Man, every time I hear a new Jarrett piece it becomes all I want to listen to for a month. This is really fantastic. I don't know if anything will top Köln for me, but this is very good.
I’ve got the Koln concert on my list for the end of the month, haven’t heard anything from him before - but very excited to get to it!
Realizing in hindsight that while trying to pick deep cuts that intrigue me is fun for me, it also means I’m not going to end up engaged in too many conversations about them cause nobody’s going to have heard them. Might need to consider that as a factor next year
Today was Showcase by Patsy Cline, with The Jordanaires as her backing vocal group, released in 1961, and one of only three albums released in her lifetime. I was expecting something in the same sort of area as George Jones, proper traditional, solid country, but there's plenty of little light jazz and swing elements to this, with string elements and the almost gospel esque backing group, blending in with familiar country style storytelling. A few tracks I recognised here, including Walkin' After Midnight, which really brought back some childhood memories for me.
Today is Grinderman, Nick Cave’s bluesy garage rock side project from 2007, and this is great fun. I’ve got quite into Nick Cave in the last few years, particularly his more recent albums, which is very thoughtful and elusive at times, so it’s fun to see him just blast through tracks called “No Pussy Blues”, no fuss, no fat and high energy. A completely different vibe to what I’ve been enjoying from Nick Cave, but it’s great to hear him much looser and scrappy - a proper late night blues record. Slightly related to this record, here’s a great response from Cave to a 62 year old fan of his asking if he should learn guitar; https://www.theredhandfiles.com/learn-how-to-play-guitar/ I find that very inspirational - love that.
Had never heard of this record or artist at all, but just read up on its rediscovery now, sounds really interesting! I love hearing about stuff like this, albums unnoticed and lost for decades getting a resurgence and recognition a long time later. The description of the music doesn’t particularly excite me - but will definitely mark it down to check out because of the story!
Man theses fuckin Sun Bear tapes are 6 hours long I'm still listening. I'm gonna have to cut them short to get other artists in
I’ll be honest, it strikes me more as something I’d return to for nice background listening while grading than active listening, but in that context it’s pretty lovely.
Today was Barrington Levy’s album Englishman from 1979, it’s a reggae / dancehall album, and it’s alright! He has a good voice, and the instrumentation is funky. It did slightly blend into one by the mid way mark, but it found a nice groove and stuck with it. Reggae is still a big blind spot for me, and while there was nothing here that made me want to re-listen immediately, this was nice enough.
Playing catch up after the weekend, today I listened to New Standards Vol 1 produced by Terri Lyne Carrington, with a deliberately selected set of compositions, written by women. I feel like I don’t really have the vocabulary for jazz sometimes, but I enjoyed this for the most part. The few songs that had a bit more of a tribal influence in particular standing out.
Was at a bachelor party over the weekend and fell way behind on this. The prospect of catching up seems a little daunting! Might just take my time with it and not worry about going into March with some of my picks.