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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Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...

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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