This is a Recording

"Marian Montgomery sings happy, upbeat, swingin' love songs that proclaim Lovin' is Livin' and Livin' is Lovin:" so begin the sleevenotes to this 1964 album, the singer's third and last for Capitol Records. How much say, if any, she would have had in selecting this repertoire I don't know, but she acquits herself well in it, even if there are other singers with a surer touch on simperingly salacious numbers like 'Teach Me Tonight' and 'Do It Again'. On songs like 'I Wanna Be Loved' and the closing track 'Love is an Old Maid's Dream' she seems surer-footed. Her voice is beautifully rich contralto with a husky timbre. The arrangements are nicely varied - some are blues-flavoured and others latin-inflected, but the prevailing theme is of swinging big-band jazz. Here and there perhaps it wouldn't have hurt for the tempo to have been a little less brisk. It's not an outstanding album, but a very enjoyable one when...

At the PDSA charity shop in Thornbury a few years ago I spotted a 10" record with an orangey-red sleeve on which the title and artist (so I presumed) were spelled out in Cyrillic text. I recognised the Melodiya logo on the cover: that being the USSR's state-run record label. I already owned a few Melodiya records, and on the prior occasions when I'd bought LPs with titles in Russian it hadn't worked out badly: one being a fine performance of Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony; the other an interesting compilation of balalaika music. My weak recollection of the Russian alphabet failed me in the moment, but, as the record was only £1, I thought I'd buy it anyway. This wasn't such a successful purchase: I'd acquired some performances of Государственный Гимн Союза Советских Социалистических Республик - that is, the State Anthem of the Soviet Union, and of 'The Internationale' (Интернационал). Side A begins with the Anthem sung by the Bolshoi Theatre Chorus,...

  One of the songs I heard on the radio in 2015 that caught my ear was 'Woeful Small Town' by Faerground Accidents. I'd grown up in such a town, and the song struck a resonant chord with me. I would have acquired a copy, but it was only available as a download, or on a CD-R, whereas their debut single 'We Hate the Same Things' / 'Back in Town', was obtainable on an inexpensive 7" piece of bright pink vinyl courtesy of John Robb's 'Louder Than Bombs' label, so I bought that instead. Fortunately, I liked 'We Hate the Same Things' too. Although clearly not a high-budget production, there was a propulsive beat and poignantly witty lyrics (e,g, "I've got too many demons / and too many people with opinions about my demons"), delivered with aplomb by singer Bomar Faery. Fans optimistically compared them to the likes of Pulp and Suede, and I thought they had great potential. Evidently, though, the obstacles to success were too...

Jean-Baptiste Forqueray (1699-1782) was a virtuoso violist who, in 1747, published a set of compositions for viola da gamba and accompaniment, ostensibly by his late father Antoine, who had also been an esteemed virtuoso. Forqueray fils subsequently published the same pieces in arrangements for the harpsichord, and two suites of these re-arranged pieces constitute the main meat of this CD.  The specifics of the works' attribution are altogether unclear. Jean-Baptiste took sole credit for a handful of the pieces, and for all of their 'continuo' bass lines, but, it has been argued that the majority of the music may have been his. Father and son had had a difficult relationship, to say the least, and Forqueray jr .'s motives when posthumously disseminating his father's work need not have been pure homage. Aside from that, it has been suggested that the harpsichord arrangements may have been the handiwork of Mme Marie-Rose Forqueray, Jean-Baptiste's second wife, wh...

There are 246 versions of Van Morrison's Moondance listed on Discogs, and I'm not sure mine is quite an exact match for any of them. I could of course submit it as a 247th variant, but it's just one of a plethora of subtly-different German-pressed re-issues of uncertain vintage, one of those where Side 1, Track 1 is given incorrectly as 'Stoned Me' on the sleeve and differently wrongly on the label as 'And I Stoned Me'. I don't recall exactly when or where I acquired it, but there's every chance it's one of Derek's records. Derek, I gather, is the proprietor of a London record shop, who, once a month or so, drops off some excess stock at St. Mary St. Collectables in Chepstow, where one can buy one album for £4 or three for £10. Presumably Derek must have some connection with Chepstow - otherwise, why would he do this? Whatever his motives, he's been doing it for at least 7 years without there having been any change in the asking price, f...

London-born pianist George Shearing and his quintet recorded a number of albums in collaboration with guest vocalists on which accompaniments were mixed with instrumentals. Among these was The Swingin's Mutual (1961) where the featured singer was Nancy Wilson, at that point a rising star with two albums under her belt. Shearing and his band (piano, vibes, guitar, bass & drums) had a restrained and elegant sound, with Wilson's voice exuding a cool sophistication that complemented it very well. Often heard as an instumental, 'On Green Dolphin Street' is sung here, with its lacklustre lyrics (which hardly matter, given the quality of its melody) delivered beautifully. Shearing's own 'Lullaby of Birdland', meanwhile, is among the instrumental numbers. Wilson's next album was a similar collaboration, this time with Julian 'Cannonball' Adderley and his quintet, which, to my taste, has the edge on this one, if only by the narrowest of margins ...

