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:
The Animals - The Singles +
'60's R 'n B from the Geordies .................. they were a bit good, weren't they?
1999 - CD (rip)...
This morning after the Goldberg variations...
During workout
Now listening to this, might not stay at it as I am not so in the mood for solo piano jazz...., that doesn’t mean the album isn’t good, it is interesting as such...
I had to have some more of Ms Krall. 
2 x LP - [PIAS] recordings © 2013 : )
Head Up High is the eighth studio album by the British band Morcheeba, released on 14 October 2013.
In 2014 it was awarded a double silver certification from the Independent Music Companies Association, which indicated sales of at least 40,000 copies throughout Europe.
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On CD:-
Tori Amos - Under The Pink
dave marshall posted:
Robert Palmer - Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley.
Robert's debut album, and with various members of Little Feat and The Meters providing backing, it's a winner.
A class act, sadly missed.
And photo taken in the Heathrow tunnel. They asked him to join Little Feat but he declined.
The late great Preston Shannon known as the King of Beale Street.
I have to admit I was initially drawn to the band by someone describing the genre as "Hypno psychotic blues trash" .. a couple of the tracks remind me of early Canned Heat .. it's probably the harmonica which brings that to mind, whatever; it turns out be a totally absorbing and exciting CD. A one CD band from New Zealand, who, I hope produce more. A big thumbs up.
John Willmott posted:
I have to admit I was initially drawn to the band by someone describing the genre as "Hypno psychotic blues trash" .. a couple of the tracks remind me of early Canned Heat .. it's probably the harmonica which brings that to mind, whatever; it turns out be a totally absorbing and exciting CD. A one CD band from New Zealand, who, I hope produce more. A big thumbs up.
Years since I have heard this album. Think it came out in about 2012-13
MDS posted:
A truly lovely album from Ms Krall. I've yet to tire of it.
Her most underrated album (IMHO), and my favourite.
A singer who, unlike Diana Krall, has real emotion.
A slightly battered early vinyl pressing of Milstein’s 1952 Mendelssohn recording, according to the sticker £1 from a Cancer Research shop. Must get round to buying an RCM soon.
Music shines through the occasional crackle in the quiet passages, fantastic sound quality, the violin especially is brilliantly recorded. I love the Mendelssohn, so lyrical and beautiful, but so brilliantly constructed that I could never tire of it. This Milstein performance has his technical perfection, but much more importantly brings out the flow and joy of the music, lovely.
ewemon posted:John Willmott posted:
I have to admit I was initially drawn to the band by someone describing the genre as "Hypno psychotic blues trash" .. a couple of the tracks remind me of early Canned Heat .. it's probably the harmonica which brings that to mind, whatever; it turns out be a totally absorbing and exciting CD. A one CD band from New Zealand, who, I hope produce more. A big thumbs up.
Years since I have heard this album. Think it came out in about 2012-13
2012 it was .. give that man any prize on the bottom shelf.
Back to the wonderful Ms Krall ................ "Turn Up The Quiet" Mrs-B is out so its turn up the volume & then some. I'm melting with her emotion & in heaven with the detail of the recording.
24/192 WAV
1958 - CD (rip)1987...
1990s Alto hi fidelity repressing of the Decca original. Excellent SQ. Musically a stunning album, Britten is near perfect as an accompanist here, and Slava is one of the great cellists. Their interplay in the Britten Sonata (premier recording of the piece Britten wrote for his new friend Rostropovich) is wonderful, making it very clear why the first movement is called dialogue, it’s like listening to a conversation between 2 close friends. The Schumann is superbly played, as is the Debussy, the album is a masterpiece.
My original vinyl copy. A treat for myself for my last music of the night, my favourite piano concerto, Perahia is lyrical with fantastic backing from Haitink and the Concertgebouw. Over the nearly 30 years I’ve listened to this album, it’s never failed to have me hold my breath at times.
Now Playing.......
