Blue Note 50th Anniversary Collection: Volume 3

I have to presume that most people who know anything about records know that old Blue Note LPs are collectable and worth money. Their striking cover designs mean they'd be hard to overlook. I don't think I've ever seen a '50s or '60s Blue Note album in a charity shop, and if I have happened to catch sight of the odd one anywhere else, a glance at the asking price has sufficed to make me forget it existed.

In the '80s there were a few stabs at cashing in on the Blue Note brand, among them a series of 50th Anniversary Collection double compilation albums (released in '89), one of which, Vol. 3 - 'Funk & Blues' - I was lucky enough to spot in the wild. Also in the series were 'From Boogie to Bop' (Vol. 1); 'The Jazz Message' (Vol. 2); 'Outside In' (Vol. 4) and 'Lighting the Fuse' (Vol. 5). Of those, the track-listings on Vols. 2 & 3 are most to my taste, so it worked out well I found one of those two.

The compilation includes only nine tracks across its four sides, about a CD's-worth of music in all. Included are some numbers that were already firm favourites of mine ('Moanin'' by Art Blakey et al; Jimmy Smith's 'Back at the Chiecken Shack'; Horace Silver's 'Song for my Father'; and 'The Sidewinder' by Lee Morgan), & it was a delight to hear those on vinyl for a change. And there are also some tunes I hadn't encountered before, of which I liked Donald Byrd's 'Cristo Redentor' and 'Alligator Boogaloo' by Lou Donaldson the best.

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All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

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Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

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