Record Reviews
📝 2096 reviews| Artist | Title | Review |
|---|---|---|
| Teddy Thompson | Separate Ways | |
| Big Mama Thornton | Live In Europe | |
| Big Mama Thornton | Volume 2 | |
| Dutch Tilders | Dutch Tilders | |
| Dutch Tilders | Working Man | |
| Dutch Tilders | Direct | |
| Tom Tom Club | Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom | |
| Tomasz Stanko Quartet | Soul Of Things | |
| Tomasz Stanko Quartet | Lontano | <p>The change of direction on Lontano, the third release by Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko and his three young collaborators — Marcin Wasilewski (piano), Slawomir Kurkiewicz (bass), and Michal Miskiewicz (drums) — is startling. Whereas Soul of Things (2002) and Suspended Night (2004) focused on Stanko's increasing sense of balladry and structurally harmonic, assonant atmospheres, Lontano showcases a band confident enough after playing for five years to find real space for free improvisation. Recorded in the south of France instead of Oslo, producer Manfred Eicher works his name magic and allows stillness and silence to play as much a role as the performers engaging one another musically. The opening title track is the first of three such excursions with the title "Lontano." Here, Wasilewski's piano opens the door and allows for the band to haltingly and carefully enter the tune, contributing economically until a groove eventually develops out of one of Stanko's balladic ideas. Ever so slowly the beat becomes circular and focused, the band vamps on it, gradually gaining in intensity until it threatens to fall apart. But it never does. Instead the band winds it way back down into silence. "Cyrhia" begins as a thoughtful, hesitant ballad, but once more finds its way out into the world, entering it as a near-modal blues. "Kattorna" was originally performed by the Krzysztof Komeda group on its influential — and groundbreaking — album Astigmatic in 1965. Its angularity has been rounded off, but its sense of adventure is retained and Stanko's own economical style on playing, and then playing around its lyric line, is impressive, as is Kurkiewicz's empathic bassline. The other two "Lontano" pieces, at the middle and near the end of the disc, represent a kind of improvisation that actually sings. The interplay between the trio members and Stanko is instinctive. It's not nearly so hesitant and ranges farther than on "Lontano I." Lyricism and melodic ideas are never sacrificed in this kind of improvisation, but the playing is so free it nearly leaves the realm of jazz altogether. This is outside playing with heart, tenderness, and quiet beauty in its marrow. The silences on "Lontano III," are so vast, it's as if the listener can enter and remain inside any one of them. Indeed, this is music as poetry itself, a pure language at once crystalline and dreamy. The set closes with "Tale," a piece Stanko recorded on his ECM debut in 1975. This version reflects restraint in its more euphoric spaces. The idea of story comes from the slowly unfolding piano chords of Wasilewski, who urges the trumpeter on to solo until the end, not so much of the piece, but until the story is complete. Lontano is at once the distillation of 40 years of European vanguard jazz history, and at once the key in the door of the lock where it enters the world not as a music categorized by its instrumentation or personnel, but as music itself; where harmonics, space, and the improvisational language expressed in it transcends genre and classification. This band is simply astonishing, and Lontano is their most adventurous and cohesive recording yet.</p><p>—<strong>Thom Jurek</strong></p> |
| Tomasz Stanko Quartet | Wislawa | <p>Since relocating to America from his native Europe, Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko has assembled a crack band to articulate his ever fluctuating, often experimental musical ideas. His New York Quartet, consisting of pianist David Virelles, bassist Thomas Morgan, and drummer Gerald Cleaver is a study in contrasts. The septuagenarian trumpeter proves as wily as ever on Wislawa, a double-disc titled for the late poet and Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska, who passed away in 2012, and whose work and persona proved influential in composing the material for this set. Several of these pieces bear the titles of her poems. Stanko's signature brooding, cranky, tone-altering phrasing and disconsolate spirit of tenderness are apparent throughout, but they don't necessarily dictate the album's flow. Two versions of the title track bookend the album and showcase those qualities in balladic form, as do others such as "April Song"; there is also plenty of fire here, evidenced by the aggressive interplay of the rhythm section on tracks such as "Assassins" and "Metafizyka." "Mikrokosmos" is a Stanko showcase, offering at its opening all manner of squeals, skronks, sputters, and sharply angled tones before Virelles adds a Latin touch and the quartet settles into a groove. Likewise in the "Dernier "Cri," where the spirit of Miles Davis' second quintet is evoked. The second disc opens with "Oni," led by Morgan's bass walk. It commences impressionistically, yet develops into an easy grooving post-bop thanks to the bassist and Cleaver's shimmering cymbal work. "Tutaj - Here" offers scintillating -- though often subtle -- interplay between Virelles and the trumpeter, while "Faces" presents the pianist's forceful, canny, harmonic assertions that the rhythm section responds to with near glee. Stanko is at his most fiery in this driven post-bop number that also recalls the Davis quintet's fearless sense of exploration. Throughout this set, Stanko leads this band as he has many others: by example. His democratic sensibilities allow his players to be fully themselves through his compositions, in turn adding depth and heft to them. Wislawa deftly celebrates in a deliberate way, not only the memory of an honored person in Stanko's life, but also the profound inspiration of her life's work upon his own.</p><p>—<strong>Thom Jurek</strong></p> |
