Slippin’ & Eliding…
Some quick thoughts about new releases in heavy rotation around here….
Say what you want about The Hold Steady–its songs adhere to formula; the band’s a bunch of 30something, retro classic rockers–the group’s appeal ain’t nostalgic and the new album Stay Positive is just plain excellent. Full of hooky, guitar driven rock songs with the kind of closely observed lyrics that linger….
Two Men with the Blues, Willie Nelson’s and Wynton Marsalis’ fantastic set of blues, standards and Willie originals recorded live last January at Jazz at Lincoln Center is worth the price of admission. More to come about this and about Joe Nick Patoski’s excellent new Willie Nelson biography, but Willie’s a direct tie back to the fertile Texas soil of the 1930s which gave us Western Swing. Also great listening is a recent, digital only reissue of a 1966 Willie show at Panther Hall in Texas Live Country Music Concert….
Jenny Scheinmanis the musican I’ve been dreaming of: quirky, ambitious, and as deeply steeped in the vocabulary of American vernacular music as anyone working today…
Art Yard’s latest Sun Ra concert issue–Media Dream–is a beautiful thing. Like Disco 3000:The Complete Milan Concert before it, the two-disk set pulls material recorded live in the late 1970s with a small band (tenor, trumpet, drums, and Sun Ra) during Ra’s Italian sojurn. The music was culled for a number of hard to find and somewhat disjointed Saturn LPs but these new issues from Art Yard are revelations. Both are major additions to the Sun Ra canon.
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