What are you listening to and WHY might anyone be interested? (Vol. XIII)
Posted by: Richard Dane on 01 January 2017
2017 has arrived today, so time to start this thread afresh.
Last year's thread can be found here;
james n posted:After spending 3 hours making up and installing new speaker cables, i'm sitting down with a well deserved glass of Laphoraig and following Sean Rowe (excellent album - another play later i think) with this old favourite.
Doves - Lost Souls
I don't know this artist, but I feel I should 'like' your post owing to your excellent choice in whisky. Only bettered by Lagavullin IMHO.
Sorry for the temporary thread diversion.
Vanska/Lahti Symphony: Sibelius Symphony No.5 & En Saga - '95 rec.
These are fascinating Sibelius' original version. En saga here recorded by Vanska was the first recording. It was only played once after the premier.
Both scores run a bit longer than the final versions but I find them equally compelling.
Vanska here is excellent much more convincing than his Beethoven cycles!
Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Bach: the art of Fugue
From grammaphone.co.uk:
This is Bach-playing to listen to every day, fresh, spry and well modulated. If spirituality is to be found in The Art of Fugue, Aimard seems to say, it will not be through slow tempi, dynamic extremes or the quasi-religious trappings arrayed by the likes of Sokolov, Kocsis, Koroliov and Nikolaieva. The tripping, French swagger of Contrapuncti 2 and 6 and the smart Italian cut of No 9 fit neatly under the fingers. Freedom is found within the interplay of voices rather than any fancy phrasing: in fact the mirror fugues and canons are so unfussily done that you’d never guess without a score to hand how much a single musician can look and sound like Mr Messy while playing them.
This is not to imply dryness or inflexibility on Aimard’s part. He follows Tovey in finding No 3 to be “one of Bach’s most beautiful pieces of quiet chromatic slow music”, after which the extraordinary cadences of No 4 (actually the final completed movement) are necessarily pedalled and clipped, even chirpy: the envoi of a true Kapellmeister. The great unfinished fugue is especially fascinating, gradually accumulating kinesis until the surge of B-A-C-H pulls us towards its unattained apotheosis with the force of the Severn Bore. Applied with more plain-spoken authority, such emphatic strength of wrist and will rather chews up the Tenth’s preludial bars and the expansive, chorale-fantasia conclusion of the Fifth, though with equal force one senses that, in this case, they had to be so. Perhaps no pianist since Charles Rosen has so persuasively demonstrated that this contrapuntal encyclopedia is to be heard as well as read. Peter Quantrill (March 2008)
Bill Evans - Montreux III
Allmusic.com:
For this duet set from the 1975 Montreux Jazz Festival, Bill Evans alternates between acoustic and electric pianos while Eddie Gómez offers alert support and some near-miraculous bass solos. The audience is attentive and appreciative -- as they should be, for the communication between the two masterful players (on such songs as "Milano," "Django," "I Love You," and their encore, "The Summer Knows") is quite special.
On CD
Since it's a very sunny - if rather cold - Sunday morning, how about some 1960s sunshine pop from The Free Design, remixed and reshaped by the likes of Stereolab, Mars Volta, Caribou, Dangermouse, Madlib, etc?
On CD.
I've had this double CD compilation laying around for a couple of months - time for its first outing methinks. Amazing how innovative a lot of the early stuff is, and some of those 12" mixes were fabulous.
Tidal. Anne Bisson - Blue Mind
On CD:-
Peter Hammill - Over
On CD:-
King Crimson - In The Wake Of Poseidon
1969 - UK first pressing...
Tidal. Emmylou Harris - Stumble Into Grace
From Bandcamp.
Yellowjackets - a rise in the road
Purchased this album when I saw Julia last year. Maybe not so good as 'That's Live', but whatever, it is Julia!
Tony2011 posted:
1969 - UK first pressing...
Such a wonderful record. A candidate for one of the best live albums ever (even though it’s not all live) and a Desert Island disc for me (Land Of Grey And Pink, RVW London Symphony 1913 a couple of other certs).
They play with such funk and with several spine tingling moments (e.g. when the band all come cascading back in towards the end of side one).
The 24/96 download is also ace.
Mid-80s vinyl pressing of TC's final album (Elektra, 1978) before he 'retired', re-emerging only 20 years later. Something soulful for a Sunday evening.
Now playing 'That's Live' by Julia Fordham. Current track - 'Foolish Thing' - soooooo gorgeous! This live version is so much better than the studio version.
John Coltrane - Soultrane
From allmusic.com:
In addition to being bandmates within Miles Davis' mid-'50s quintet, John Coltrane (tenor sax) and Red Garland (piano) head up a session featuring members from a concurrent version of the Red Garland Trio: Paul Chambers (bass) and Art Taylor (drums). This was the second date to feature the core of this band. A month earlier, several sides were cut that would end up on Coltrane's Lush Lifealbum. Soultrane offers a sampling of performance styles and settings from Coltrane and crew. As with a majority of his Prestige sessions, there is a breakneck-tempo bop cover (in this case an absolute reworking of Irving Berlin's "Russian Lullaby"), a few smoldering ballads (such as "I Want to Talk About You" and "Theme for Ernie"), as well as a mid-tempo romp ("Good Bait"). Each of these sonic textures displays a different facet of not only the musical kinship between Coltrane and Garland but in the relationship that Coltrane has with the music. The bop-heavy solos that inform "Good Bait," as well as the "sheets of sound" technique that was named for the fury in Coltrane's solos on the rendition of "Russian Lullaby" found here, contain the same intensity as the more languid and considerate phrasings displayed particularly well on "I Want to Talk About You." As time will reveal, this sort of manic contrast would become a significant attribute of Coltrane's unpredictable performance style. Not indicative of the quality of this set is the observation that, because of the astounding Coltrane solo works that both precede and follow Soultrane -- most notably Lush Life and Blue Train -- the album has perhaps not been given the exclusive attention it so deserves.
Vinyl
Why? Discovered it whilst browsing the racks for something t play. Totally forgotten it was there. I don't thin it's been played since I received it for my birthday in 2000...
steve
Listening to the third disc (Singles As & Bs) of this excellent 3-CD from the man who did more to popularise Randy Newman in the UK than just about anyone else:
Paper Plane posted:Vinyl
Why? Discovered it whilst browsing the racks for something t play. Totally forgotten it was there. I don't thin it's been played since I received it for my birthday in 2000...
steve
Been there! A great benefit of digitisation is the discovery of previously forgotten about cds.
U2 new album.