This is a Recording

Little Axe is a stage name used by guitarist Skip McDonald (itself an alias for the man born Bernard Alexander). It's also the name of one of his collaborations with producer Adrian Sherwood, aided by long-term musical associates Doug Wimbish on bass and Keith LeBlanc on drums, and also in this instance by percussionist Talvin Singh. Whereas Sherwood is best-known for his Jamaican-inspired dub, this record is built on the foundations of McDonald's formative blues influences. The clever title alludes to Howlin' Wolf, whose voice is sampled on some of its tracks. While there's virtually nothing of house music per se in its musical ingredients, it does involve programming & sampling used in ways which arguably owe something to it. The feel of the album is generally dark & weighty, with its mesmerising grooves the main attraction. McDonald's bluesy guitar work blends with as tight a rhythm section as one could wish for, with Singh's tabla a fascinating addit...

"Warmduscher" is, I gather, a mild German insult meaning "hot-showerer": that is, a person unwilling to undergo the bracing rigours of a cold shower, or otherwise rough it; a bit of a wimp. In this case it refers to a London-based band fronted by U.S. ex-pat Craig Louis Higgins Jr., aka Clams Baker. Their second album Whale City was one of my favourite records in 2018. I have it on CD. Whale City - as a locale - is a re-imagining of the decrepit and dangerous NYC of the '70s. The album has a loose concept, outlined in a few spoken-word interludes, of following one man's unscrupulous rise through the ranks of that city's underworld. The musical action begins with the second track ' Standing on the Corner ', whose unsavoury urban storylines play out over an invitingly insistent bassline.  The short & sharp 'Big Wilma' has more of a post-punk aura, while '1000 Whispers' feels like it's being transmitted from some '60s ba...

I can't pinpoint my initial encounter with Neko Case's voice with any precision. It would have been between '02 and '05. Perhaps I'd heard her on The New Pornographers' song 'Mass Romantic'. Or maybe one of the tracks from Blacklisted ('02) was included on a promotional CD affixed to a music magazine. In any event, Blacklisted was certainly the first of her albums I bought. And it's turned out to be the only record of hers I've held on to. I eagerly ordered Fox Confessor Brings the Flood ('06) when it was first released, but never did warm to it. Much more recently I purchased Hell-on ('18) which hit me only just a little wide of the mark. Even this record, much as I love the tone & timbre of Case's voice, is one I revisit quite seldom - annually or so - but each new listen has been a fresh pleasure, so its place on the shelf is secure. The tunes are lovely. Case's lyrics are often interestingly oblique. Her singing is...

As the Britpop wave crested in 1995, my albums of the year in that vein weren't by front-runners Blur or Oasis (though I did buy (What's the Story) Morning Glory? ) but those by dark horses Pulp and Supergrass, with the latter's debut full-length release I Should Coco issued that May. My head had been turned late the previous year by their first single 'Caught by the Fuzz', and I'd been keeping my eye on their progress in the meantime. It's an excellent album, fizzing with youthful energy and with plenty of good tunes. The songwriting is generally solid too, with a distinctly English lyrical sensibility on display in the vein of influences like Madness and The Kinks. The opening run of eight tracks maintains a high energy, with 'Caught by the Fuzz', 'Alright' and 'Sitting Up Straight' my favourites among them. The tail end of the running-order has a more laid-back air, with the closing triple-decker of 'Time', 'Sofa (of m...

My introduction to TV on the Radio was via the TV, not the Radio. In 2004 I caught the video for 'Staring at the Sun' on MTV2 and realised at once it was something well out of the ordinary. I didn't love it at first acquaintance, but after seeing and hearing it a few more times, I'd changed my mind and was inclined to pay some money for it, ordering a CD copy of the 'Young Liars' EP from Amazon.  I'm glad I ordered the EP first, rather than their debut album Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes as I think it's the better effort. Had it been the other way around I may have been discouraged. 'Satellite' comes first: with its rapid heartbeat-like rhythm and layered vocal harmonies - it's a good song, but better is to come. The eerie and disconcerting 'Staring at the Sun' follows it, which still sounds out on its own nearly twenty years on. Coolly world-weary - and a tad less unconventional - 'Blind' is the EP's longest numbe...

