sound Quality

Overall Enjoyment

Take every story of wild rock stars, rockabilly cats, and legendary jazz over-indulgers, and set them all aside. No one -- not Keith Moon, Jerry Lee Lewis, or Charlie Parker -- could hold a candle to pianist James Booker for combining outrageous behavior and audacious musicianship.

Read more …