[jsaliga]

Throwing Muses - The Real Ramona



This is my favorite rock album from the 1990s, and Throwing Muses happens to be one my favorite rock bands period.  This album is extremely satisfying to me on so many levels I could probably yammer on about it all night long if I had the time.  Kristin Hersh, in my view, is a songwriting genius, and her remarkable sense of songcraft and delivery has served her very well throughout her solo career as well as side projects such as 50 Foot Wave.  This was the record were Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly brought it all together and created a masterpiece of 90s rock.  Hersh's dark, searching songwriting combined with Donelly's great pop sensibities gell so well it surprises me that I don't see these as two half-albums brought together by two very different creative songmeisters.  But it all seems to fit together in a way that makes it seamless to me.  The album balances pop, hard rockers, and ballads.  Tunes like Counting Backwards, Red Shoes, Graffiti, and Hook in Her Head are bustling with energy.  But the two sleeper tracks on this record are Honeychain and Two Step -- replete with shimmering guitar work.  A must own album for any rock fan.

--Jerome

[jsaliga]

I have everything Morphine ever produced and love it all!!

As good as "Cure For Pain" is, I think their best work was "Yes".

It's all good George.   Yes is a terrific album too.  You can't go wrong with either of them.

--Jerome

[Canyoneagle]

This will be first record I'll play to celebrate my return to LPs. My phonopreamp should be here any day now.

-Roy

.....must......reist......temptation... .. to.....buy.........turntable.........

[jsaliga]

not......possible....!

--Jerome

[jsaliga]

The Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat



Well...if someone can suggest a Sonic Youth record in this thread then I think it only fair that I submit for your consideration one of my truly favorite, and damned noisy, rock albums.  It sounds like sh*t.  It really does.  But it does it in a way that makes you think it sounds pretty great!    This album implodes in its own cacophony, that's for sure, but amazingly it maintains a pop aura about it that there's no denying.  I find the whole enterprise very fascinating.  The songs are all strong, but the 17 minute plus Sister Ray really takes the cake.  Just be forewarned if you aren't familiar with the Velvets:  this is one NOISY record and is an early entry into the world of lo-fi, only to be matched by perhaps The Sonics and the MC5 in terms of recording aesthetics.

--Jerome

[jsaliga]

Johnny Mercer - Capitol Collector's Series



I truly love the music of Johnny Mercer.  The Georgia Gentleman really had a way with a lyric.  His smooth voice just seemed to glide right over the music.  This is probably the best single-disc compilation of Mercer's work as a solo artist and with the Pied Pipers and Jo Stafford.  My parents danced to this music long before I was a twinkle in my dad's eye, and in many ways I think my parents enjoyed much better music when they were in their 20s then I did when I was in my 20s.   Thankfully this music has been well preserved and the quality of this CD is stellar.  Some of the recordings were taken from metal stampers and others were culled from 78s.  The latter will have very slight surface noise, and I am pleased that Capitol did not denoise the thing to death.  Most of Mercer's signature songs are here, such as: Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive, G.I. Jive, I'm Gonna See My Baby, On The Atchison, Topeka, And The Santa Fe, Personality, and many others.  Twenty great songs adorn this splendid CD, which can usually be had for less than $8 on Amazon.com.  Very classy music from a bygone era.  Highly recommended.

--Jerome

[jsaliga]

...and if you want more Johnny Mercer there is a nice 3 CD set from Mosaic for $44.



Mine just came in the mail today and I played the first CD.  It sounded great and the song selection is terrific, but some of Mercer's more pop oriented tunes, such as On The Atchison, Topeka, And The Santa Fe have been omitted.  This package represents Mercer's more jazzier works, which is what I would have expected from a label like Mosaic.  Very nice.

-Jerome

[jsaliga]

Ben Webster - Soulville



Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young were the three greatest tenor players of the swing era.  Hawkins cut his teeth with Louis Armstrong, Young made his name with Count Basie in the 1940s, and Webster was a featured tenor with Duke Ellington, also during the 1940s.  When the big band swing era ended in about 1946, it gave way to small group swing sessions, usually a quintet (tenor sax, bass, drums, piano, and guitar), but occasionally there were quartets (no guitar) and even a few sextets (add a trumpet or alto sax to the quintet).  This is my favorite form of swing.  I like the big bands too, but I find the small group swing model more intimate and far more invigorating musically.  Soulville was released in 1957 and to my ears it is perhaps the greatest small group swing album ever cut on the Verve label.  Webster's throaty, raspy tone was the archetype for 1950s swing tenor, and this album was superlatively recorded to show off the musical talent assembled for this session (Oscar Peterson on piano, Herb Ellis on guitar, and Ray Brown on bass).  If you like small group 1950s era swing and you don't have this album, then buy it right now.  I can recommended both the CD (Verve Master Series) and the Speaker's Corner 180g vinyl.  It doesn't get any better than this.