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...

If I have an album by a particular artist on vinyl, I'll generally try to get any others of theirs I want on vinyl too; or if I have one CD of someone's music, I'll typically aim to get more CDs when I choose to explore their work further. But not always. Having been given a vinyl copy of Curtis , Mr. Mayfield's excellent debut solo album, last Christmas, and having much enjoyed playing it, getting a copy of Superfly seemed to an obvious next step. Trying to find a vinyl copy of Superfly for less than £30, however, proved difficult. I placed orders on Discogs twice for copies that seemed to be marginally below the going rate, only for both orders to be cancelled on me. Meanwhile there was no shortage of CD versions of it on offer, for a quarter of that price or less, and ulimately I gave up on the idea of format uniformity, saving myself some money and hassle by buying one of those. I ended up with a copy of the 2002 "special edition" on Charly Records which...

About twenty years ago I aquired a wonderful and educational 3-CD box set called OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music . Among its tracks was an excerpt from Karlheinz Stockhausen's piece 'Kontakte'. As with much of Stockhausen's output, it's not the most immediately-accessible music, but I did acquire a fondness for it, and became curious to hear all 35 minutes of the piece. I suspect I would have ordered my CD copy a couple of years later from a long-defunct UK on-line classical specialist called "Crotchet". It's a 1992 re-issue of a recording made in 1960, the same one from which the excerpt on the compilation had been taken. 'Kontakte' exists in two versions: the original all-electronic one; and the better-known "hybrid" version with parts for live piano and percussion backed up by electronic sounds on tape. The possibilities of modern "live electronics" would doubtless have thrilled Stockhausen, but were a lon...

For a few years I was haunted by a song I could not identify. On the infrequent occasions I listened to the radio during my time in Rome, whichever station it was I'd settled upon as the least objectionable might play a jazzy-sounding number in which a deep male voice sang in Italian, but with some words of English in the chorus: "It's wonderful... good luck my baby...I dream of you... chips, chips". It was the kind of song where it seemed likelier that these were the chips one might be given in a casino, and not any potato-based foodstuff. I grew to love the song, but each of the half dozen or so times I heard it I never caught the artist or track-title being announced. I resigned myself to its remaining a mystery. But then I heard a snippet of it again a few years later in Amsterdam, issuing from a hotel-room TV as the soundtrack to an ad. On returning from that trip back to the UK, I resolved to see if the internet might be able to solve the puzzle for me. This w...

The Id is an album which gives the impression of having had a great deal of talent, time and money thrown at it in a way that by no means guaranteed a successful outcome. Recorded in the wake of the runaway success of her first record On How Life Is , Macy Gray's second features a large cast-list; seems to have been recorded all over the place; runs to nearly an hour long; and includes many thickly-layered production jobs. Yet (for me) it does mostly work very well, just about holds together, and marks an improvement over what had been an excellent debut. I don't think I bought this from a record shop but rather from some other kind of retail space - a petrol station or a department store maybe - it would have been somewhere in Sweden in late 2001. While I was a tad nonplussed by it at first, it has grown on me, and I've played it so often that the disc is now in a sorry-looking state: I probably ought to get a new one. The opener 'Relating to a Psychopath' sets up...

Early in 2017, a correspondent asked if I knew of any contemporary Brazilian instrumental music. I did not, but on searching in YouTube I found a goldmine of such material in the form the channel of "Programa Instrumental SESC Brasil". It contained many dozens of 50-55 minute shows, each one devoted to a performance by a specific musician or group. Not only were practically all of the featured artists new to me, but, judging by the frequently very low view counts, many must not have been widely-appreciated even in Brazil. One of my favourite such videos featured a band called Quartabê. I liked their performance so much I bought their debut album: Lição #1 Moacir .  It's among a handful of records I've bought in download form from Bandcamp and then burned to CD-R. I can't then make much comment about the cover design (I snagged the image from the Discogs listing) or the insert/booklet notes - which, in any case, would be in Brazilian Portuguese. The band's ...

