The Now Spinning/Recent Purchases Thread

Some of the tracks from Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On? were cut at United here in Detroit, along with Hitsville USA and a couple other places.

OK, OK, I know it's not the greatest album in recorded history, but this has a few interesting cuts (including one that got some minor airplay on the funk stations locally, "Body Language," and of course the Mercury/Bowie "Under Pressure" collab) that I don't mind spinning once in a great while:

upload_2017-3-2_16-8-33.png

So then I have to do a little cleansing with this one:

upload_2017-3-2_16-9-58.png

:laugh:
 
I picked up a couple of interesting CDs recently. The first is actually something a friend sent to me by a trumpeter named John Daversa, who has this progressive big band and recorded a live album called Kaleidoscope Eyes, which is an all Beatles tribute. This thing is intense and requires some real listening, but it's really, really good. Here's a clip of "I Saw Her Standing There":



The other CD is a reissue of an album where Pat Senatore was the leader of a trio that also featured pianist Cedar Walton and drummer Billy Higgins. The original album from 1988 was called simply Standard Album. The reissue is called The V.I.P. Trio Standards:

standards.jpg


The original cover from 1988:
standards.jpg
 
While browsing the Soundstage Direct site this morning, I noticed that ECM is doing a 180g reissue of Solstice by Ralph Towner--it is available for preorder. Since my vinyl copy is flawless, I likely will stick with it. I'm giving the CD rip a spin right now on the desktop system.

I'm going to follow that up with Batik, another ECM release that features Towner, Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette.

upload_2017-3-5_20-17-19.png upload_2017-3-5_20-17-39.png

Gomez and DeJohnette are also featured in the trio with Bill Evans on the recent release Some Other Time: The Lost Session from the Black Forest. As this was a very short-lived version of the Trio, this is their only studio recording together. The only other appearance of this configuration on record is their live gig At the Montreux Jazz Festival on Verve. I listened to these late last week.
 
71ebpzaF5sL._SL1200_.jpg
Truly excellent new CD from former A&M artiste Rick Wakeman, "Piano Portraits", a mixture of pop songs and classics played on solo piano by a true craftsman. Currently #1 in Amazon's solo piano chart and #15 in the Top 100 albums. Which is quite an achievement for a solo piano album these days!
 
This afternoon I dug out Count Basie's April in Paris and gave that a listen. It's just such a lush sound.
 
This afternoon I dug out Count Basie's April in Paris and gave that a listen. It's just such a lush sound.
One more, once? :D I saw the Basie band around 1990 and they still did the same "One more time!" routine all those years later. Freddie Green was still with them at the time.
 
This evening's spin. Nice tunes on this one. Been a while since I've given it a listen.

upload_2017-3-11_20-43-27.png

The short work "The Unanswered Question" from this Charles Ives album is one of those things that I can't really tell if I like it or not. :laugh: It certainly is one of the more unusual modern orchestral works I have heard.

upload_2017-3-11_20-46-1.png

And to keep the evening totally off-balance, I give you...

upload_2017-3-11_20-47-20.png

Cameo's Alligator Woman, the title track being a minor hit locally. This predated the hit "Word Up!".

And I still have to work the rest of the way through the 20-disc Bernard Haitink The Philips Years set on Tidal. :D
 
One more, once? :D I saw the Basie band around 1990 and they still did the same "One more time!" routine all those years later. Freddie Green was still with them at the time.

Nothing like running a bit into the ground. :D
 
Funny you guys mentioned this, as I watched "Blazing Saddles" the other night.
That is exactly where I first heard the song and my older sister took me to see that movie when it was in the theaters. I became a diehard Mel Brooks fan ever since.and Blazing Saddles is still one of my all time favorite movies
 
Releasing officially on March 17 (or, in about 42 minutes :shh: ):

91jeazfEHxL._SX425_.jpg


I'm up to track 8, "Poison Heart." This is perhaps one of the heaviest and most topical DM albums they have ever made. At least they can be topical without being as embarrassingly bad as Bacharach's "Who Are These People?". They leave interpretation up to the listener.

The tour will be here in late August, but the cheapest pavilion seats left were just under $250 each. :bigeyes: Lawn seats are ~$40. But if it rains, you're SOL. And wet.
 
Steely Dan's Pretzel Logic. Many of the cuts received so much air time back in the day that I never owned a copy until about two years ago. I think my favorite is Night by Night. That guitar just gets into your head.
 
Steely Dan's Pretzel Logic. Many of the cuts received so much air time back in the day that I never owned a copy until about two years ago. I think my favorite is Night by Night. That guitar just gets into your head.
I didn't listen to much radio back in those days, but I know classic rock stations here never touched this one. They tended to play mostly "Do It Again" or "FM". I heard the original "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" a few months ago though--the Dan did a good job at pretty much recreating it note for note.
 
