This is a Recording

I was delighted and a little surprised to hear a harp in the mix of the opening tracks on Makaya McCraven's 2018 album Universal Beings , and looked up the musician responsible: Brandee Younger. I watched and enjoyed several YouTube videos featuring her playing solo and as part of a quartet. It seemed her own recordings weren't readily available in the UK at that point, but when Force Majeure (a collaboration with her partner, bassist Dezron Douglas) came out in 2020 I was eager to listen.  It's an album that grew out of a series of (I think) Facebook videocasts from their New York apartment in the early months of the pandemic, under the title 'brunch in the crib with Brandee and Dezron'. So it's domestic music-making but for public consumption, and serves as a record of that strange time and the ingenious ways some musicians found to reach out and find an (often captive) audience. It's also a beautiful album with tremendous charm, and vividly-recorded too....

It took me years to figure out that, as a general rule, my preference was for chamber music over orchestral music; trios, quartets & quintets over concertos and symphonies. As with most general rules, however, there are exceptions, notably when it comes to the works of Jean Sibelius. The Finn wrote a good deal of undistiguished chamber and salon music, but, given a bigger band to play with, he could work wonders. I went through a Sibelius phase around 15-20 years ago, collecting several CDs of his music, and gaining an appreciation for such justly-popular pieces as the 'Karelia Suite' the 5th Symphony, and 'Tapiola'. The only Sibelius LP I currently have is this 1975 recording by the USSR Radio and Television Large Symphony Orchestra performing Symphones 3 & 5, with that man Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting. It was one of half a dozen classical albums I picked up at the Oxfam shop in Thornbury last autumn. I'd previously had another version of the 5th on vi...

Morphine are another of the many bands and artists I first heard on the radio - in their case my initial exposure would have been the tracks 'Super Sex' and 'Honey White', ca.  '95 or so, promoting their third album Yes . Did I buy any Morphine albums on cassette? Probably: but not, I think, Cure For Pain , which I believe I've only ever owned on CD. My copy is no longer in its original Rykodisc green-tinted jewel-box, which must have suffered a fatal mishap at some point. Released in the apparent trough between the crests of the Grunge and Britpop waves, Cure For Pain sounds like it was drawn from some other ocean altogether. That might be partially attributable to singer & bassist Mark Sandman being half a generation older than most of his musical contemporaries. The blend of baritone sax & bass was never going to be to everyone's taste, but I'm among those who like how they kept it all down low. For all their unique atmosphere, and the excell...

Thanks to his day-job as a research chemist (among other commitments), Alexander Borodin wasn't the most prolific of composers, and this 3CD set suffices to include all of his chamber works. It's a 2009 issue on the budget Brilliant Classics label of recordings made in the mid-'90s. The performers are The Moscow Trio and The Moscow String Quartet, with a further four musicians helping out here & there. None of the players are famous enough that I recognise their names, but all are highly accomplished. The recordings themselves are excellent too. The majority of the works are early ones, written when Borodin was in his twenties. According to Malcolm MacDonald's booklet notes, the String Quintet in F minor on disc 2 is among his first serious compositions. It, like a few of the other pieces, was never fully finished. There are only two movements of a String Sextet in D minor, and the Piano Trio in D has three movements, but, seems to be lacking a fourth to serve as a ...

On hearing their fascinating track 'Winterland' on the radio just over two years ago, I immediately looked up Northwest on-line and saw it was part of their then recently-issued second album II . Unsurprisingly, that was the follow-up to a debut release called I , which had come out in 2018. Not much later I ordered both albums on CD direct from their Bandcamp page . Both discs came signed and inscribed with handwritten messages. Northwest are a Spanish duo (Ignacio Simón & Mariuca García-Lomas) who, I gather, were based in the UK for most of the period in which these albums were made. While their first record blended electronic and acoustic instrumentation, this one uses mostly the latter, with the pair helped out my a supporting cast of eight other musicians. Strings and clarinet feature prominently, as do piano and harmonium. There are drums on some tracks, but it doesn't feel much like rock'n'roll or jazz, and it's adorned with classically-inspired flour...

Naruyoshi Kikuchi's 'Dub Sextet' is a conventional jazz quintet (tenor sax, trumpet, piano, bass & drums) augmented by a sixth member, Pardon Kimura, who is credited as providing the dub. Kimura's contribution seems to entail moments where reverberating echo has been added; others where blooping oscillators come in; and others still where the acoustic sounds break up into glitchy electronic static, etc. It's not obvious to me which, if any, of those effects were applied 'live', or if they were all varieties of studio post-processing. In any case, they strike me more as decorations than as structurally-integral parts of the music. I wouldn't imagine the album would have sounded radically different if it had been a dub-less quintet performance. The musicianship is excellent: Kikuchi is the saxophonist, leader and principal composer; Shinpei Ruike on trumpet is no lesser player; and drummer Tamaya Honda is terrific, often threatening to steal the show...