The Supersuckers took a sharp turn off the rock'n'roll highway in 1997 with their fourth album Must've Been High , which saw them travel for the first time "down that old dirt road to the country". I'd previously heard 'Born With a Tail' (from The Sacrilicious Sounds Of The Supersuckers : album #3) so had an inkling of where they'd driven from to get there, but this was my first proper introduction to their music. It's far from a perfect record, but twenty-five years on I still get a kick out of playing it. Mine is a German-made CD copy. The sleeve-notes promise "Simple [...] three-chord songs, sung from experience", and that's what we get. The subject matter encompasses the pleasures of recreational drug-use ('Non-Addictive Marijuana'); the end of a long night's revelry ('One Cigarette Away)'; the morning after the night before ('Hungover Together'); the hazards of being on stage ('Barricade') ...

Travelin' Light is the fourth and last album jazz singer and pianist Shirley Horn recorded in the '60s, before taking time away from the limelight to devote to family life. Thereafter she performed only occasionally in and around her home city of Washington D.C., until the first stirrings of a career revival in the late '70s. Her early records had been well-reviewed and earned admiration from her peers (no less a figure than Miles Davis singled out her debut LP Embers and Ashes in some rare public praise), but they had sold poorly. I first heard of her via YouTube, having searched for versions of a song I'd taken a shine to called ' You're Blasé '. At length I got around to tracking down a copy of the album it had appeared on, i.e. this one. Specifically I bought a mid-'90s French-made CD re-issue. While not terribly rare, it's uncommon enough that it took me a while before I found an affordable copy. I think I ended up paying something in the ...

Domenico Scarlatti is thought to have composed five hundred and fifty five keyboard sonatas in his time (1685-1757). None quite reach seven minutes' duration, so they're brief pieces - but there are so many. How best to approach this body of work? Some intrepid harpsichordists and pianists have recorded them all, with Scott Ross's complete set the first to be released, in 1988. Wonderful as they can be, I don't know that I'll ever want to try listening to every single one. A less serious alternative would be to try listening to them all at once . For me, the much more appealing option is to trust a performer to put together a judiciously-curated selection. As mentioned before , one of my first ever classical CD purchases was such a set, bringing together eighteen sonatas played by Andreas Staier. I'd picked the disc up having read an endorsement of Scarlatti in a poem: "It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti / condensed so much music into so few ...

This CD is part of a late-'90s series under the collective title Musica Non Grata ("Undesirable Music") featuring pieces drawn from the archives of the Russian Melodiya record label by composers who had variously been "threatened, vilified, reviled and reduced to silence or, at best, grudgingly tolerated" by the Soviet regime. It brings together two of the eight symphonies written by the Armenian composer Alfred "Avet" Terteryan (or Terterian). This wasn't an easy item to find, and I ended up paying £20 for a used copy via ebay earlier this year. Symphony No. 3 (1975) is written for a large symphony orchestra augmented by the duduk and zurna, (traditional Armenian woodwind instruments). It's cast in three movements, and peformed here by the Armenian SSR State Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Khandjan. Terteryan was evidently partial to wide dynamic contrasts, alternating & juxtaposing judderingly loud percussion, strident woodwinds an...

