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Most Popular Featured Releases

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 May 2016

Columbia/Legacy Records 88875175862
Format: CD

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When singer Jeff Buckley drowned in 1997, he had only released one studio album, but it was a truly remarkable record. Released in 1994, Grace was beautiful and ambitious, embracing rock’s varied past while looking forward to its future. Boomers like me may have been drawn to it because of our affection for Buckley’s father, Tim, but as a songwriter and performer the younger Buckley was his own man. Jeff Buckley’s sad death at 30 was a depressing echo of his father’s own death at the age of just 28.

Read more: Jeff Buckley: "You and I"

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 April 2016

Phenix Phonograph
Format: CD

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A few months ago, a young friend posted a comment on Facebook that said Peter Frampton had taken one gimmick and made a career out of it. When I asked him what that gimmick was, he couldn’t really explain it, but he clearly meant the talk box Frampton used in his solo in “Do You Feel Like We Do,” known best in the live version from Frampton Comes Alive! (1976). An attentive listener would have picked up that the solo showed Frampton’s formidable skills as a guitarist.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 April 2016

Blue Note 61898
Format: CD

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Don Was, president of Blue Note Records, has been helping keep the label current by signing young musicians such as the pianist Robert Glasper. He’s also been keeping its history alive by bringing on musicians who are well established. In some cases, they have prior history with the label. Charles Lloyd, who released two discs on Blue Note in the last two years, had a brief association with the label in the 1980s. Dr. Lonnie Smith recorded four LPs for Blue Note in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and in 1995 the label released a 1970 Smith recording from its archives, Live at Club Mozambique.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 March 2016

Dry Wood Music 001
Format: CD

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I liked the cover of Wild Stab, the debut album by The I Don’t Cares -- it reminded me of something a mid-1960s garage band might have released on a regional label. I did a little research, and it turns out the album is a collaboration between Paul Westerberg and Juliana Hatfield, who has admired Westerberg’s songwriting since his days with the Replacements. The CD, released on Westerberg’s own Dry Wood Music label, lists no information. The liner notes inform us that “lack of factual info & pics courtesy of dry wood records [sic] who insist on making people use their imagination.”

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 March 2016

Eagle Vision EVB335309
Format: Blu-Ray

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Elvis Costello has been recording for nearly 40 years, which makes him even more venerable and established than the rock acts he and other punk and new wave musicians were rebelling against in the late 1970s. Since then, he’s cast his musical net wide, recording more than 25 pop albums notable for their stylistic variety and consistency of quality, and showing a willingness to venture into more ambitious territory. He co-composed and recorded a song cycle with the Brodsky String Quartet (The Juliet Letters, 1993), and composed and orchestrated a ballet score (Il Sogno, 2004).

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 February 2016

Eagle Vision EVB335159
Format: Blu-ray

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Irish blues guitarist Rory Gallagher was never the big star in the US that he could have been, largely because he didn’t spend much time touring here. He was as good a blues player as some of his better-known contemporaries -- so good that he was the guitarist on The London Muddy Waters Sessions, from 1972. Aside from the leader, he’s the best thing on that album.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 February 2016

S-Curve Records 7315500429
Format: CD

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The booklet for Tom Jones’s new disc, Long Lost Suitcase, is filled with pictures of the singer, from his childhood to his years as a hitmaker in the 1960s. The disc was released in conjunction with Jones’s autobiography, Over the Top and Back, and its songs encompass the many styles of music that have influenced him.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 January 2016

Blue Note B0023668-01
Format: LP

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Blue Note’s web page for its vinyl initiative, which began in March 2014, includes this hopeful statement from label president Don Was: “Although this program begins in celebration of Blue Note’s 75th Anniversary, our catalog runs so deep that we will faithfully be reissuing five albums a month for many years to come!” While I certainly hope this will turn out to be true, as I write this review in mid-December 2015, I don’t see any listings for releases after November 20. Since LP sales for 2014 totaled 14 million, there’s reason for the label to continue mining its deep catalog for more vinyl.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 January 2016

Legacy/Sony Music 88875150542
Format: CD

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When I was 12, two friends and I decided to start a rock’n’roll band. I had a cheap Woolworth guitar, my friend Brad played his brother’s set of Rogers drums, and his neighbor Kevin played a powder-blue Sekova hollow-body guitar. We didn’t have a bass player. The first song we learned had three chords. At that moment we joined kids around the world who, in the mid-to-late ’60s, were filling their parents’ basements and garages with the sound of “Gloria.”

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 December 2015

Provogue PRO 7463 5
Format: CD/DVD

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When I caught Robert Cray in concert about ten years ago, he played a very good, very professional show that somehow fell just short of being memorable. When I saw him last spring, he played a show that I’d rank among the best I’ve seen. At both events he was in good voice, his guitar playing was outstanding, and his band was on point. The difference was that indefinable quality that lifts a performance or a record from the level of routine into the category of special.