Revinylization

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Revinylization
Revinylization #58: The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle on MoFi
Robert Baird  |  Sep 19, 2024  | 
While it's a distant memory now that he's making mediocre albums and using his US website to sell $50 T-shirts for gigs in Helsinki, there was a time when Bruce Springsteen had a hungry heart: Hungry to be perceived as a consequential artist. Focused on telling stories and making vivid albums. Alive with conflict and memorable characters. Back in those days, the early 1970s, he broke any number of rules and barriers. In the case of The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, that meant defeating the dreaded sophomore slump.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #57: Trane meets the Motor City, 2 Reissues from OJC and Craft Recordings
Jim Austin  |  Sep 04, 2024  | 
Detroit became a destination for migrating African Americans early, starting with the Underground Railroad; the city's proximity to Canada was convenient for those seeking to escape Southern slavery. The mass human movement accelerated with the Great Migration, which started about 1910, when millions of African Americans left the Jim Crow South for northern cities. The same human movement that brought the blues to Chicago and jazz to New York City took both to Detroit.

In all those cities, the 1920s was a time of ballrooms and big music halls. In Detroit, "society bands" black and white played through-composed, jazz-inflected music, according to a narrative put together by Cliff Coleman and Jim Ruffner for the local jazz museum. The proliferation of orchestra chairs meant that skilled musicians familiar with a range of musical styles could find work, especially if they read music. It also meant that Detroit was ready when, in 1927, Don Redman, who had been the chief arranger for Fletcher Henderson's band, moved to the city to lead William McKinney's Cotton Pickers, the resident Black jazz orchestra at Detroit's Graystone Ballroom. The Pickers soon became an important touring band, with a national reputation. Big-name orchestras like Duke Ellington's and Fletcher Henderson's started to visit the city; on Monday nights, the national bands would "battle" local bands.

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Revinylization
Revinylization #56: Sonny Rollins, A Night at the Village Vanguard, Made New
Robert Baird  |  Aug 06, 2024  | 
As one of the first live albums to be recorded in the hallowed space that is New York City's Village Vanguard, Sonny Rollins's A Night at the Village Vanguard (recorded November 3, 1957, released in 1958) set the template, proving that recording in the odd, triangular club could not only work but could also produce distinctive, satisfying sound. Soon after the recording of the Rollins album, Bill Evans and John Coltrane added live Vanguard albums to their recording catalogs.

Now reissued by Blue Note Records as part of its Tone Poet Series, this three-LP edition, which comes from a different source than previous releases, is that rare audiophile reissue where the sonic differences are immediately audible.

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Revinylization
Revinylization #55: An American Beauty Unblemished
Tom Fine  |  Jun 25, 2024  | 
Of all the albums in the Grateful Dead catalog, American Beauty is the one with the widest appeal. Its proto-Americana tunes are neither antique nor modern; instead, they are timeless. The album's sound is clean and lean, up to modern snuff even more than a half-century after its original release in November 1970.

The tunes seem to roll like a Sunday drive on a country road, in and out of dark hollows and up and down hills. Three of its 10 songs have become folk-rock standards: "Friend of the Devil," "Sugar Magnolia," and "Truckin'."

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Revinylization
Revinylization #54: Deep Purple's Machine Head
Robert Baird  |  May 21, 2024  | 
Ow Ow Ow, Ow Ow Whaow, Ow Ow Ow...Wha-aa-ow. That simple G-minor melody, supposedly inspired by Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (or perhaps Brazilian composer Carlos Lyra) and played with the tone of a Fender Stratocaster doubled by a Hammond B3 organ, is unquestionably the most famous rock-guitar riff. The apotheosis of 1970s hard-rock, the ubiquitous "Smoke on the Water" is also the unlikely story of the song's creation and the high-water mark of long-running UK rock band Deep Purple.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #53: Craft Records releases Joe Henderson's Power to the People
Robert Baird  |  Apr 17, 2024  | 
In the late 1960s and the early years of the next decade, tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, like many of his contemporaries, was listening to such albums as Miles Davis's Filles de Kilimanjaro and Miles in the Sky and pondering what it meant for his music. During this period, for better or worse, the rhythms and aggressive approach of rock music, including the use of electric rather than acoustic instruments, were mixing with jazz and giving birth to fusion. In hindsight, it seems inevitable that these two vital genres, both of which prize improvisation—be it on electric guitar or tenor saxophone—should become each other's major influence. Jazz fusion based in jazz (Mahavishnu Orchestra, Tony Williams Lifetime, Return to Forever), and jazz rock based in rock (Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears, Soft Machine), evolved into major genres in the 1970s. From these tendrils, jazz pop, jazz funk, M-Base, and even smooth jazz have continued to spread.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #52: Nina Simone's Seminal Wild is the Wind
Robert Baird  |  Mar 26, 2024  | 
By all accounts, Eunice Kathleen Waymon, aka Nina Simone, who passed in 2003, was a troubled person and a brilliant artist. Why she was not more acclaimed during her lifetime is a question several recent film projects have tried to answer. Did her fierce stand on civil rights lose her fans? Or was it, as the films have implied, a case of self-sabotage driven by mental illness? Whatever the answer, her inimitable work continues to resonate with ever more force and depth.

A mix of tracks left over from sessions Philips recorded in 1964 and 1965, Wild Is the Wind has been reissued on 180gm vinyl by Universal Music and Acoustic Sounds. Remastered by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound and plated and pressed at QRP in Salina, Kansas, the record sounds warm and evocative, capturing the nuances of Simone's complex vocal powers.

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Revinylization
Revinylization #51: ECM is Back in the Vinyl Game
Robert Baird  |  Feb 19, 2024  | 
Given his seemingly endless stream of ideas, virtuoso instrumentalism, and considerable wealth of recordings, Keith Jarrett is a creative universe unto himself. He began his recording career on Atlantic Records and recorded for several labels, including Impulse!, along the way, but it was on Manfred Eicher's label ECM that he first broke through to worldwide fame in 1973, with the 3-LP set Keith Jarrett, Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne. Considering its landmark status, it's fitting that the album is among the first releases in ECM's new Luminessence vinyl series, reissued in its original triple-vinyl form.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #50: Bruce Springsteen's Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. at 50
Robert Baird  |  Feb 01, 2024  | 
In Jan Swafford's excellent 2020 Mozart biography The Reign of Love, he intimately weaves the composer's life story with the music he created. Along the way, he confirms a legendary scene. Played to the hilt in Amadeus, Milos Forman's 1984 film adaptation of Peter Shaffer's play, the then-reigning Hapsburg monarch, Joseph II, rushes backstage after the premiere of Mozart's first operatic blockbuster, The Abduction from the Seraglio, and opines, "Too beautiful for our [Viennese] ears, my dear Mozart, and monstrous many notes." Sassy by nature or perhaps just stung by the implied criticism, Mozart supposedly replied, "Exactly as many as necessary, Your Majesty."

That quote rings in my head each time I listen to Bruce Springsteen's still-astonishing 1973 debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., which has just turned 50 and been reissued in Mobile Fidelity's Ultradisc One-Step series.

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Revinylization
Revinylization #49: Steely Dan's Aja
Ken Micallef  |  Jan 03, 2024  | 
In the 1970s, Steely Dan produced hit records for a listening public that could care less about the band's cryptic lyrics. Those early Dan fans responded to their songs' epic choruses and glistening hooks, awarding chart-topping success and a global audience.

From 1972's Can't Buy a Thrill to 1980's closing act Gaucho, Bard sages Walter Becker (1950–2017) and Donald Fagen occupied a place in pop music as unique as their songs' references to "wild gamblers," "midnight cruisers," "bodacious cowboys," and a female protagonist who "prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire." Much later, Becker and Fagen returned to the studio, issuing Two Against Nature to an audience still hungry for their singular R&B-and jazz-based music.

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Revinylization
Revinylization #48: When Duke met the Bean
Tom Fine  |  Dec 01, 2023  | 
Saturday, August 18, 1962, was quite a day in music. In England, Ringo Starr made his first appearance as a full member of the Beatles, at a Horticultural Society dance at Port Sunlight, Merseyside. In Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, two jazz giants met in a recording studio for the first time. Duke Ellington showed up with a streamlined, potent ensemble: Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Ray Nance, Lawrence Brown, Aaron Bell, and Sam Woodyard. Then tenor sax legend Coleman Hawkins arrived.

Ellington and Hawkins had never recorded together, so there was an atmosphere of energy and something grand and long overdue. Producer Bob Thiele and engineer Rudy Van Gelder stayed out of the way and let the music unfold while making sure not to miss anything. The result was a spectacular, loose, joyous, perfectly played album: Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins (Impulse! Records, AS-26, A-26 in mono).

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Revinylization
Revinylization #47: John Coltrane's Seminal A Love Supreme on UHQR Vinyl
Robert Baird  |  Oct 17, 2023  | 
Why is John Coltrane's A Love Supreme still so resonant nearly 60 years after it was recorded? Much to its credit, it's short (just over 30 minutes) and to the point. If you're going to raise a prayer of gratitude to a higher power and layer spiritual meaning onto music, best not belabor the point. In the case of A Love Supreme, that kind of brevity also extended to the recording process. The album was tracked in one day—December 9, 1964—by Rudy Van Gelder in his studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; Van Gelder also mixed the album. A composed (rather than purely improvised) four-part suite ("Acknowledgement," "Resolution," "Pursuance/Part 4," and "Psalm"), it exudes a certain hypnotic aura. It draws the listener in with an entrancing spirituality, its fealty to love and a higher power. Finally, the incisive, same-page playing of bassist Jimmy Garrison, drummer Elvin Jones, and pianist McCoy Tyner is almost supernatural.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #46: Chronic Jazz from Craft Recordings & ECM
Ken Micallef  |  Sep 20, 2023  | 
Today's scrappy record labels understand that an intimate brand connection captures consumers. Every major label has its own boutique imprints, from Columbia's Legacy to Blue Note's Tone Poet and Classic Vinyl. Craft Recordings, the catalog label for Concord, is set up well for achieving such a connection, since the parent company also owns Fania, Prestige, Milestone, Pablo, Telarc, Vanguard, Concord Jazz, and Riverside (not to mention Stax, Rounder, and Sugar Hill). For vinyl reissues, that's the jazz motherlode.

Craft created Jazz Dispensary to reissue some of this music, with shall we say uplifting goals: "With jazz as its source, ... Jazz Dispensary blurs boundaries and opens minds to the psychoactive potential of music, introducing a new generation to the grooves that elevated the hippest heads of the '60s and '70s." One Jazz Dispensary review copy came with branded rolling papers.

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Revinylization
Revinylization #45: Charles Mingus's Changes: The Complete 1970s Atlantic Studio Recordings
Robert Baird  |  Sep 05, 2023  | 
The standup bass genius and jazz force of nature Charles Mingus made his first album for Atlantic Records, Pithecanthropus Erectus, in 1956. Several of his most memorable musical masterpieces, including The Clown (1957), Blues and Roots (1960), and Oh Yeah (1962), followed as he intermittently returned to the label throughout the 1960s and early '70s. Beginning in 1974 with Mingus Moves, the cigarillo-chomping, famously gruff Mingus recorded most of his final albums for the label as he progressed from composer/player to wheelchair-bound writer and musical director. His final seven studio albums for the label and a single LP of outtakes, all freshly remastered, comprise this welcome 8-LP (or 7-CD) box-set addition to the Mingus oeuvre.
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Revinylization
Revinylization #44: Little Feat's evolution in two classic albums
Tom Fine  |  Jul 25, 2023  | 
Little Feat's beginning was a slow burn, bolstered by the faith of record company execs as the band found its groove. Once it found its, um, feat, the band thrived through deaths and other turmoil. In fact, they're still at it. This fall, according to Rhino Records, the band will be performing "on back-to-back nights ... at selected venues" the two albums that document the time they found their way: 1972's Sailin' Shoes and 1973's Dixie Chicken.

In conjunction with that 50th anniversary mini-tour, Rhino has issued deluxe remasters of both albums on 3 LPs or 2 CDs, with plenty of bonus material and a previously unissued live show with each album. On the LP sets, the two original albums were remastered by Bernie Grundman "from the flat master tapes," according to Steve Woolard, Rhino's head of A&R. Plating and pressing was done at Precision Record Pressing in Ontario, Canada. Rhino was kind enough to send me both the LP and CD sets so that I could compare the sound and presentation.

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