| Al Farka Toure | Talking Timbuktu | <p>Guitarist Ali Farka Toure has repeatedly bridged the gap between traditional African and contemporary American vernacular music, and this release continues that tradition. The CD features him singing in 11 languages and playing acoustic and electric guitar, six-string banjo, njarka, and percussion, while teaming smartly with an all-star cast that includes superstar fusion bassist John Patitucci, session drummer Jim Keltner, longtime roots music great Ry Cooder (who doubled as producer), venerable guitarist Gatemouth Brown, and such African percussionists and musicians as Hamma Sankare on calabash and Oumar Toure on congas.</p>— <b>Ron Wynn</b> |
| Ralph Towner | Diary | <p>This 1974 album was given a well-deserved boost when ECM reissued it in 2001. It's a solo performance with a twist: Towner plays not only 12-string and classical guitars, but also very competent piano. Only "Entry in a Diary" and "Mon Enfant" are unaccompanied guitar solos; the latter, a traditional melody, is also the sole non-original. On four of the remaining six tracks, Towner accompanies himself via overdubs, playing both guitar and piano for an effect vaguely reminiscent of Bill Evans' Conversations With Myself. The best of these is "Icarus," one of Towner's best-known compositions, which also appeared on Matchbook, his 1976 duo album with Gary Burton. The guitarist's most unusual moves include playing a set of gongs behind his sparse 12-string work on "Images Unseen," and using his guitar entirely as a percussion instrument to create a propulsive rhythm track for "Erg." He closes with a tuneful solo piano piece titled "The Silence of a Candle." The reissue of Diary was timed to coincide with Towner's 2001 solo outing, Anthem.</p><p>—<strong>David R. Adler</strong></p> |
| Ralph Towner | Anthem | <p>On this solo recording, Ralph Towner returns to the elementary sounds of his classical and 12-string guitars for inspiration. Though an accomplished pianist, French horn, and trumpet player, Towner has left all of them out of Anthem's stark mix. And it's a good thing too. There was a time when his love of the Prophet V synthesizer and his piano improvisations covered over the gracefulness of his trademark signature on the guitar. Anthem begins with "Solitary Woman," for 12-string. It's based on modal intervals and harmonics. His sense of drama in the piece is remarkable; coming from a melodic framework and building an architecture of trills and single-string runs, he then evolves the piece into a chordal spiral, where semitones fall off in rows until only the melody remains -- skeletal, icy, crystalline. On the title track, he uses the classical guitar to create a riff-based structure, adding one element and then another, quoting from "Greensleeves" in one section until he has harmonically changed the entire structure of the tune's body, creating an almost Renaissance melody from its framework.</p><p><i>Anthem</i> reveals Towner in the role of being a composer for the guitar rather than of music. For example, City of Eyes, which was for an ensemble, relied both on composition and improvisation to offer a view of the album as something resembling a film score. Anthem has no such aspirations, but it's a far loftier album. These precise, moving, and technically virtuostic compositions have flair and depth to them; they accentuate the voices of these two guitars as solo instruments capable of carrying the most complex musical issues to the fore and resolving them. But above all, as the compositions "The Lutemaker," "Very Late," "The Prowler," "Gloria's Step," and "Three Comments" make plainly clear, Towner writes with great aesthetic beauty and settles for nothing less as a player. If there was ever any doubt of the latter being true, one need only hear the album's closing track, Charles Mingus' "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat." Towner proves a consummate jazzman; his sensitivity to a complex melodic and harmonic work is instinctual. In fact, his reading of this tune is the most significant version heard on the instrument thus far -- and there have been many. Indeed, <i>Anthem</i> is Towner's finest album in a decade and one of the finest in his distinguished career.</p> — <b>Thom Jurek</b> |
