This is a Recording

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 ...

My copy of 'Nutbush City Limits' is clearly marked "Promotional / NOT FOR SALE" yet I paid a pound for it about three years ago. So far, I have escaped any adverse consequences for contravening that 49-year-old interdiction; as, to the best of my knowledge, has the charity shop that sold it to me.  It has a stereo mix of the song on one side and a mono one on the other.  On the label is a helpful note for DJs that the introduction takes up  22 seconds of its 2:57 duration. I daresay some of them will have taken the liberty of talking over those crucial seconds, which is too bad, as they set up the body of the song very nicely indeed. This outstandingly satisfying groove then becomes a launch-pad for Tina Turner's precise but powerful vocals. It's a tightly-constructed & forcefully-delivered thing of beauty. The song reached No. 4 in the UK (outsold by the likes of Slade, The Sweet and David Cassidy) and did better still in the German-speaking world. I had ...

Swing may not have altogether still been the thing even in 1956 when this album was recorded. It isn't, in any case, what I look for when I put the record on, but rather tenor saxophonist Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet's way with slow blues & ballads. He plays here as part of a sextet including such notable big band veterans as Jo Jones on drums and Roy Eldridge on trumpet. Jacquet himself had first found fame in the early '40s playing with Lionel Hampton's orchestra. My favourite track is the singularly evocative version of ' Harlem Nocturne ', with the number that follows it ('Can't We Be Friends?' - a mellow ballad dating back to '29) a close second. Not much in evidence (even on the more uptempo numbers) is the "honking" sax style that Jacquet had become associated with, where high harmonics alternate with notes from the bottom of the instrument's range. He had hit upon this style - according to the slightly stilted sleeveno...

Several of my musical discoveries of the '00s were sparked by listening to the Now Hear This! promotional CDs affixed to The Word magazine. The disc that came with the May 2006 issue kicked off with the track 'Diferente' by The Gotan Project, which I enjoyed well enough to place an Amazon order for the trio's album Lunático . I must have clicked carelessly, as I was taken by surprise when a large, flat, square parcel arrived the following week. I'd meant to order it on CD, but instead had procured a 2-LP vinyl copy. That year happened to be when vinyl sales were at their nadir, and, although I had by then acquired a small collection of second-hand LPs, I'd no intention of buying new records, imagining them to be virtually a thing of the past (outside of club culture). Lunático is about an hour long - as was commonplace for albums then - an inconvenient duration for vinyl, so it had been split into four roughly quarter-hour-long sides, necessitating annoying...

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...

'Being Boiled' was one of the more unlikely hit singles of the early '80s. A song protesting the cruelty of sericulture, it was The Human League's debut single, first issued in 1978. A reworked version appeared on the band's second album Travelogue in 1980, with a re-release of the original 7" (slightly tweaked with added stereo effects) following a few months later. Only in the wake of the League's breakthrough album Dare , did a further re-issue (seemingly identical with the 1980 one) finally achieve success, reaching the respectable heights of number 6 in January '82. Even then, it still sounded forbiddingly futuristic, despite its having been "recorded on a domestic tape recorder, in mono, in an abandoned factory, at a cost of £2.50" (wikipedia). My copy is one of the re-issued variants, very likely the later one. The B-side, 'Circus of Death' is good too, though I'm not sure it really needed the 25-second spoken introduction ...

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...