There are many more famous and - by virtually all measures - objectively better 19th-century concertos than Giovanni Bottesini's 1853 'Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra in B Minor', but this relatively obscure piece has brought me more pleasure than Beethoven's 'Emperor' piano concerto; or Brahms' for the violin; or Dvořák's for the cello, etc. There's something about the way he makes the lugubrious voice of the bass sing so sweetly that never fails to delight me. Part of the piece's charm for me, is its brevity - it clocks in at 16:13 on this recording. The first two movements have wonderful yearning melodies which aren't allowed to outstay their welcome, while the shorter third wraps things up in a brisk Allegro finalé. Also on this disc is Bottesini's later and longer F sharp minor concerto, a work I've never enjoyed as much as the B minor one. Rounding out the disc is a further charming piece: a 'Gran Duo Passione Amorosa...

I didn't like 'Games Without Frontiers' when I first heard it, but then, I was only eleven when it came out, and it did grow on me over repeated listenings. It seems I've always had mixed feelings about Peter Gabriel: I never warmed up to his Genesis-era work, but one of the first albums I ever bought with my own money was So , which I've always enjoyed. I can't recall if I picked up on the references to the long-running TV show Jeux Sans Frontières and its British equivalent It's a Knockout when I was eleven, but it did certainly dawn on me as a teenager that Gabriel was using these as a metaphor for international relations, with a nod to the on-going Cold War. I didn't realise until much later that it was Kate Bush providing the backing vocals. 'Games Without Frontiers' was one of a batch of 7" singles I picked up at a Chepstow charity show three or four years ago. A former owner had put it in a plain cardboard sleeve, so I don't hav...

The internet as it was in 2003 alerted me to the existence of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, and, when I fell in love with that album myself the following year, the internet further explained that it had come out of something called the 'Elephant 6 Collective', an umbrella in whose shade numerous bands hand flourished, one of the most notable of them being The Olivia Tremor Control. Curious, I sought out the OTC albums on CD, acquiring them in reverse order, getting the second (and to my mind, the better) of them first. I fell for Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One too. It's determinedly psychedelic record where Beach Boys and Beatles-inspired melodies and harmonies alternate with (or are overlain by) musique concrète- style tape manipulations, and where the lyrics recount a longing for, and a striving towards the otherworldly. I loved the songs but the sound quality on the CD left something to be desired: I imagined that may have been attribu...

Flicking through the TV channels one evening about fifteen years ago I alighted on MTV or VH1 - at that time still playing music - halfway through a video in which a tattooed woman in a bathtub was singing (in such a way that I didn't doubt she meant it) 'I told you I was trouble - you know that I'm no good'. That was my introduction to Amy Winehouse's music. Her name I already knew courtesy of its numerous appearances in Heat magazine, a publication primarily focussed on celebrity gossip to which my wife then subscribed, in connection with similarly numerous episodes of publicly obnoxious behaviour. I liked the songs of hers I heard, but not enough, at first, to tempt me to buy the record. Ten years later, sustained in part by her tragic posthumous fame, her songs were still often on the radio, and I found I enjoyed them all the more seasoned by the passing of time. It wasn't however, until last spring, when I heard the album played right through while at my s...

Camper Van Beethoven had been one of my favourite bands of the mid-to-late '80s, and I was more than ready to see what David Lowery's next group Cracker came up with, only to feel that their first, self-titled album was something of a disappointment. Their follow-up Kerosene Hat , on the other hand, I loved . I think I must have bought it on cassette when it came out, but my memories on that point are hazy. Nor am I exactly sure when I acquired my currrent CD copy. I'd just missed out on catching Camper Van Beethoven play what turned out to be their final London show, but did eventually see Cracker live, ca. '94, in a low-key gig at the Fleece in Bristol. As I recall, that evening brought my first encounter with the song 'Eurotrash Girl', which appears as a hidden track on the CD (but which wasn't, if I'm not mistaken, on the cassette). It, along with 'Nostalgia' and 'Take Me Down to the Infirmary', are my favourite songs on the album.  ...

