Lydia Lunch's 1980 album <i>Queen of Siam</i> (ZE Records ZEA 33006, LP) is so impressive—both sonically and musically—that, while listening, you might just find yourself compelled to send an enthusiastic, breathless text message to one of your friends.
"Experience which is not valued is not experienced....Value is at the very front of the empirical procession."</I>—Robert M. Pirsig, <I>Lila</I>
<B>CHARLES LLOYD QUARTET: <I>Fish Out Of Water</I></B><BR>
Charles Lloyd, tenor sax, flute; Bobo Stenson, piano; Palle Danielsson, bass; Jon Christensen, drums<BR>
ECM 1398 (841 088-2). TT: 57:50<BR>
<B>KENNY WHEELER QUINTET: <I>The Widow In The Window</I></B><BR>
Kenny Wheeler, fluegelhorn, trumpet; John Abercrombie, guitar; John Taylor, piano; Dave Holland, bass; Peter Erskine, drums<BR>
ECM 1417 (843 198-2). TT: 61:17<BR>
<I>Both</I>: CD only. Jan Erik Kongshaug, eng.; Manfred Eicher, prod. DDD.
Lyle Owerko likes boomboxes.
One of the records we listened to <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/at_the_monkeyhaus/">at the Monkeyhaus</a> last week was Sonny & Linda Sharrock's <i>Paradise</i>—a powerfully uplifting record, in my opinion. Sonny Sharrock, however, did not feel the same. In a 1989 interview with WKCR's Ben Ratliff, Sonny dismissed <i>Paradise</i> as being "not a good album," and attributed the album's failure to his own incompetence as a bandleader.
Last week, we moved—from the sixth floor of 261 Madison Avenue to the fifth floor of 261 Madison Avenue. The good news is abundant:
With good news to share about new downloads, let's dispense with the downer first. As <A HREF="http://www.twice.com/article/CA6661607.html?nid=2402&">reported by Twice.com</A>, HDGiants, aka MusicGiants, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in US Bankruptcy Court on May 18. Although the site, often praised by <I>Stereophile</I> as a leader in CD-quality and high-resolution music and video downloads, still appears to be operating, the layoff of its sales and marketing staff raises serious questions about its future.
Joe Lovano’s <I>Folk Art</I>, his 22nd album on the Blue Note label, is an odd, sometimes jarring record—it took a few hearings before I found my bearings—but once the fragments snap into place, it’s a rousing pleaser, bursting with indigo moods, heart-skipped romance, and free-flow funk riffs. Lovano plays all kinds of reeds—tenor sax, straight alto sax, clarinet, and, on one song, the aulochrome, a Hungarian-built horn that’s a double soprano sax (attached to one reed), each side tuned to a different key, so that you blow melody and harmony simultaneously. He plays with a somewhat hardened tone, reminiscent of Sonny Rollins, but with a more soulful sensibility, stemming from his Midwestern roots (his father was a tenor blues saxophonist in Cleveland), though over the past couple decades, he’s played with, and gleaned ideas from, a wide variety of masters, including Hank Jones, Gunther Schuller, and Mel Lewis, to name a few.
I've been reading Daniel Levitan's <I>The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature</I>, which makes pretty strong claims for the importance of those tones in time. (Neil McCormick conducted an interesting <A HREF="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/neil_mccormick/blog/2009/04/09/evolution_o…; with Levitan in <I>The Telegraph</I>.)
Sure, there is a ton of information about new music available online, but sometimes holding it in your hand is better still. Do you subscribe to any music magazines? If so, what do you subscribe to, and if not, why not?