The Essential Jimi Hendrix

I wouldn't usually write about a record I'd only listened to once, but in this case I'm at least slightly acquainted with most of the music on it; and unavoidably know some of it very well. In Chepstow a couple of weeks ago I picked several records out of a crate on the floor of a charity shop of which this was one: a 1978 double-LP Hendrix compilation. It cost me rather less than the £6.30 price sticker on the cover from a prior sale.

As with any compilation I'm more in agreement with some of the editorial choices than others: we have 'Purple Haze' here but not 'Foxy Lady'; 'Little Wing' but not 'Spanish Castle Magic'; 'Burning of the Midnight Lamp' but, sadly, not 'Crosstown Traffic'. It also ventures beyond the three Experience records, with the last couple of tracks on Side C and all of Side D taken from some of the many of his posthumously-issued albums like The Cry of Love, Rainbow Bridge, and so forth. These, by and large, are songs I heard back in my student days, courtesy of a friend's cassette recordings of them, but hadn't since encountered until the Saturday before last.

The copy I found also came with a bonus 7", with the fake catalogue number "JIMI 1", including a ropey live version of Van Morrison's 'Gloria'. Alas, this doesn't show the great man in anything like his best light, and it's not hard to see why it hadn't been released before '78, for all the flood of prior records cashing in on his name. In the gatefold there's a biographical outline by Don Menn, and a piece about Hendrix's "Guitars, Amps and Devices" reprinted from an issue of Guitar Player Magazine. I think Hendrix looks a little sad & tired in the cover picture.

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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

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...

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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