"The music to The Wicker Man is quite extraordinary, it is probably the best music I've ever heard in a film" according to Christopher Lee, who is quoted thus on the slipcase of this 2002 CD issue of the movie's soundtrack. With his having been a star of the film, and, moreover, having contributed vocals to 'The Tinker of Rye', one of the songs in it, his can't be considered an unbiased opinion, but it is, I think, music that stands up straight on its own, without the accompanying visuals, and makes for an enjoyable album.  It's a well-presented release, apparently the first time the original recordings had been given an official outing. Included are a twenty-page booklet incorporating essays by Simon Wells and Gary Carpenter on the convoluted history of the film & the music in it; and an insert that folds out into a mini-poster. The songs on it are a well-judged mish-mash fashioned from folk-music elements, which all come together remarkably well...

The eponymous debut album by the London-based four-piece band Goat Girl was released in 2018. I have it on CD. Goat Girl are among the many artists I first encountered via BBC Radio 6 Music. As I recall, the album was a little while in the making owing to some mishaps and setbacks that beset the band at the time. The album packs in nineteen short tracks in a running time of about forty-two minutes. Musically, it imparts what I perceive as a downward force: its de-tuned sound (if that's the right term - it may be just a particular choice of tunings & chords) has a depressive quality to my ears, that I need to be in a certain mood to appreciate, with tracks like 'Slowly Reclines', 'Lay Down' and 'Throw Me a Bone' all exemplifying that kind of feeling. Other songs are catchy, uptempo numbers which nevertheless aren't altogether uplifting: the singles 'Cracker Drool' and 'The Man' in particular. It's an impressive album that, when I...

Round one: I first heard Mark Lanegan in his capacity as frontman for The Screaming Trees though I didn't know his name at the time I took a liking to their song 'Nearly Lost You', which I misremembered for years as having been by The Afghan Whigs. Round two: I bought Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age a year or two after it came out, but Lanegan's contributions were some of my less favourite parts of that album. Round three: via Spotify, I found my way to the album Broken by Soulsavers, which I loved primarily because of Lanegan's contributions. Round four: I heard the song 'One Hundred Days' on the radio ca. 2012, and realised I needed to listen to more of his solo recordings, but money was tight at that time. I was still hard up in 2014, but somehow scraped together enough change to order the 3LP set Has God Seen My Shadow? from Piccadilly Records in Manchester. It was around then I'd been obliged to sell some things I wished I didn...

I was aware of the importance of John Coltrane's work from a relatively young age (even if I struggled to enjoy it), but, as these things too often go, I read or heard nothing of his wife's music until much later. About ten years ago I heard her composition 'Turiya And Ramakrishna', which stopped me in my tracks, whereupon I downloaded a few of her albums. Even so, several more years passed before I finally bought some of them on physical media, with Journey to Satchidananda being one of two CDs of hers I picked up at Spillers Records in Cardiff in 2019 (as mentioned a few days ago). In Coltrane's original liner notes for the album, reproduced in the CD booklet, she wrote "I hope this album will be a form of meditation and a spiritual awakening for those who listen with their inner ear." Only having functional outer ears, and not the most discerning ones at that, such an awakening may continue to elude me, but one needn't be fully on-board with the h...

When I lived at 6 Cotham Place in Bristol, my downstairs neighbour Mr. Sheehan must have really loved Angelo Badalamenti's Music from Twin Peaks , as he played it very frequently and quite loudly. Often, he'd put a single track on repeat, so I'd hear - for example - a muffled & distorted 'Love Theme from Twin Peaks' (which seemed to be his #1 favourite) issuing through my floorboards half a dozen times in a row, several times a week. I'd loved Twin Peaks myself when it was first broadcast in the UK and had watched it avidly. Part of its appeal was the music, but Mr Sheehan's troubling fondness for it nearly soured it for me. After I'd moved to Italy, though, the negative associations faded, and I bought a German-made release of the album on CD.  I still enjoy it now: there's a certain sheen to its production which, to my ears, hasn't aged perfectly well, but most of the music still sounds great; and remains richly evocative. 'Night Lif...

At the British Heart Foundation charity shop in Chepstow (now seemingly closed) one pandemic Saturday morning I found a cache of late '80s/early '90s indie records including a single by Bob Mould's band Sugar and this 12" by Grant Hart's Nova Mob; as well as Hart's first two solo singles. I wondered if perhaps there had also been some Hüsker Dü vinyl that another punter had snapped up first. I'd been slow getting in to Hüsker Dü, only climbing aboard that bandwagon when it had stopped moving, after the release of Warehouse: Songs and Stories . But I listened with interest to what I heard of Mould's and Hart's subsequent work, almost buying Sugar's Copper Blue ; and hoping to buy (but, at the time, failing to track down) the self-titled Nova Mob album, having taken a shine to their song 'Old Empire'. On the A side of this record are two mixes of 'Admiral of the Sea'. The 'First Ave. Mix' has the drums pushed right to the ...

