The Now Spinning/Recent Purchases Thread

[Bobberman]

As a former Trumpet player The only thing I hated what the fact when the sound got bubbly I knew I had to release the dreaded spit valves and during school band practice we were taught to do it in a way that didn't Freak everybody out. Thankfully some of us kept a dry cloth handy

 

[DeeInKY]

Kinda off topic but it was a hoot at the time... When going through some stuff in my brother's house we found a trumpet (who knew). The kids were about to blow their brains out trying to play it. Finally my niece (self taught brass player) showed them how. She hadn't played in years but was able to play a song for them. She was second chair in school (much to the consternation of all the guys ) and could also play French horn and sax.

 

[Rudy]

Here is something totally out of left field. Back story--we toured GM Studios in 1971, where my cousin was an engineer. After we saw all of the equipment, he took us to a storage room that was stacked high with boxes of promo 45s from all sorts of labels. In hindsight, I don't recognize most of the names of the bands and artists we picked up, but a few of those singles stood out. One that stood out for me was this particular single I'm featuring here.

After parting ways with Motown, the Holland-Dozier-Holland team struck out on their own and started both Hot Wax Records (who had a #1 hit with "Want Ads" by the Honey Cone) and Invictus Records. One of the other groups on Invictus was a band named Lucifer, and this single (of which I have a couple of copies--we ended up with quite a few duplicates) named "Bloodshot Eyes" kind of stood out. I later found out it was a cover version of an old R&B tune from decades ago, covered by Wynonie Harris. Others have made versions of it.

I haven't been able to dig out the single, but found the longer stereo LP version on YouTube:



At 4:19, listen for the "On the good ship lollipop..." section. Keep in mind that I'd only heard this on older record players and never really understood what they are actually saying here.

 

[Rudy]

Working from home today...so the tubes are warming up to this one:



Sadly it's the original CD version, one of the first three I bought back around 1982-1983-ish. Needs a bit of a remastering. I don't think it's ever had another release past this one! Wish I still had my original vinyl on this one.

Still, it's a Quincy Jones production, so it has a certain vibe to it I've always liked. Very much in line with what he was doing around the time this was released. Stylistically this is just prior to Benson going to his full-on R&B/pop mode. In addition to the title track, "Love Time Love" and "Star of a Story" had a lot of local airplay on the R&B stations.

 

[Harry]

The only thing I have from that album is the promo single of the title track with mono on the flip side:

 

[Bobberman]

Working from home today...so the tubes are warming up to this one:



Sadly it's the original CD version, one of the first three I bought back around 1982-1983-ish. Needs a bit of a remastering. I don't think it's ever had another release past this one! Wish I still had my original vinyl on this one.

Still, it's a Quincy Jones production, so it has a certain vibe to it I've always liked. Very much in line with what he was doing around the time this was released. Stylistically this is just prior to Benson going to his full-on R&B/pop mode. In addition to the title track, "Love Time Love" and "Star of a Story" had a lot of local airplay on the R&B stations.

I own this CD version and I do have a few favorite standouts the title track ( in its entirety) plus two instrumentals " Off Broadway" and "Dinorah Dinorah" although I do enjoy most of his vocal hits I was more of A Fan of His Instrumentals after this release almost every other album Benson made had fewer instrumentals and eventually none by the end of the decade. But then in 1993 came "Love Remembers" which was more of A Return to form".

 

[Rudy]

I wasn't a fan of Benson's albums that were primarily vocals--not that he was a bad vocalist, but I tended to listen to someone like, say, Luther Vandross because he was primarily a vocalist. And some of Benson's material was lightweight at times in the vocal department. I saw Benson in concert on his tour for the Tenderly album, where he sang pop standards--he still played a lot of the old tunes like "Off Broadway" and the encore was of course "On Broadway" (completely with a little rap section he threw in for humor).

A compilation of his instrumental tracks from those years might actually be a cool idea.

I think my most recent favorite was his Absolute Benson album, which brings to mind something like a modernized version of Breezin'. He only does a few scattered vocal parts on a few tracks, and the rest is all instrumental.

 

[Bobberman]

I wasn't a fan of Benson's albums that were primarily vocals--not that he was a bad vocalist, but I tended to listen to someone like, say, Luther Vandross because he was primarily a vocalist. And some of Benson's material was lightweight at times in the vocal department. I saw Benson in concert on his tour for the Tenderly album, where he sang pop standards--he still played a lot of the old tunes like "Off Broadway" and the encore was of course "On Broadway" (completely with a little rap section he threw in for humor).

A compilation of his instrumental tracks from those years might actually be a cool idea.

I think my most recent favorite was his Absolute Benson album, which brings to mind something like a modernized version of Breezin'. He only does a few scattered vocal parts on a few tracks, and the rest is all instrumental.

My most recent favorite Benson goes a little further back with his 1993 release (the aformentioned " Love Remembers") which has a few vocal tracks and mostly instrumentals up to that point it was the first time in years since he included any instrumentals on his albums I have the deluxe edition of Breezin CD with the bonus tracks Shark Bite and an early studio version of Down Here on The Ground ( which he would cover later on "Weekend in LA" WHICH I also love) When he allows himself to Benson can Really go go go on his guitar.i first heard him when his version of"On Broadway" was getting tons of Radio airplay in 1978 I really liked his style of guitar playing especially scat singing with his guitar notes in unison which has been His Trademark. Still awesome after all these years

 

[Rudy]

Taking a break from Bela Bartok, and have this one playing (as part of the 10-CD Art of Bernard Haitink set):



Symphony No 9, to be exact.

It's interesting to note a rather obtuse connection to A&M. In 1980, his Festive Overture in A major was used as the theme for the 1980 Summer Olympics.

 

[DeeInKY]

Listening to Harry Connick, Jr.’s Chanson du Vieux Carre. I think my favorite here is “Bourbon Street Parade.” This CD is recorded LOUD. First time the brass section kicked in I about jumped out the window.

 

[Rudy]

I haven't heard that one yet, but I've liked some of Connick's records.

I've been too tied up in the Olympics during the evenings. CBC has been broadcasting them for most hours of the day, with relatively few commercials, so it has been a great way to catch the evenings. I also DVR them on the server so I can fast forward to the overnight events I miss.

Being the CBC, a lot of the coverage is Canada-centric (and I'll admit I root for them), but I don't mind, as for me it's more about the athletes and events than the countries they are from. I fixed a couple of things here and am now getting a nice strong signal from Amherstberg, Ontario (to my south).

 

[Rudy]

Back to the music--the Olympic flame is out, and the music is on!

Got this truly excellent slab o' wax spinning at the moment. It's got a strong soul/blues vibe that throws back to the 60s in terms of feel. This is the good stuff--if anyone doubts there is any good music being recorded today, this record is just the ticket.

Here's a bit of a blurb from the Daptone Records site:

James Hunter has certainly paid his dues. Over the span of 30 years, he’s worked on the railway, busked in the streets of London, provided backup vocals and guitar for Van Morrison, played clubs and theatres all over the world, written scores of original songs, and recorded some of the most original and honest rhythm & soul albums of the last two decades. By 2006, Hunter was recognized with nominations for a GRAMMY® Award (“Best Traditional Blues Album” for People Gonna Talk -Rounder) and an American Music Award (“Best New/Emerging Artist”). He and his band then hit the road for a decade of extensive touring and recorded three additional critically-acclaimed studio albums— The Hard Way (Concord), Minute by Minute (Concord) and Hold On! (Daptone). By 2016, MOJO magazine had crowned him “The United Kingdom’s Greatest Soul Singer.”On February 2, 2018, renowned soul label Daptone Records released James Hunter’s most ambitious album to date, Whatever It Takes, offering ten new and original songs written by Hunter and recorded live to 8-track tape by Daptone's two-time GRAMMY® Award-winning Gabriel Roth.
​

Check out the title track!

 

[Rudy]

In addition to the above, another Daptone release that I have on preorder is by Cuban band Orquesta Akokan. They have a 45RPM single out at the moment, but I'm holding out for the whole mojito here. The sound is almost a throwback to the sound of Perez Prado (with occasional vocalist Beny Moré), spun through a bit of a soul filter along the way. Can't wait to hear this record!

Check out the A-side of their 45:



Great shtuff!

 

[Rudy]

Got this truly excellent slab o' wax spinning at the moment. It's got a strong soul/blues vibe that throws back to the 60s in terms of feel. This is the good stuff--if anyone doubts there is any good music being recorded today, this record is just the ticket.