Charlie Haden & Carla Bley - The Ballard Of The Fallen
Charlie Haden (bass), Carla Bley (piano, glockenspiel, arranger), Don Cherry (pocket trumpet), Sharon Freeman (french horn), Mick Goodrick (guitar), Jack Jeffers (tuba), Michael Mantler (trumpet), Paul Motian (drums, percussion), Jim Pepper (tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, flute), Dewey Redman (tenor saxophone), Steve Slagle (alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, clarinet, flute), and Gary Valente (trombone).
Streaming on NAS....... The exploration of the ECM Catalogue continues and I am enjoying the music!
ECM Review Note HERE:
Don’t ask me who I am
Or if you knew me
The dreams that I had
Will grow even though I’m no longer here.
Jazz is a music of oppression, or rather about resisting it. As such, it has the potential to liberate listeners—and, perhaps more importantly, performers—in ways that few other genres can. Which is precisely the paradox of the purist: in order to get to the heart of jazz, one must shut up and feel it. Intellectualizing just gets in the way. Charlie Haden is a purist, but it took him years to achieve that title, and his Liberation Music Orchestra represents a coming into his own as a musician, as a human being, as a force of peace and respect.
The LMO took shape at a time of upheaval. The Vietnam War was coming to a head, and the taste it seems to have left in Haden’s mouth could only be washed out with music. Through his sporadic activities with the LMO (the collective has averaged only one album per decade since its inception in the late 1960s), Haden now had a voice with which to purge widening circles of listeners of the warmongering and corruption he saw all around him until, hopefully, those circles began to touch. It was the voice of those who could not speak except through histories, a voice honed in the communal spirit that breathes through every note he’s played since.
Haden never chose his material in the authorial sense; the politics chose him. By the time of The Ballad Of The Fallen, the Reagan administration was pouring military spending into Central America, where Contra death squads left tens of thousands dead and corrupted countless others by covertly sponsoring dictatorial regimes and, by extension, their drug cartels. This brings us to Haden’s purism in another sense: as a onetime narcotics addict long since sober, he knew well the dangers of letting go of music’s hand. And so, through this second recording he and the LMO inscribed a poem of mourning for those who lost their lives in such conflicts, as well in the Spanish Civil War, for he might very well have become an indirect casualty had he not been awakened. Such motivations were never a gimmick in Haden’s hands, and the balanced arrangements, courtesy of Carla Bley, speak to (and for) hearts and minds committed to outreach.
“Els Segadors” (The Reapers), a song of revolt from the Spanish Civil War that would later become an anthem for the Catalan Republic, begins with a somber elegy for brass, which then flowers with the introduction of a funereal snare and glockenspiel. With this somber tone set, the heartrending El Salvadorean song that makes up the title track finds ground in Haden alongside Motian’s drums and the acoustic guitar of Mick Goodrick. The words it only hints at were discovered on the body of a student protester, who along with others died by military hands during a university sit-in. After two darkly lit marches, each insightful horn solo therein a message in a tarnished bottle, we arrive at “Introduction To People.” Bley’s first of two contributions to the album has the sweep of some of the early Arild Andersen quartets and is only enhanced by her rolling pianism and Haden’s ever-pellucid bass. Her second piece is “Too Late,” a pensive duet for piano and bass that frays into majestic horns. It is also the session’s heartbeat.
The Chilean freedom fighters’ anthem “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” lifts us upon a delicate floating carpet of horns, who continue to emote in the heavier “Silence” (Haden’s sole composition and among the session’s more powerful) that follows. In this chain of four-step phrases, we find ourselves lost in the memory of that which we can never know. Goodrick spins chant-like threads throughout “La Pasionaria,” suspended like stars while Dewey Redman plots his tenor along less determinable trajectories. Bley’s keys whip like a sidewinder through this rare breath of hope while Haden emotes as nowhere else. The Catalonian song “La Santa Espina” reprises the martial feeling with which the album began and breaks into a powerful reinstatement from brass.
This is a continuous suite of moods drifting through a passage in foliated time. The album’s resignations are palpable at every turn, each inhaling mourning and exhaling hope. This is death and memory, rebirth and diffusion, the flame of a forgotten past kept alive in the cavity of an unparalleled instrument and its practitioner.