--Jerome

[rajacat]

Jerome,  I have Soulville in the CD format. It's definitely the album to choose while enjoying a bit of Scotch after a stressful day at work. I also find that the sound quality of the CD to be very good.

Verve offers a number of albums where Webster teams up with another renown artist. I have and like this one.



-Roy

[jsaliga]

Verve offers a number of albums where Webster teams up with another renown artist.

Hi Roy, I have most of them and they are all outstanding.  I wasn't aware that Mulligan Meets Webster was issued on a MFSL gold disk.

--Jerome

[jsaliga]

The The - Mind Bomb



No matter how large your music library becomes and how insatiable your thirst for new music is, there will always be superb artists that somehow manage to elude your music radar.  Matt Johnson, otherwise known as The The, is one such artist for me.  In fact, up until about five months ago I have never even heard of him despite the fact that he has been writing, performing, and recording critically praised alternative pop/rock since 1981.  Mind Bomb is a terrific album.  I usually don't go in for what I refer to as dance rock, but this album works extraordinarily well.  In some ways it recalls the INXS masterpiece - Kick.  In fact, the songs The Violence of Truth, Kingdom of Rain, and Gravitate to Me would have probably been right at home on an INXS album.  But I don't want to create the impression that Matt Johnson is a cheap INXS immitator.  Far from it, since the comparison really ends with just a few of the tunes.  Johnson was far more creative and wasn't constrained into a single niche genre, as he would later do an album of Hank Williams songs with surprisingly fresh interpretations.  Mind Bomb is highly recommended for open-minded rock fans.

--Jerome

[jsaliga]

Buckethead - Electric Tears



I'm pretty sure that I got over the whole rock-stars-as-mythical-figures schtick by the time I was about 22, which was over a quarter century ago.  True enough, when I was in high school I thought Kiss was pretty cool.  And I'm sure that if I was a teenager today I would think that a guitarist running around with an inverted KFC bucket on his head would be the greatest thing since sliced bread.  But I'm pushing 50 now and it's far easier for me to see past the gimmicks (and make no mistake about it...they are gimmicks) and concentrate on the music.  There is no denying that Buckethead is a guitarist of enormous talent.  He has great range as a musician: from thrash metal to experimental rock, to world musics, his talents have taken him to a variety of musical realms and he is able to thrive in all of them.  The folks who prefer the wilder side of Buckethead's musical meanderings will probably not be too keen on this album.  This is relaxed, mellow music that is introspective in nature, drawing from popular American contemporary themes and world music such as Spanish guitar.  That's not to say the album has no fire.  The song Mustang has a sharp growl and attack, but doesn't feel out of place here.  This album is very well recorded and sounds fantastic.

--Jerome

[jsaliga]

Frank Sinatra - Songs for Swingin' Lovers!



I don't think it's any secret around here that Frank Sinatra is one of my favorite, if not my favorite recording artist.  I could not even begin to calculate his impact on popular music and he was single-handedly responsible for the revival of the American Popular Song.  Were it not for Sinatra's stint at Capitol Records in the 1950s, the likes of Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Rogers and Hart, and Jerome Kern might very well have slipped into musical oblivion.  Because of Sinatra's success, other artists were strongly motivated to record songs from the Great American Songbook, most notably Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, and Anita O'Day.  With all that said, Songs for Swingin' Lovers is my favorite Sinatra record, and he made a ton of great albums in a recording career that spanned six decades.  The song lineup is the strongest of all of his swing oriented concept albums, with the ballad laden Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonley having nearly an equally strong slate of tunes.  Nelson Riddle turns in perfect arrangements that are equal to the task of being made to order for Sinatra at the top of his game.  The track listing is worth mentioning: 1) You Make Me Feel So Young, 2) It Happened in Monterey, 3) You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me, 4) You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me, 5) Too Marvelous for Words, 6) Old Devil Moon, 7) Pennies from Heaven, 8) Love is Here to Stay, 9) I've Got You Under My Skin, 10) I Thought About You, 11) We'll Be Together Again, 12) Makin' Whoopie, 13) Swingin' Down the Lane, 14) Anything Goes, 15) How About You?  It's available on CD, but the sound quality is not so good.  The best CD edition comes with the 21 CD "The Capitol Years" boxed set, from EMI International.  But that set will run you almost $300.  If you have an analog setup then find yourself a vinyl copy -- just be careful.  My first copy on vinyl was a 1970s reissue that sounded very good but had a wee bit of reverb in the vocals.  Barely noticable but it's there.  I eventually ran down a first-pressing after someone told me that this was the only issue of the album that was struck from the original master tapes.  To me this is the single most important record in American popular music.