As I spin this again, I should say that the music here is some good old-fashioned honest music-making. There's just something here that is missing in much of the new music being released today. Maybe an authenticity of sorts? I can't put my finger on it. I won't say it's stuck in the past, but I would say that it easily could have been recorded in the 60s or 70s and fit right in perfectly. This also doesn't suffer from "digital-itis". It's not the overly pristine and sterile sound we associate with recordings from the past couple of decades, and it's also not brickwalled to where everything is the exact same volume level throughout. There is just that tiny bit of noise or "grit" that adds warmth to these records.

 

[Rudy]

The lead-off track, "The Return of Per Ulv," is what drew me to Terje Rypdal, and this album--If Mountains Could Sing. It is very much in the ECM mold.





I know Wikipedia is hardly a trusted source but from what I gather, Per Ulv is the Norwegian name for Wile E. Coyote. (This is hardly a "coyote" sounding track though!) Another track on the album is called "One for the Roadrunner," so maybe there is some truth to that.

 

[Mike Blakesley]

Still, it's a Quincy Jones production, so it has a certain vibe to it I've always liked.

I never thought Quincy Jones got his due as a shaper of an artist's sound. Some producers, you can tell their productions right away and he's one of them. The Michael Jackson records are a prime example. When he split with Jones, his music definitely got more "street" but the sound was not near as polished and, to my ears at least, not as appealing. Critics always gave Michael about half the credit for the way his records sounded, but I think Quincy was more than 50% responsible -- you can tell just by listening to the post-Jones albums.

 

[Rudy]

Critics always gave Michael about half the credit for the way his records sounded, but I think Quincy was more than 50% responsible -- you can tell just by listening to the post-Jones albums.

Michael brought the perfoming talent; Quincy provided the much-needed polish.

I have a feeling Michael had so much success by that point that he figured he could do his own producing, and didn't need Q anymore. I found Dangerous to be nearly unlistenable. It was just a lot of loud music to me, really not sounding much different from other music I didn't care for. Q's production added a much-needed flow and slickness to the proceedings--he brought all of his influences together in everything he produced. (Q's big band albums, and his arranging with the Basie band that appeared on so many albums, have more than a few similarities to what he would apply to his pop record productions.) The albums by The Jacksons around the same time as OTW/Thriller/Bad were actually pretty good though, even though Q didn't produce those. Triumph in fact was probably the high point for me, with Destiny not too far behind. Classic R&B grooves there, which I'm not even tired of all these years later! The 12" singles are very hard to find now--they are still in demand.

 

[Rudy]

This is unusual, yet fascinating as well.. Nik Bärtsch's Ronin has been together for over a decade, and this is a 2008 recording I discovered through a 2008-ish documentary (Sounds and Silence: Travels with Manfred Eicher) about ECM's founder/producer, Manfred Eicher. Ronin...and Holon (this album) are...indescribable. Bärtsch has called it "zen funk" but it also borrows from classical, techno, jazz, and it's all acoustic (Bärtsch is on piano). It's hypnotic and trance-like, but also groove-oriented and organic.

OK, I give up. I'll let Thom Jurek's review highlight some of the traits (Stoa refers to the album immediately preceding Holon, which this review is about):

When Stoa was issued in 2006, it was like this startling blast of air. Was it jazz? Was it minimalist classical music? Was it acoustic techno? Bärtsch calls it "zen funk." OK, fair enough, but in actuality, while it bears traces and borrows elements from all of the aforementioned genres, Ronin is its own animal, its own sound, its own complex yet utterly accessible musical identity or, better, brand.
......
Stoa revealed the taut, interlocking pulses, rhythms, and grooves, all stacked atop one another with nearly mathematical precision. Given the trance-like nature of some of it, it was easy to get hypnotized and allow its subtler elements, those having to do with improvisation, however tightly scripted, into the various sections of its numbered "moduls," as Bärtsch calls his compositions, as if they are all of a piece.
......
Most of these players have been with Bärtsch since the beginning and as a unit have learned to trust one another to keep frames in this music while allowing for a certain looseness that makes it more physical, more driven, and consequently more intuitive and intimate... ...... Basslines and percussive elements are rumbling under, pushing toward who knows what, but it's going somewhere. It actually "rocks" more than rolls, but the tension is exquisite, so much so that when Pupato introduces a cowbell and some other brighter percussion instruments in certain places, it startles the listener, like a minor shock. It is only then one realizes that the groove is mutated, shifted, turned toward another rhythmic sphere -- Meyer's carrying more notes in his groove now -- another set of pitches and contrasts and groove without the pulse seeming to change at all.​

One interesting thing to see in the video is that Bärtsch plays with the piano lid open, not just for the sonics. He dampens some of the notes with his free hand on one track; on another, he "strums" across the strings in the piano like a harp.