I first spotted the electronic composer/musician Kiyoshi Izumi's name in the credits of OOIOO's album Feather Float . Since then I've heard a fair bit of his varied & intriguing output on-line, but Protocol A from 2004 is the only album of his I own. As far as I know, an  EP ( Effect Rainbow ) on the Rephlex label has been the only music of his released outside of Japan. From the information on Discogs it seems he's still active, having released a quaduple CD under his own name in 2016; and albums under the aliases of 'aSymMedley' and 'Miraigamill' in 2011 and 2019 respectively. I've no idea what intentions lie behind this music, but the track titles, given in a sort of cyberpunk English - 'Code Vortex', 'Strata Sensys', 'Graflicker', etc. - have perhaps influenced my perception of it as urban rather than pastoral; nocturnal rathar than sunlit; a music of experience rather than of innocence. There are some jazz-like flavo...

  A bird - part chicken, part peacock, part raptor - hovers, as if poised to attack. What that has to do with 'Come on Over', which, I believe, was Royal Blood's fourth single, I don't know, but it makes for a striking image. By 2014, when this was released, I was back in the long-lost habit of listening to the radio, and getting a little less out-of-touch with what was musically new & notable. At the same time, I had very little money with which to buy music, but, on occasion, would splash out on a 7" single or two in order to get at least a few of my favourite songs of the day. 'Come On Over' was one of those, and I still like the song now, even though my tastes have drifted off in other directions in the interim. The B-side ('You Want Me') is pretty good too. I'm less fond of the band's later work. The median value of the single on Discogs is currently £25, so it has (theoretically) appreciated in value since I bought it.

This 1997 compilation CD is a great idea, and well put-together, but I've found I'm not its ideal audience. It comprises jazz-flavoured themes and soundtrack cues from a variety of crime-related movies & TV shows from the mid-to-late '50s and early '60s. Some pieces are lifted from original soundtrack albums, while others are reworkings: for example the Peter Gunn theme on it isn't Henry Mancini's original, but a version by Quincy Jones & his band.  While the main title and lead character themes included have some of the most pointed hooks, the emphasis in them on blaring brass can be a little wearisome. The discs's three opening tracks are all in this vein and collectivly give an impression akin to that of watching three sets of opening credits in succession. There is more variety as the album continues, but there's a strident edge to it throughout which doesn't fit well with by own late-evening listening habits: I can't unwind to it. M...

I didn't take the time to listen though all of Beethoven's piano sonatas until I was in my mid-forties. Some I already knew, but I was unfamiliar with the majority. I found I liked more of them than not, which led me to ponder acquiring a box-set of the things. The one that was on offer at Amazon at an advantageous price at the right time was the not-quite-complete nine-disc set performed by Emil Gilels, who'd recorded twenty-seven of the thirty-two sonatas before his sudden death in 1985. I'd seen Gilels' name mentioned as being among the finest of 20th-Century pianists, and knew his Beethoven cycle was highly-rated by many aficionados. It's not hard for even a know-nothing listener like me to be impressed by his playing on such old chestnuts as the 'Appassionata' or 'Waldstein' sonatas (nos. 21 & 23 respectively), and, more generally, he seldom fails to please when the notes are flying thick & fast. In no. 14 ('Moonlight'), the ...

For a time in 2007/08, with the Japanese economy depressed and the yen weak, while the UK economy was puffed up with misplaced optimism, and the pound infeasibly strong, it was possible for me to order items from amazon.co.jp at fairly reasonable prices, even accounting for intercontinental delivery. This happily coincided with a burgeoning interest of mine in Japanese music: I had just learned about The Boredoms and OOIOO, and, having bought what was readily available of theirs in the Anglosphere, I was keen to see what else I might obtain from Japan, and to try listening to some other more or less like-minded artists. Among my first purchases was the album Mon by 'space rock supergroup' Rovo, and, while I enjoyed the music on it (lengthy instrumental pieces with Katsui Yuji's electric violin the leading 'voice'), the CD itself was 'bricked', making it wearisome to listen to. Even so, when their next album Nuou was released in '08, I bought that too -...

Sassy Sings is a 1966 compilation LP collecting tracks by the great Sarah Vaughan recorded in 1946 and '47. Given those dates, it's not surprising that the sound quality isn't the best. 'September Song', which in all likelihood would have sounded exquisite to those lucky few present at the time, presents those of us in posterity with a need to make allowances for something that sounds like it was taped in a subway tunnel. The closing track - 'The One I Love (Belongs To Somebody Else)' - gives one the impression that the microphones were in a room across the hall from the one where the musicians were playing. The recording quality of some of the other tracks isn't so bad, but the fidelity is never high. Moreover, my copy of the record is hardly in pristine condition, and the pops & crackles from it don't help matters. Despite all that, some of the tremendous amount of light & warmth in these performances does still frequently shine through. V...

Here is another attempt at starting a blog. A few weak attempts over the last decade & more have come to nothing. The idea this time is that I'll start writing a little about LPs and CDs from my collection, as suggested by the 'Random Item' button at Discogs. Up first is Happy Birthday to Me by The Muffs. I now have a copy of the 2017 issue from Omnivore Recordings on white vinyl, but I first bought this album on CD, not so long after its release some twenty years earlier. My recollection is of picking it up in Birmingham, where I'd sometimes stop briefly while travelling by train from Tamworth or Nuneaton back to Cardiff. I would have first listened to it on my 'Discman' while reading some magazines: such quaintly dated pastimes now. I was already a Muffs fan, and a proud owner of Blonder and Blonder , and this album was in no way a disappointment: both were well-loved, and well-travelled - and both CDs ended up badly scratched with their cases broken, hen...