--Jerome

[rajacat]

I checked this album out of the local library. Nice straight ahead contemporary jazz. Eric Alexander plays with a very strong and confident tone; he's got all the tools. I think the sound quality is excellent too . My setup sounds like it's had injection of air. It is engineered, mixed and mastered by Rudy Van Gelder for High Note Records.

-Roy

[Danimal]

This is one of my favorite albums.  I think it does a great job of showing exactly what these speakers are capable of.  I left Louis w/ a copy on a recent visit to CT.  He mentioned later that he had used it at his most recent show.  Andy is a phenomenal mandolin player.  He is complemented by an equally talented bassist and percussionist.  I think you can hear shorts clips of each song here...

http://www.amazon.com/East-Flatbush-Blues-Andy-Statman/dp/B000H1RFVO

[jsaliga]

I checked this album out of the local library. Nice straight ahead contemporary jazz. Eric Alexander plays with a very strong and confident tone; he's got all the tools. I think the sound quality is excellent too . My setup sounds like it's had injection of air. It is engineered, mixed and mastered by Rudy Van Gelder for High Note Records.

Nice find Roy!  I found some samples from this one and it is some superbly performed hard bop.  That's right up my alley.

--Jerome

[jsaliga]

Shirley Horn - Close Enough For Love



Shirley Horn got her start with Mercury records in the early 1960s, but never really enjoyed much success.  It took another 25 years for that to happen when she signed up with Verve in the late 1980s.  Release after release proved that she was a paragon of vocal jazz.  She also turned in some dazzling work on the piano.  Her first four albums for Verve were all five-star efforts.  On this album Horn mixes it up, waxing melancholy on the ballads and then turning it up on some outstanding swing numbers.  If you aren't familiar with her music, then start with Close Enough For Love since it is her best album, and then you can turn your attention to I Thought About You, Softly, and You Won't Forget Me.  By the time you have those, you'll want to check out the rest of her 1990s catalog.

--Jerome

[Boybees]

The The - Mind Bomb



Jerome, thanks for mentioning this outstanding album. Also worth mentioning is that on this (and one other The The album) Matt Johnson teams up with Johnny Marr, ex of The Smiths, a brilliant and innovative rock guitarist.

[jsaliga]

Roberta Gambarini - Easy to Love



This album came on a recommendation from a fellow jazz fan on another forum.  It arrived in the mail today and I'm listening to it as I write this post.  If you like jazz vocals and enjoy excellent scat singing, then buy this album!  Roberta Gambarini reminds me a lot of Ella Fitzgerald.  Not just in her vocal interpretations of standards and elocution, but also in her scatting (though truth be told, no one -- and I mean no one -- could scat like Ella Fitzgerald).  Still, Gambarini has a great deal of talent and it shines through on every track of this outstanding CD.  James Moody appears as a guest on tenor sax and also joins the featured vocalist on a great scat duet.  This is a very worthwhile CD that will see a lot of use in my current rotation.

--Jerome

[jsaliga]

Andy Bey - Ain't Necessarily So



Vocal jazz is a field that has historically been dominated by women.  There just doesn't seem to be many male jazz singers, and even fewer good ones.  That's not a complaint, just an observation.  I have more jazz than any other genre of music in my library, and vocal jazz is very well represented.  It's one of my favorite subgenres of jazz along with swing and hard bop.  I can't say that Kurt Elling works for me as a jazz singer.  I know he has a very large following, and that my low regard for his art runs contrary to the prevailing sentiments among jazz lovers.  But his voice, his improvisational style, and arrangements just do not appeal to me.  I'm even less impressed with Michael Bublé .  Harry Connick Jr. has done a few swing albums, but he lacks the proper feel for rhythm and timing and his voice, his vocal style, just isn't suited for swing.

Mark Murphy, on the other hand, is a giant of vocal jazz in my view and has towered over his contemporaries for the last 35 years or so.  But beyond Murphy there isn't much out there in the way of contemporary male jazz vocalists.  Enter Andy Bey, who often seems to get lost in the sauce, which is hard to imagine since there are so few male jazz singers to begin with.  Bey got his start in the mid 1960s on the Prestige label and is still recording music.  Which makes one wonder how he only managed to release 9 albums over the course of a 43 year recording career.  To say he is not particularly well known is an understatement.  With so few studio recordings Bey's reach into the hearts of jazz lovers was confined to his live performances.  Ain't Necessarily So, a 2007 release on the 12th Street Label, was recorded live at Birdland.  The set features a wonderful mix of tunes, with some downright fascinating interpretations of standards by the likes of George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein.  You will find a delightful blend of ballads, swing, and post-bop that are driven by Bey's extraordinary gifts for vocal improvisation.  He is also a very accomplished jazz pianist.  This CD should have a place in every jazz lover's library.

--Jerome