Waitress In A Donut Shop

'Midnight at the Oasis' was very often on the radio when I was five years old, and occasionally thereafter. I wasn't especially fond of it as a young child, though it has since grown on me. For a long time I wouldn't have been able to link that song with Maria Muldaur's name, and it was probably only within the last 5-10 years that the connection was established in my mind, a connection that chimed when I saw a copy of Waitress in a Donut Shop on sale locally last summer, I was happy to wager a few pounds on it (and another few on Barry White's Can't Get Enough) in the hope I might like them.

It proved a small risk well worth taking. Barry White, of course, is a genius, and Waitress in a Donut Shop, while not the sort of album that tends to feature on "Best Of" lists, is excellent entertainment, beautifully made. Having a supporting cast of such notable artistes as Ry Cooder, Jim Keltner, Linda Ronstadt, Spooner Oldham, Paul Butterfield, Klaus Voormann, Mac Rebennack & Ray Brown can't have hurt - though of course there are even starrier constellations that have produced music which is no good at all.

Side A kicks off in old-timey big-band style with Fats Waller's 'Squeeze Me', a sound revisited on 'Sweetheart' and the marvellous 'It Ain't the Meat, it's the Motion'. 'Gringo en Mexico' features some mariachi-esque brass and requinto guitar, but doesn't feel too untoward a piece musical of tourism for that. Lieber & Stoller's 'I'm a Woman' is given a heartily down-home arrangement; while 'Honey Babe Blues' smells even more like the country. 'Brickyard Blues' is a well-polished gem of a song, perhaps my favourite on the record, setting things up very nicely for the closing number 'Travelin' Shoes', fervently delivered acapella by Muldaur et al.

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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...

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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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