What are you listening to and WHY might anyone be interested? (Vol. XIV)
Posted by: Richard Dane on 31 December 2017
On the eve of a new year, it's time for a new thread.
Last year's thread can be found here:
Now Playing......
Yazz Ahmed - Finding My Way Home
Streaming on TIDAL....... I enjoyed another Yazz's "La Saboteuse" album the other day and thought I would take this earlier release out for a spin. Enjoy her music quite a bit.........
Review from the London Jazz News website here:
Yazz Ahmed - Finding My Way Home,
(Suntara Records SUN 7422001, CD Review by Chris Parker)
Trumpeter/composer Yazz Ahmed has made something of a splash on the current UK jazz scene since graduating from the Guildhall School six years ago, and this album can only help establish her as a strikingly original voice.
It’s structured as a roots-oriented journey, exploiting both what the accompanying publicity calls “Arabic scales” and more overtly conventional jazz-based fare in the process, its core the strong, infectiously enthusiastic musical bond between Ahmed and bass guitar virtuoso Janek Gwizdala, with whom she improvises four spontaneous duets and a number of more structured duo pieces, including deft, absorbing visits to Miles Davis’s So What and Stan Sulzmann’s Birthdays, Birthdays.
Ahmed has a precise, poised but warm, atmospheric sound, well suited to the flugelhorn she also plays, and both her informal but rousingly powerful collaborations with the alternately growling and spurting Gwizdala and the more ambitious, extended, multi-textured pieces in which she skilfully deploys larger forces (among them clarinettist Shabaka Hutchings, tenor player Alam Nathooand cellist Chris Fish) showcase a considerable and – most important – highly individual instrumental and compositional talent.
Chopin: complete piano works
It's the finishing touch. After tackling the complete piano works on records and testing them live on the stage, Pietro De Maria has collected all Chopin's works for the piano in this box: 13 cds. The performer face to face with the composer's complex world and with himself as well. That is: the Venetian pianist born in 1967, prize winner in competitions of the level of the Ciani and the Ciajkovskij, has dedicated to Chopin four years of full immersion recording (2006-2007), in addition to 6 recitals and still more Chopin all over the world in the anniversary year of 2010. The question is how did his relationship with the composer mature? Answer (apparently) embarrassing: it did not mature. It was tested. Just the way it happens in our lives, by dint of seeing someone regularly we get to know him better and better. But in De Maria's case, what strikes us is his “integrity” from the first to the last record: monolithic in the best sense of the term, that is profound, true, passionate. Somehow, not perfectible. From the transfiguration of the idea of fatherland in the Polonaises with sounds that range from nearly catatonic dimensions to rushes of madness with every possible nuance in between, to the elegance of the Mazurkas, “easel pictures” as Chopin called them, to the formal clarity of the Sonatas, to the intimism of the Nocturnes. Of course, the drawing room is there. An interpreter cannot ignore the composer's social "cage". But that drawing room met with sensitive fingers will make room for Debussy. And we can hear that clearly.
Still sounds good.
I haven’t played this in ages and now I’m halfway through it I’m wondering why, because it’s really good
Sir Neville Marriner - Bach: Brandenburg concertos
Elton John -Here and There. A live album from the 1970s which I have on vinyl, but I am listening to an expanded version on CD. If you like Elton, especially his heyday in the 1970s, this is a recommended album.
Some 90s Acid Jazz.
Now Playing.......
Amina Alaoui - Alcantara
Streaming on TIDAL........ On this cold, wet, dark Thursday morning a women's beautiful voice was needed to get me gently moving into this day........
:format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-8308071-1467630127-8535.jpeg.jpg)
Some more acid jazzery
Buddy Montgomery - Live at the Maybeck recital hall
Allmusic.com:
The sole surviving musical Montgomery brother goes it alone for the microphones at Maybeck, demonstrating that he has more than enough of the solid musicianship and abundant technique that seems to go with the territory in this series. The only hangup is that Montgomery's solo ruminations, however accomplished, aren't all that compelling here. The usual blend of idioms -- bop-based with frequent immersions in earlier styles, mostly stride and classical derivations -- are lavished upon a collection of standards; "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" has an intriguing alternate re-harmonization of the tune. However, it is Montgomery's own tunes, "Who Cares" and "Money Blues," that deliver something resembling a personal signature, getting into some down-home bluesy rhetoric. Of course everything is superbly recorded.
Okapi. pruffoli.
Anna Von Hausswolff - Ceremony
Forgotten Melodies: Polina Leschenko (piano)
Mischa Levitzki | Sergei Rachmaninov | Nikolai Medtner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uq5Tg5lE-8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N26hFvruKN8
OMG, it’s 1981 again.
Paul Simon - Gracelands - via iPad TIDAL App into nDAC front USB connection.
This sounds as almost as good as the CD via various routes. Much better at the moment than TIDAL on the NDX +XPSDR which arrived for demo today and might need a week to come on song.
Now I can listen to the stuff you recommend!
Phil
Good to hear these songs again and sounding very good from this SACD rip.
On CD:-
XTC - Drums And Wires
On CD:-
Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes
