Reviews

Miles Davis – Tutu When I was in high school and discovering the music of Miles Davis, I had started with a Workin’ & Steamin’ two-pack album (1956) and the 1966 classic Miles Smiles. Then one of the first things I saw was Miles as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live in late 1981 playing Jean Pierre. The next day I bought ‘The Man With The Horn’ and ‘Live Evil’, meaning I had a cross section of his ‘first great quintet’, ‘second great quintet’, 70’s electric period, and his brand new release. I also quickly discovered that back in…

As we approach the holiday season, I have already started getting a deluge of emails about upcoming music releases for the Fall season – including Holiday albums and Greatest Hits collections. It brought my mind back to something I wrote for a long-defunct site back in 2005 at about the same time of year – and sadly it is more true than ever! At the time, there was a new release I had gotten as a gift right before reading the USA Today article mentioned below. Here we go: Six years ago USA Today ran an article called “‘Best Of’…

Welcome back to another edition of Music Diary Semi-Quavers, the quick-take reviews of recent releases. Last time I explored some recent pop & rock album releases, now I jump over to the world of jazz! And similar to before, when I say ‘jazz’, it can include just about anything in a very broad spectrum from traditional ragtime through swing, bebop, modal, free, fusion, post-bop mainstream, modern, smooth jazz and who knows what else. I believe there is good and bad music in every genre, and try not to bother too much with genre labels – though I obviously separate jazz…

100 Best of Blue Note Last Christmas I got a really cool gift – one that I have only now begun to use and appreciate. It was the massive 10-CD box set ‘100 Best of Blue Note’. As of right now I can only find the collection in MP3 format on Amazon and iTunes, with the CD collection still listed on the German Blue Note site. This is what you call ‘truth in advertising’ – the box consists of 100 tracks from the Blue Note collection of recordings, which theoretically spans from 1939 to the present, but much of which…