Revinylization

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Revinylization
Revinylization #40: Beck & Croz
Robert Baird  |  Mar 13, 2023  |  4 comments
Turns out rock stars are human after all. Which means music fans should prepare themselves for the coming toll. The next few years are certain to be brutal: Bob Dylan, 81; Paul Simon, 81; George Clinton, 81; Brian Wilson, 80; Carole King, 80; Keith Richards, 79; Jimmy Page, 79; Sly Stone, 79; Rod Stewart, 78; Neil Young, 77; Pete Townsend, 77, and the inexorability rolls on. The news is even worse among the pre-rock era stars, where it's a matter of any day now: Tony Bennett, 96; Burt Bacharach, 94; Sonny Rollins, 93. Even the ageless one, Willie Nelson, is 86.

January 2023 was a particularly cruel harbinger of the reckoning to come as guitar legend Jeff Beck and folk rock icon David Crosby died within eight days of each other.

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Revinylization
Revinylization #39: New Reissues of Classic Ella and Billie on Verve and Decca
Ken Micallef  |  Feb 28, 2023  |  6 comments
Decades after their deaths, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday loom large over the American music landscape, inspiring every jazz vocalist, especially the women. Fitzgerald and Holiday's contributions are vast, their work timeless, their joys and sorrows expressed in songs both thrilling and crushing.

Jazz as a form of popular song has largely faded from America's music culture, but Fitzgerald and Holiday's brilliance lives on, a beacon to their artistic excellence. Much evidence for that excellence can be heard in two new vinyl sets, both produced by Ken Druker.

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Revinylization
Revinylization #38: At My Window by Townes Van Zandt
Robert Baird  |  Feb 02, 2023  |  1 comments
To be a poet is to be tormented. And singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt's demons were relentless: mental illness, addiction, willful recklessness. He constantly complicated his life and the lives of those around him. Even fans who felt lucky just to have him play their town were unwittingly drawn in, often exhilarated but occasionally aghast. Yet judged by his recordings, he was indisputably a songwriting genius—often sad and confused but gifted nonetheless. The scion of a storied and wealthy Texas clan, he was that rare artist who was compelled to create art.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #37: Little Feat, Still Willin'
Sasha Matson  |  Jan 05, 2023  |  4 comments
One of my favorite comments by an actual participant in rock history is from Bonnie Raitt: "I miss Little Feat like I miss being eight years old." That remark was included in the liner notes for the Feat's 1981 album Hoy-Hoy (Warner Bros. 2BSK 3538), which was released two years after front man Lowell George's passing in 1979.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #36: The Hissing of the Roses
Sasha Matson  |  Dec 01, 2022  |  1 comments
My wife saw me putting on my new LP of Joni Mitchell's great For the Roses album and said: "Oh, our breakup album!" Never mind the confusing details—we're obviously still (or again) together—that's how intense the bonds are for many people with Joni's music: We people of a certain age set the clock of our lives by her recordings.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #35: John Coltrane's Blue Train Remastered (Twice) for Tone Poet
Robert Baird  |  Nov 03, 2022  |  0 comments
With its indelible Francis Wolff cover image of a pensive John Coltrane bathed in blue, freshly fired by Miles Davis but four months free of heroin, and its confident, accessible music that hints at the genius to come, Coltrane's Blue Train is a timeless jazz masterpiece. The saxophonist's only album as a leader for Blue Note, recorded before his triumphs at Atlantic Records—My Favorite Things and Coltrane Jazz—the boppy Blue Train, which, including the original mono and stereo pressings, had been issued 272 times, remains important for many reasons.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #34: The Reintroduction of Candid Records
Ken Micallef  |  Oct 04, 2022  |  3 comments
As an aspiring teenage illustrator, I was fascinated by the work of outlaw cartoonist Robert Crumb. His beautifully drawn images offered escape from the redneck southern city where I grew up. I was especially enchanted by Crumb's caricatures of blues and jazz musicians, which were assembled in his "Heroes of the Blues" and "Early Jazz Greats" trading-card collections.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #33: 21st Century (Steely) Dan
Fred Kaplan  |  Aug 31, 2022  |  7 comments
Steely Dan's last two studio albums, Two Against Nature (2000) and Everything Must Go (2003), are anomalies. The music is stellar, at or near the level of the band's best early work, but it's almost unknown, even among fans. (Back in 2011, one night of a week-long gig at the Beacon in New York City was supposed to highlight songs from these two albums—the program was called "21st-Century Dan"—but the idea was dropped when almost nobody bought advance tickets.)
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Revinylization
Revinylization #32: Analogue Productions' UHQR Are You Experienced LP
Sasha Matson  |  Aug 02, 2022  |  3 comments
Those of you old enough to have heard it when it was new will recall when you first experienced the music of Jimi Hendrix. I was 13, in 1967, when I came home after school with a friend bearing an LP of the just-released US Reprise Records pressing of Are You Experienced. My dad had a floorstanding, monophonic record player.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #31: Rush's Moving Pictures at 40
Tom Fine  |  Jun 30, 2022  |  4 comments
Certain albums stand as monuments because of the influence they had on contemporary and future musicians despite having little commercial success. The Velvet Underground & Nico comes to mind. So do the early Ramones albums. And then there are albums that had just as much influence but were megahits—a much rarer thing.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #30: Coltrane's Giant Steps from the Electric Recording Company
Fred Kaplan  |  Jun 09, 2022  |  3 comments
I have never written about the ultraboutique reissues from the London-based Electric Recording Company. Pressed in quantities of 300 or so, each title sells out within days (or hours) of its release, despite a price tag of $400 or more. Why review what can't be had?
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Revinylization
Revinylization #29: Bill Evans, Inner Spirit: The 1979 Concert at the Teatro General San Martin, Buenos Aires
Fred Kaplan  |  Apr 28, 2022  |  6 comments
Do we need yet another unearthed recording of the Bill Evans trio? I count 22 albums or boxed sets—a total of 49 polycarbonate or vinyl discs—of posthumously released sessions, many of them in just the last few years. But this latest discovery, recorded in Buenos Aires in September 1979, is a stunner. So, to answer the question above: Yes, we do need this recording.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #28: Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard and Crescent, from Impulse! and Acoustic Sounds
Fred Kaplan  |  Mar 31, 2022  |  1 comments
John Coltrane spent his final years with Impulse! Records, from 1961 until his death, in 1967, at the age of 40. Those years were his most adventurous, as he sorted through every sound he could create in his spiritual quest, as he put it, to "get the one essential." His range of recordings in those years spanned from "Greensleeves" to A Love Supreme, from ballads with pop singer Johnny Hartman to multiphonic fireworks with alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #27: Round Trip: Ornette Coleman's Blue Note sides on Tone Poet
Fred Kaplan  |  Mar 01, 2022  |  2 comments
Round Trip: Ornette Coleman on Blue Note is the first boxed set on the label's Tone Poet imprint, and it's a bold move. Audiophiles are not known to be keen on avant-garde music, but Don Was, Blue Note's president, and Joe Harley, the Tone Poet producer, are huge Ornette fans. They've lately been reissuing some other adventurous titles from the catalog—so good on them! Fellow fans should dive into this one, and the hesitant should give it a try, with some caveats.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #26: Two Charles Mingus LPs
Fred Kaplan  |  Feb 03, 2022  |  2 comments
In the annals of jazz, Charles Mingus—bassist, pianist, composer, bandleader, unique, headstrong, and deeply influential in every category—occupies the transit point between Duke Ellington and the post-'60s avant-garde, a station he carved out deliberately.
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