Archives: Music Reviews

This one is a treasure. In the early 90s, smoky-voiced jazz singer Cassandra Wilson signed with Blue Note and released this stunning, spare, elegant album of mostly reinterpretations of blues & folk rock songs, including a sensitive and lovely resuscitation of Van Morrison's badly overplayed "Tupelo Honey", Joni Mitchell's "Black Crow", and, spectacularly, dark-as-midnight and entirely effective jazz nocturne renditions of two Robert Johnson songs—one of them being "Hellhound On My Trail", a song formerly claimed by Eric Clapton to be "uncoverable". She makes them all her own.

That's all I can say about this one. You just have to listen.

I've had a real soft spot for this obscure German epic since discovering it on some pirate music server decades ago. It might even have come from a Hotline server, it's been that long.

I suppose this album is considered by some to be psychedelia—and with the driving acoustic guitar acoustic guitar and Indian instruments, you can practically hear bell bottoms flapping in the breeze—or even krautrock due to its drawn-out, linear and insistent nature. But, besides the facts that krautrock was never this patchouli-scented, and that this came out in 1972 where psychedelia had been deader than a doornail for several years everywhere except Turkey, stylistically I consider "Crawling To Lhasa" to be less like those and closer in spirit, and even perhaps a direct acoustic precursor to, something like Magma's 1973 "Mekanïk Destruktïẁ Kommandöh". Like MDW, this album is almost just a single long rock raga, and…

Here we have something very unique. Composer Easley Blackwood programmed a synthesizer to use scales with different numbers of notes than western music's traditional 12 notes per octave, then wrote fairly conventional short classical compositions in these very unconventional pitches. I really find it a fascinating listen—what little I know of classical music theory is intricately bound to those 12 notes and the mathematical relationships between them, I don't know how you break the octave up into 13, 14, 19, 20, or more notes and still apply the same ideas. It's certainly dissonant, unmistakeably avant garde, but you can clearly hear well-executed classical harmonic, and contrapuntal ideas at work in these, Blackwood's fully intentional reinvention of traditional tonal music using completely new tones. On a rational level it just plain doesn't seem possible... it's like someone composing formal poetry in a foreign language, which still, somehow, makes perfect sense in…

Ornate, complex, breathtaking.

I was eating lunch in a sandwich joint up in Northbeach when I noticed the background music. Complex swing jazz compositions that would pivot off into jagged, squawking atonal horn stabs, momentarily droop into impressionistic piano melodies, or suddenly stop on a dime and pivot into classical-sounding passages before soon veering back. I had to ask the waiter what it was.

I feel like this is one of those albums that *had* to exist. It was out there somewhere, waiting, until Mingus discovered it and brought it to us. There's parts of it that are conventional—at least to the extent that Mingus's genius could be conventional—but as a whole, nothing else is quite like it.

I later read that Mingus considered this his best album. It makes sense. It's a real showstopper.

Now, here we have a treat. I found this album at Amoeba Music... a spoof of the album cover of Pink Floyd's "The Wall", with hay bales instead of bricks, made me too curious to pass it up. The sticker on the CD said, if memory serves, "For 20 years, a great bluegrass album was trapped inside a great rock & roll album. We set it free."

This works FAR better than it should, and—despite some occasional hokey drawled vocals that tax my suspension of disbelief—is a 100% enjoyable, if wholly improbable, reimagining of "The Wall" from start to finish, which absolutely succeeds as an extremely listenable bluegrass album.

Next time Luther Wright and The Wrongs toured, I was lucky to see them play at a very small club near me. I introduced myself to Luther after the show and he proved to be one of the most personable guys…

I'm going to try not to include too many albums for which no video is available, but this one is a favorite and deserves a mention.

One night in the late '90s I fell asleep listening to local radio. I was woken up a short time later by a live-in-the-studio set of very impressive smart, quirky pop. My instinct is to compare them to The Cars, who they sounded nothing like, but are reminiscent of in terms of quirky, intelligent pop songwriting with catchy melodies and great hooks. I had to know who it was, and as soon as the set ended and something else came on I called the radio station to ask. The DJ answered, I told him I loved it and needed to know what the hell I had just woken up to, and he told the band—the end of the conversation I heard went like this:…

An old GOAT (Girlfriend Onceupon A Time) who I dated for three weeks had this charming gem on cassette taped off a friend. Sonny Smith played around the Bay Area for a long time. Whether he's still playing, I don't know. You won't find a single video from this wonderful album online, although it turns up used on eBay and Amazon. That's the only way you'll hear it, other than coming to my house. My favorite song, "Let Me Be Your Baseball Player", as of this writing, ois, according to Google, only mentioned once on the entire internet. (It could be me, though... this has been happening to me a lot lately... it also just happened with "hoosemanacka".)