| Ralph Towner | Time Line | <P>It's hard to believe that it's been more than five years since Ralph Towner issued his last solo guitar album, or any album under his own name, for that matter. Anthem was issued in 2000. Time Line is a return to the stark, spacious and lyrical explorations of that set. That's not to say this is any kind of direct replica. Towner's a restless artist, he pushes his boundaries on the classical and 12-string guitars. The set contains 14 new compositions and two fine covers that provide the real reason for Towner's not-so-secret inspiration here: George Gershwin's "My Man's Gone Now," and Harold Arlen's "Come Rain or Come Shine." The muse, of course, is Bill Evans. Evans has been forever associated with the former tune since his 1961 trio performance of it at the Village Vanguard; the latter is a tune he played live fairly often in the '60s and even the '70s. Time Line is full of lively, even, bright textures and moods. Check out the languid beauty of "Turning of the Leaves" or the nearly singing "Always by Your Side," or the nearly Celtic folk aspects of "Anniversary Song," where he plays airs and rounds. The moodier and more melancholy side of his playing can be heard in the brief "Oleander Etude," or the tender, near flamenco single string playing in the 50-second section of "Five Glimpses/3." "Freeze Frame," the gorgeous 12-string exercise here, uses the instrument's droning quality to establish a harmonic resonance in spite of the legato playing he does on the higher strings. The set closes with the Gershwin tune, also played on the 12-string. His chromatic elegance and grace underscore the tune's nuances and subtleties even as he brings the lyric to the fore with extended chord voicings and embellishing the sonorities that echo the piano's more controlled tensions. In sum, this is a brief but utterly captivating issue from one of the music's great composers and theorists that should not be missed by anyone interested in Towner, of course, but also in melodic improvisation and composition.</P>— <B>Thom Jurek</B> |
| Pete Townshend | White City | |
| Pete Townshend | The Iron Man | |
| Pete Townshend | The Best Of Pete Townshend | |
| Pete Townshend | Music From Lifehouse (DVD) | <p>Music from Lifehouse is a lovely record of two instantly famous concerts Pete Townshend performed in the winter of 2000, accompanied by the London Chamber Orchestra and sundry other musicians and vocalists. Undoubtedly the most rewarding failure in rock history, the Who's <i>Lifehouse</i> was kick-started and then abandoned in 1971 as a post-<i>Tommy</i> stage experiment. Composer Townshend's unwieldy dream of bringing together new music and controlled theatrical space with audience interaction sadly burst, but it also scattered song gems through various albums: <i>Who's Next</i>, Townshend's 1972 <i>Who Came First</i>, and <i>Lifehouse Elements</i> (2000).</p> <p>With passing years, Townshend has sought to unify and celebrate the music of his unrealized project, and this DVD, simultaneously contemplative and hard-charging, refines familiar warhorses ("Bargain," "Pure and Easy," "Baba O'Riley") into works of refreshed beauty and gives Townshend a chance to shine on such lesser-known titles as "Greyhound Girl." Often magical and surprisingly fun, this is a keeper for Townshend fanatics.</p>— <b>Tom Keogh</b> <p><b>Description</b><br>Thirty years have passed since Pete Townshend began work on "<i>Lifehouse</i>," but it's only now that the technology exists to make the experimental nature of the piece a reality. This recording of the concerts held at Sadler's Wells in London on February 25 and 26, 2000, is a celebration of the music of "<i>Lifehouse</i>" rather than the culmination of the project. To this day, Pete Townshend is continuing the exciting musical experiments he first pioneered in a small South London theatre back in 1971. Songs: Fantasia Upon One Note, Teenage Wasteland, Love Ain't For Keeping, Greyhound Girl, Mary, I Don't Know Myself, Bargain, Pure and Easy, Baba O'Riley, Behind Blue Eyes, Let's See Action, Getting in Tune, Relay, Join Together, Won't Get Fooled Again, Can You Help the One You Really Love?</p> |
| Pete Townshend | Psychoderelict - Live In New York | |
| Traffic | The Best Of Traffic | <p>Though Traffic broke up at the start of 1969, the band was on a commercial ascent, which led Island Records, their U.K. label, and United Artists, which licensed their product for the U.S., to assemble a posthumous album, Last Exit, released in April 1969, that, like its predecessor, Traffic, peaked in the American top 20. Meanwhile, former band member Steve Winwood formed Blind Faith, which produced a debut album that topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. No wonder Island and UA determined that the fall of 1969 was a good time for a Traffic compilation. The release was especially needed in Britain, where the singles sides "Paper Sun," "Hole in My Shoe," and "Smiling Phases" had not yet appeared on an LP. Since Traffic had moved away from being a singles band after its first year, the album was not dubbed a hits collection, though all its tracks had been released on one side or the other of a single on one side or the other of the Atlantic. As a selection of the best and most popular material from the group's first three albums, the result is hard to fault, though it's worth noting that the missing "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush," the theme song from the 1967 movie of the same name, was a Top Ten hit in England. Also missing, on the British version of the LP, anyway, was "You Can All Join In," a song that had enjoyed popularity in continental Europe. (The American version did include "You Can All Join In," which replaced "Smiling Phases.") The group's U.K. hit singles, "Paper Sun" and "Hole in My Shoe," were already beginning to sound like quaint bits of psychedelia by 1969, but the entire second side of the LP, comprising "Medicated Goo," "Forty Thousand Headmen," "Feelin' Alright," "Shanghai Noodle Factory," and "Dear Mr. Fantasy," was the kind of progressive rock that would define Traffic and give it its place in the rock pantheon. Who could have known when this disc was first released that the band's story was far from over?</p><p>—<strong>William Ruhlmann</strong></p> |
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