 

[Rudy]

I've been spinning a couple more of Nik Bärtsch's recordings, plus I've also been dipping deeper into Ralph Towner's recordings. He is part of the long-running group Oregon, and has also recorded many solo records with ECM Records. I've had Solstice for a few years, but lately I've been fond of Open Letter, which features Towner on his nylon-string guitar and synthesizers, and it features Peter Erskine on percussion and drums. This has an earlier version of "Nightfall" which appeared on my favorite Oregon album Northwest Passage produced two years later (1994). It is aptly named--it actually does sound like the darkness of evening creeping up on you. The chords Towner plays are haunting.

 

[Rudy]

"Modul 46" (from my post above re: Nik Bärtsch's Ronin):



It would make a great soundtrack for something...

 

[Rudy]

A total about-face. Someone asked me if I had the recent Kraftwerk "3-D" box set. No, not here. But it made me dust off my copy of the Computer World record. The tracks "Pocket Calculator" and "Numbers/Computer World 2" (featured below, courtesy of our YouTube pal Slayd5000) received a lot of airplay here back in the day. It's about as "electronic" as music can get! But if you know Kraftwerk, this is totally their sound.

 

[Bobberman]

A total about-face. Someone asked me if I had the recent Kraftwerk "3-D" box set. No, not here. But it made me dust off my copy of the Computer World record. The tracks "Pocket Calculator" and "Numbers/Computer World 2" (featured below, courtesy of our YouTube pal Slayd5000) received a lot of airplay here back in the day. It's about as "electronic" as music can get! But if you know Kraftwerk, this is totally their sound.

I remember Kraftwerk's" Pocket Calculator" which I first heard on ( of all places") The Doctor Demento show but I liked the song and some of their other songs interesting listening to be sure.

 

[Rudy]

I remember Kraftwerk's" Pocket Calculator" which I first heard on ( of all places") The Doctor Demento show but I liked the song and some of their other songs interesting listening to be sure.

Of all the stations we had, this one played heavily on the dance/funk station we had in town (WLBS). I have to say that their program director really liked to mix things up. Heck, if it weren't for that station, I probably never would have listened to The Police, as they played "Voices Inside My Head" in regular rotation there for a month or two.

Between WLBS and WJZZ, we had a lot of good music in town. Slayd5000 is "slaying" me right now, in fact. This one was a popular dance tune LBS played heavily back in the day:



And on JZZ, this Ronnie Laws track was a constant on their playlist (a few times per week, even long after the record was released):



Lots of good memories. And I get the feeling Slayd5000 is one of my brothers from another mother.

 

[Bobberman]

Of all the stations we had, this one played heavily on the dance/funk station we had in town (WLBS). I have to say that their program director really liked to mix things up. Heck, if it weren't for that station, I probably never would have listened to The Police, as they played "Voices Inside My Head" in regular rotation there for a month or two.

Between WLBS and WJZZ, we had a lot of good music in town. Slayd5000 is "slaying" me right now, in fact. This one was a popular dance tune LBS played heavily back in the day:



And on JZZ, this Ronnie Laws track was a constant on their playlist (a few times per week, even long after the record was released):



Lots of good memories. And I get the feeling Slayd5000 is one of my brothers from another mother.

I like Ronnie Laws music too I enjoy his album Flame which was the first l.p. I owned by him By The way Friends and strangers was written by Dave Grusin and the aforementioned Grusin covered it on his 1980 album " Mountain Dance" and both versions and artists are Great. Fond memories of my younger days

 

[Rudy]

"Always There" was also played often. I don't have any of the albums, but I did get a compilation CD many years ago that had a handful I recognized. A local TV station used the opening measures of "Always There" (with the clavinet) as bumper music during their news broadcasts. I'm pretty sure that at the same time, they were using the last 30 seconds or so of Henry Mancini's "Symphonic Soul" (from the same-named album) as their news broadcast's theme song.

Speaking of TV news show themes, our ABC affiliate used a heavily edited version of "Tar Sequence" from the film Cool Hand Luke (music by Lalo Schifrin) for very many years. In later years, they had someone slightly rewrite that edited version and expand on it. Other stations around the country used the same theme--it may have originated at WABC in NYC, aka the "Eyewitness News Theme."

Schifrin's original:


The edit: