Steve Albini: Serve The Servants
InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Robert Baird | May 29, 2018 | 11 comments
Notoriously opinionated and obstinate Steve Albini, a guy ever vigilant and vocal about the wicked ways of the music business, showing up in Austin, Texas, at the annual South by Southwest festival? This I had to see. After a near-miss at his Austin hotel, we spoke the next morning on the phone.
"It was unspeakable on all levels, as bad as I imagined, and in some ways worse."
Any notion that he'd somehow softened, somehow accepted the music biz as it—
Wait. What the hell am I thinking?
Recording of June 2018: After Bach
Robert Baird | May 18, 2018 | 3 comments
Brad Mehldau: After Bach
Brad Mehldau, piano
Nonesuch 7559-79318-0 (CD). 2018. Robert Hurwitz, exec. prod.; Tom Korkidis, prod. coord.; Tom Lazarus, eng., mix, mastering; Brad Montgomery, mix. ADD? TT: 69:24
Performance *****
Sonics *****
That American jazz pianist Brad Mehldau has made a recording of J.S. Bach's music should come as no great surprise to anyone who's followed his extraordinarily varied career. In many ways, it seems a natural progression.
Having become one of the most important jazz pianists of this century, and dabbled in classical-flavored music, film scores, and even performances of popular music (by Oasis Soundgarden and Nick Drake, to name just a few of the artists he's covered), Mehldau has finally gotten around to recording this album of five pieces by one of the greatest keyboard improvisers in history. Mehldau's method here is to play a more or less straight version of a Bach prelude or fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 846–893, followed by his own "After Bach" reimagining of the same piece.
National Sawdust: An Artistic Incubator
Music and Recording Features
Saturday night in hipster Brooklyn . . . yet there could have been actual sawdust on the floor. Inside National Sawdust, a youngish crowd, many clearly ready to party, were shuffling, some were full-blown jitterbugging, while onstage the Lost Bayou Ramblers, a progressive young Cajun band who'd at first seemed a bit awed by their futuristic surroundings, were slugging beers, sawing a fiddle, squeezing an accordion, and generally finding their groove.
Todd Rundgren's 1972 Classic
Robert Baird | Mar 29, 2018 | 8 comments
Something/Anything? reissued on SACD.
Moby: Sound of Mind
Robert Baird | Mar 27, 2018 | 14 comments
The loudness wars are over. The valiant but hopelessly outnumbered forces that stood against squashing the dynamics and life out of recordings, all in the name of almighty loudness, have been vanquished. Scattered across the smoking battlefield are the lifeless bodies of thousands of disappointed listeners, many so young they will never now know what it's like to hear a natural, uncompressed recording.
Wes Montgomery Redux
Paris '65 in stunning sound, the Resonance Reissue...
A Nasty Gal!
A controversial funk collectible gets a heavyweight LP reissue.
Bettye LaVette: Things Will Change
In her wild ride of a memoir, A Woman Like Me (2012), eclectic soul and R&B singer Bettye LaVette spoke of being hung over a 20th-floor balcony of a Manhattan skyscraper by her pimp boyfriend. She revealed that she'd slept with Ben E. King and Otis Redding, and had even spent a minute dabbling in prostitution. She had dropped acid with George Clinton. Finally, she had her moment of satisfaction when she delivered a knockout performance of the Who's "Love, Reign O'er Me" at the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors. In the audience, all agog, were Beyoncé, Barbra Streisand, and Aretha Franklin, all more successful than she.
Hotel California Turns Forty
Robert Baird | Feb 24, 2018 | 12 comments
Hi-Rez and Surround-Sound mixes included in Deluxe Edition boxed set.
Recording of March 2018: Stardust
Robert Baird | Feb 13, 2018 | 8 comments
Willie Nelson: Stardust
Columbia/Analogue Productions AAPP 116-45 (2 45rpm LPs). 1978/2017. Booker T. Jones, prod.; Donivan Cowart, Bradley Hartman, engs.; Bernie Grundman, mastering. AAA. TT: 43:28
In Nashville in the early 1960s, Willie Nelson hit his low point. He'd failed at singing and writing country music, and one snowy night, after a liberal drowning of his troubles at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, he decided to totter outside and lie down in the middle of Lower Broadway. In subsequent retellings of the tale, he's always maintained that he wasn't trying to kill himself. For that, he had a pistol.