I didn't listen to much radio back in those days, but I know classic rock stations here never touched this one. They tended to play mostly "Do It Again" or "FM". I heard the original "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" a few months ago though--the Dan did a good job at pretty much recreating it note for note.
I'm surprised by this. We heard pretty much everything but "Through with Buzz", "Charlie Freak", and "Monkey in Your Soul" from the Cincinnati stations.
 
I'm surprised by this. We heard pretty much everything but "Through with Buzz", "Charlie Freak", and "Monkey in Your Soul" from the Cincinnati stations.
When it was first released, I wasn't a radio listener so I may have missed some of that. I don't even know if we had any good AOR stations here, back in the day. We had The Big 8 but they were very much single- and hit-driven, so at most they would have played "Rikki".
 
That reminds me that in the car this past week, I had been listening to AM 580, CKWW, "broadcasting from the legendary studios of The Big 8". :cool: Mostly a nostalgia/oldies format. CKLW (800) is now a talk radio format. At the time, my mother was a fan of WWJ (950), which was also a talk radio format back in the day, so we tended to have that on during the day at home, vs. the music stations.

We used to have a crap ton of rock stations though. WABX, WRIF and WWWW were big rock stations in town. WLLZ came along after WWWW switched to country. Hard rock stations came along late in the 80s and through the 90s (like The Bear). Classic rock came via WCSX which is a sister station of WRIF. And of course, WNIC, "Detroit's Nicest Rock." (Which was a trendy way of saying "pop music". :laugh: ) WRIF ("The Riff") was an AOR station for about 20 years, although their programming tended to lean towards the harder rock (I never heard them play Steely Dan).
 
That also reminds me that WILZ FM in Saginaw, MI is WHEELZ 104.5 "Classic Rock That Really Rocks" (since 2003)!! Matt Clark Sanford, MI
 
Reminds me of my misspent youth - one night there were 15 of us riding around in a shag carpet lined van blasting music. There were 13 girls and 2 guys. :D
 
Every parent's nightmare...the conversion van. :laugh: (Shag carpet also dates us, y'know. :D )

Anyway...does anyone remember this one?

upload_2017-3-19_22-0-33.png

Playing it at the moment, from SACD. Won a Grammy for best engineered recording. Not quite my cuppa tea, but it's sounding pretty good right now. There was a compilation of his that I liked better--Live from the Double Planet. It features the track "Because It's There," played on the harp guitar (six guitar strings, five bass strings).

 
Steely Dan's Pretzel Logic does contain two of their best known songs -- "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" and "Any Major Dude Will Tell You," which were released on both sides of the same single and they both got quite a bit of airplay back in the day and still do....Sirius's classic stations feature both songs ad nauseum.

My CDs of Herb Alpert's Beyond and Bullish showed up last week, so I'm currently spinning those a lot. I was disappointed in the sound of Beyond -- it's not as crystalline as the other reissues, to me anyway. Sounds like a thin blanket is in front of the speakers. I need to compare it to my homemade version of the album, which is a copy of the original A&M CD.
 
That harp guitar is amazing! I liked that song.

I have heard the hi-res of Beyond and thought it sounded good. I don't have the CD. Hmmm.

Speaking of shag carpeting... There was this club (read roadhouse) that we used to frequent that had red shag on the walls, so you know that was a quality establishment. :laugh:
 
Listening to "the (big) man" tonight. :D

upload_2017-3-23_20-46-39.png

Bought this one so long ago that I forgot which year it was--1979? 1980? It had been out a year or two before I picked it up. The track "Sha-La-La Means I Love You" played on a local "dance party" radio program back in the day, and I think that I must have made note of the artist and song title at the time to remember it. This one is like a cross between his Love Unlimited Orchestra (#1 hit with "Love's Theme" a few years earlier) with a bit of a Latin-themed workout and a party atmosphere.



Side one is the danceable side, where side two gets into the ballads. "September When I First Met You" and the bittersweet "Early Years" are nice. He also does a very effective cover of Billy Joel's "Just The Way You Are," and his one "gettin' busy with the ladies" song on this album, "It's Only Love Doing Its Thing," was actually covered by the group Simply Red, leading off their A New Flame album in the following decade.

That Simply Red album, by the way, closed with the excellent track "Enough," featuring a mid-song cameo from a rather famous jazz pianist...and I think I may spin that one next.

 
I have heard the hi-res of Beyond and thought it sounded good. I don't have the CD. Hmmm.
I'm not sure what it is... on the TJB CDs, I tend to use my more normal settings on my stereo, but on Beyond I had to crank the treble way higher than usual. (I do about 90% of my listening in my vehicle.)
 
It does have a slightly darker tonality than the albums it falls between. I actually noticed this on the LP version a few years back. The LP and hi-res versions are very close.
It's just the way some of the tracks are recorded. I personally prefer it left alone, than have the EQ tweaked in mastering, which causes more problems than it solves. That's why some systems have tone controls. :D
 
Back
Top Bottom