I went to see Sonny in San Francisco's Make Out Room in 2002 or 3. I chatted with my ex-roommate at the bar waited for the uninteresting Bob Dylan wannabe to finish…

I know next to nothing about Jasper & The Prodigal Suns, or this album. I believe these guys were from Atlanta, they palled around with G. Love & Special Sauce in the '90s, and that's about all I know. They used a similar chordal style and unvarnished guitar work to G. Love, but applied it to a ramshackle, jazzy sort of small-venue hip-hop rather than a bluesy sort, and to my ears might have had the same drummer. This album sounds like it was recorded live in the studio, and has, raggedy, at times extremely loose, down-to-earth feel and some good hooks. Always liked this one.

According to YouTube commenters, at one point this album was regularly available on Amazon for a penny. I found my copy in the cutout bin, too. It didn't belong there.

So obscure, most of the songs aren't on YouTube, none of my favorites for…

The Trio Organ Sonatas not among Bach's more popular works. He wrote them as homework practice for his son, Willhelm Friedemann Bach, sometime in the late 1720s. This recording was released on the ultra-cheap Naxos label, famous for releasing not particularly noteworthy classical recordings on cassette for like $3. All my classically trained friends, back when I still hung out with disreputable classical musicians, looked down their noses at it.

This is one of my favorite albums, full stop. Like it or don't. I'm not going to try to defend it.  I've heard other recordings of the Trio Organ Sonatas; there is none that I like as much. Something about this one is like magic: independent melody lines—played one with each hand and one with the organist's feet on the pedals—pulse and snake, laugh and skip and dance around each other as if they have a life of their own.…

Probably one of my top three favorite albums of all time. Mike Oldfield, stylistically and melodically my favorite guitarist of all time, has had decades-long success in Europe but never became widely known in America. He's best known here for his debut, "Tubular Bells", a truly strange and wonderful 45-minute instrumental recorded, incredibly, when he was 19 years old, and well-known for later being used as the creepy theme music to "The Exorcist", although it was not written as a soundtrack.

I do love the "Tubular Bells", but to me, "Hergest Ridge" is his quiet masterpiece. A very unusual instrumental tapestry of droning textures and odd but beautiful melodies, on which he played something like 18 rock and orchestral instruments himself, including numerous layers of quiet and highly processed electric guitars, and, just, one of those things that's hard to explain in words. It was written when he lived in…

Ah, my beloved "Red Queen To Gryphon Three". A singular all-instrumental album, reminiscent of the proggiest of prog rock, if only it had been invented in a parallel world where the popular music of the 1970s wasn't dominated by electric instruments. Formed by classically trained students of England's Royal College of Music, Gryphon was originally an erudite folk act playing renaissance music, and moved into prog rock without losing the flavor. Acoustic and orchestral instruments abound... there's still enough touches of electric guitar, organ and synthesizer to qualify it as rock, but it's just wonderfully full of acoustic guitar, english horn, recorder, etc., all played with formally-trained expertise. If, like Gene, you don't like prog rock, you will hate it, but fans of the folkier side of prog (Jethro Tull, Mike Oldfield's quieter moments, Steeleye Span) you should love it. I adore it.

Kind of an odd gem. This act was put together by Chess Records in 1967 as part of an effort to expand from their classic blues catalog into psychedelia, and features, floating ethereally in the background, a pre-fame Minnie Riperton (later known best for "Loving You") adding coloratura from the top of her 5-octave range, as well as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, not quite slumming it with some of the better pop orchestrations I've heard from that period. Distorted organ, fuzztone guitar, harpsichords, and sitars, you know the drill.

Mostly creative psychedelic covers of well-known songs, this album succeeds where a lot of similar efforts failed, by virtue of the overall talent of the people involved, and the imaginativeness they weren't afraid to embrace. I never would have guessed that Sam and Dave's "Soul Man" could work as an shaggy psychedelic chamber-rock freakout, but they pull it off, along with…