I'd known about Kraftwerk since the '70s, and had later made a passing acquaintance with some of Can's œuvre, but it wasn't until '07/'08 that I explored the music of some of their ' kosmische ' contemporaries in any more depth. Discovering Neu! '75 had started me off, and, before long I was ordering CDs by La Düsseldorf,  Michael Rother, Harmonia, Faust and Cluster from amazon.de: Zuckerzeit was among them. It's a catchily melodic album, but meanwhile a wonkily off-kilter one, as if things were always slightly out-of-sync, or not running at exactly the right speed: its imperfections are both charming & disconcerting. My favourite track is 'Caramel', with 'Fotschi Tong' and the unnerving 'Rote Riki' in contention for silver and bronze.   Before writing this post I should have first checked that I still actually owned the CD. I suspect it may have fallen victim to a recent purge to clear out some shelf-space. Either t...

I bought 'How to Recognise a Work of Art', a 7" single on the Moshi Moshi label by Welsh singer-songwriter Meilyr Jones in 2019, a few years after its release (in 2016) to promote Jones' confusingly-titled album 2013 . I picked it up at Spillers Records in Cardiff, aka 'the oldest record shop in the world' (est. 1894), as an additional impulse-buy having already decided to purchase a pair of Alice Coltrane CDs. Given that Spillers has changed premises twice, and hasn't for some time had any connection with the Spiller family, its claims of longevity should be taken with half a pinch of salt - but there's no disputing there's been a shop of that name selling recordings in central Cardiff for over 125 years, even if, for as long as I can remember, it's been a somewhat unprepossessing one.  I knew (and loved) the song after hearing it many times on Marc Riley's BBC 6 Music radio show around the time of its release. It's un uptempo numb...

My wife's musical tastes and mine didn't overlap too much, but she had a love of the '40s and '50s crooners, which, when we met, was music I'd just begun to appreciate too. In her case, it was a taste she'd inherited from her father, who, born in the mid-'20s, had grown up listening to those singers. His particular favourite artist in that vein, and, by extension, hers, was Nat 'King' Cole. She recalled fondly how he'd sing Cole's 'Mona Lisa' (and Frankie Laine's 'That Lucky Old Sun') to her as a lullabies when she was very young. We jointly acquired CD compilations of the bests of Cole, Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee & others. At our wedding we danced to Tony Bennett's version of 'The Way You Look Tonight'. Those tunes were a large part of the soundtrack to our marriage. When her father died, 'Mona Lisa' was played at his funeral, and to hear it became more bittersweet. When my wi...

On the occasions she would peruse my record collection, my sister would lament the absence of David Bowie albums. All I could do was point weakly at my CD copy of Hunky Dory and explain that Bowie LPs were just none too commonplace in the local charity shops. At length, I suggested that if she wanted to buy me one for my birthday or Christmas then it would be much appreciated. It's thanks to her that I've since supplanted my Hunky Dory CD with an LP;  and that I now also have vinyl copies of Low and Station To Station , all three in recent re-presses - with Station To Station being a 2017 issue. In the meantime I did manage to find a '70s copy of Aladdin Sane out in the wild (I vaguely recall having caught sight of Let's Dance and Tonight in the bins too, but I wasn't interested in acquiring those). On hearing the title track I tend to begin asking myself "do I really like this?" during its opening minutes, only to end up convinced anew by the time ...

Digging through the bargain bins and record-boxes at charity shops in search of old jazz records, one comes to learn that, in this part of the world at least, the politer (and whiter) kinds of jazz are much more readily available than the rawer & rootsier varieties; or the further-out & more experimental ones. Before one Sonny Rollins record comes to light, for example, one might find a dozen or more Dave Brubecks. What was more popular back in the day is often less sought-after now, and vice versa. With most of my jazz vinyl having been obtained locally & on the cheap, it reflects those bygone biases. Even so, I'm still more than happy to pick up top-quality slices of lighter jazz, with The Guitar Artistry of Charlie Byrd being a prime example. It's a 1962 issue of an album first released a couple of years earlier under the unwieldy title of Charlie's Choice: Jazz At The Showboat, Volume IV . On it, Byrd leads a trio with Keter Betts on bass and Buddy Deppensc...

Chances are I would have bought Boulevard De L'Indépendance via an Amazon order within a few months of its release in 2006. I've scarcely dipped much more than a tentative toe or two into the deep pool of African music, but having acquired and enjoyed In the Heart of the Moon (Toumani Diabaté's collaboration with Ali Farka Touré) the year before, I was curious to hear this album too. I would likely have learned of its release via The Word magazine, which I routinely read in the mid-'00s. This was during my time in Sweden. I did still shop for CDs from the 'Rocks' record shop down the road, a soulless little place (akin to an 'Our Price' shop in the UK), but for even slightly more obscure stuff I went on-line to buy. The bigger and better 'Skivlagret' stores would have already closed by then, what with the simultaneous rise of e-commerce and file-sharing. The music: an all-star band fused into a well-oiled machine after a lengthy club residency...

In an era rich with exquisite voices, Ethel Ennis' was one of the finest. Praised by Sinatra as 'my kind of singer', and congratulated on the release of her debut album by fellow-Baltimorean Billie Holliday, she could have been a major star. Her recording career was, however, sporadic, and, after a stint touring Europe with Benny Goodman, she apparently took a dislike to life on the road, seldom performing outside her home city thereafter. This self-titled LP is a budget re-issue of her 1955 debut album Lullabies for Losers with the track-listing re-ordered, and with one song ('Love For Sale') omitted. The songs on Lullabies for Losers were recorded in a single session with a four-piece band - uncredited here, but listed elsewhere as Hank Jones (piano), Eddie Briggs (guitar), Abie Baker (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums). Despite the re-jigged running order, with the tracks all sharing a common nocturnal mood and the same air of necessary spontaneity, the re-issue st...

I own not one but two '80s-vintage Julie London 'best-of' compilation LPs. For me, the other one ( The Best Of The Liberty Years ) has the edge as regards song-selection; whereas this one has the better-designed cover. Luckily, the two intersect only slightly, with just a pair of songs in common: 'Cry Me a River'; and 'Daddy', the latter written by Bobby Troup (also responsible for '(Get Your Kicks) on Route 66' and 'The Girl Can't Help It'), who was London's second husband. The Best of Julie was apparently first issued in 1961: its re-issue date isn't given, but the sleevenotes mention that Mari Wilson's cover of 'Cry Me a River' sparked a resurgence of interest in London's music, so '83 seems a reasonable guess. London's voice wasn't the strongest of instruments, often deployed in a huskily conspiratorial near-whisper, but she could certainly hold a tune, and had a knack for persuasively deliverin...

My best friend at university had grown up in Milan, among the Anglophone ex-pat community there, and, while ostensibly babysitting their younger offspring, he'd busied himself taping their record collections, thereby accumulating a veritable archive comprising hundreds of C90 cassettes. Across four of those tapes he'd recorded JJ Cale's first eight albums, and we often listened to one or more of those while engaged in our rambling post-pub conversations.  I ended up buying Cale's ninth album Travel-Log on its release, which I loved, but, what with one thing and another, it was for many years the only music of his I owned. Happening upon a mid-'70s Dutch re-press of Naturally among the vinyl at St. Mary's St. Collectables in Chepstow a few years ago, I was delighted to renew my acquaintance with his debut LP. Cale excelled in making music that sounded as relaxed and laid-back as it was possible to be without falling asleep. For me there is great warmth and comf...

This is a 1970 UK re-issue, on the short-lived Valiant label, of an album recorded in '66 and released in '67. The original US pressings had a cartoon-style cover design depicting a cereal box and a bowlful of something with a spoon in it. Someone by the name of Paul May is credited with the design featuring the woman's torso. The music is earthy soul-jazz, expertly led by Holmes' Hammond organ. It's too bad the cover designer got credited for his work, but the musicians - Holmes excepted - did not: they did a great job, especially whoever was on the electric guitar. Holmes is on fine form too: I particularly like the range of sounds he coaxes from the keyboard in the slowly simmering ' How Long How Long Blues '. The producer, who did get a mention, was Nick Venet: apparently he was also in the control room (according to wikipedia) for some of the early Beach Boys singles: 'Surfin' Safari', etc.  Also thanks to wikipedia, I gather that the band ...

I'd heard of Ethan Iverson on the strength of his playing with The Bad Plus, and suspect that YouTube searches on his name led me to learn about this recent (2019) release featuring Iverson and veteran trumpeter Tom Harrell, whose name I hadn't known, despite its being attached to a discography extending back into the mid-'70s. The other two members of the quartet on this live recording are Ben Street on bass and Eric McPherson on drums. Superficially, at least, this is a backwards-looking affair. Most of the tracks are tunes that would have already been familiar jazz standards sixty years ago. The playing is refined, tasteful and seldom attention-seeking. It can serve as elegant background music, but paying closer attention is well worthwhile.  Iverson's piano-playing provides the most obvious points of departure from how these melodies would have been interpreted back in the '50s or '60s: such as in the eerily discordant introduction to 'The Man I Love...