The centrepiece of Idle Moments is its title-track, as languidly lovely a quarter hour of jazz as one could hope for. The story goes that it was a happy accident, born of a misunderstanding. Having been talked through the piece by its composer (pianist Duke Pearson), Green played his first solo part for sixty-four bars rather than the thirty-two that Pearson had intended. It sounded so good that the rest of the musicians (including Pearson himself, saxophonist Joe Henderson, and Bobby Hutcherson on vibes) followed suit. It left them with a track that was too long, in conjunction with the others they'd already recorded, to shoehorn on to a single LP. After some failed attempts to recapture the magic of that first take in truncated form, they decided to re-do the other pieces instead, arranging the rest of the album around 'Idle Moments'. Although the other tracks are also excellent, it was undoubtedly the right choice. Those who have the CD version of the album can also hea...

At the age of five (ca. 1670), Élisabeth Jacquet, the daughter of an organist and music teacher, and something of a prodigy, was presented to King Louis XIV for whom she played the harpsichord and sang. She evidently made a favourable impression, as she was thereafter granted Royal patronage, and was in the privileged position of being able to dedicate her first published works, a collection of four suites for harpsichord issued in 1687, to the King. By that time she had married, taking the step (unusual in France at the time) of appending her husband's surname to her maiden name. Three of those four suites make up the bulk of this CD. Each suite brings together pieces sharing a common key, beginning with an "unmeasured" prelude, that is, one written without bar lines, with the player at liberty to set their own tempo. The subsequent pieces in each suite are all based on a set sequence of dances deemed proper at the time, beginning with an 'Allemande' and ending w...

The quantity and quality of the sessions that were recorded for Blue Note records but not released until many years after the fact almost beggars belief. One imagines the increasingly adverse commercial climate for jazz as the '60s wore on must have played a significant part in that. Even so, some of their decisions seem baffling in retrospect. Saxophonist Hank Mobley's A Slice of the Top is a prime example: recorded in '66; released in '79. Personally I think it's one of his finest outings, and a better record than those adjacent to it in his discography ( A Caddy for Daddy and Hi Voltage ), both of which were given more timely releases.  A Slice of the Top is unique in Mobley's output for having been written and arranged for an octet. The usual suspects of tenor sax (Mobley); alto sax (James Spaulding); trumpet (Lee Morgan); piano (McCoy Tyner); bass (Bob Cranshaw) and drums (Billy Higgins) were augmented by euphonium (Kiane Zawadi) and tuba (Howard Johnson)...

Georgy Vasilyevich Sviridov was a Soviet-era Russian composer, probably best-known internationally for his choral and other vocal works: cantatas, oratorios, hymns. etc.. Russians of a certain age will remember him for his piece Time, Forward! part of which was used as the theme for the TV evening news broadcast «Время» . As well as a substantial corpus of choruses, film scores & the like, he also produced some chamber music, which is the focus of the present CD. Sviridov had studied with Shostakovich, nine years his senior, with the older man's influence strongly evident on the pieces included here. Sviridov's 'Piano Trio', written in 1945 and revised ten years later, is, at times, very reminiscent of Shostakovich's 2nd Trio written the year before: such in the piano chords in the agitated Scherzo second movement. Elsewhere (so Iossif Rajskin's booklet notes inform me), Sviridov was more broadly inspired by the Russian tradition of elegaic music for piano ...

Richard Dawson can look like a folk singer: one bearded man with an acoustic guitar, albeit an amplified one, and can sometimes sound like a bit like one too. His playing, though, owes as much to avant-garde free improvisation as it does to traditional fingerpicking & strumming, while the subject-matter of his fascinating lyrics can incorporate historical events, mundane contemporary references, and the surreal or fantastical. The overall effect is a singular one, and not readily categorisable. I first heard him in late 2014, when his song 'The Vile Stuff'' (drawn from his fourth album Nothing Important ) was played on BBC 6 Music. Not completely sold, but curious, I looked on-line and found a  YouTube clip of him performing 'Black Dog in the Sky' - and that reeled me in. This song formed part of a 2011 album The Magic Bridge , which, conveniently, was re-issued in 2015 as interest in his music grew. I ordered a CD copy of it.  'Black Dog in the Sky' co...