Word: albums
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MILES DAVIS: SORCERER (Columbia). Whether scaling the heights or sighing from the depths, Miles's slender, wavery trumpet tone never loses its quirky cool. Always listening intently to his direction are wizard apprentices, sorcerers in their own right. Tenorman Wayne Shorter composed four tunes on the album, notably the tense and shadowy Prince of Darkness. Drummer Tony Williams contributes a mysterious ballad as well as his inspired, erratic drum effects. Bassist Ron Carter lays the undertone for Pianist Herbie Hancock's inimitable brush strokes of color, while Miles quavers the quintessential, kaleidoscopic themes...
JACKIE McLEAN: NEW AND OLD GOSPEL (Blue Note). That hardy musical ghost, gospel, is summoned once again for this session. Its vibrations materialize most happily in a church-spirited composition by Ornette Coleman, who simply plays trumpet on this album. In Altoist McLean's four-part piece Lifeline, though, these vibrations become only the merest echo, as the group slides into the "new gospel" of freedom. Here McLean's quintet (Lamont Johnson on piano; Scott Holt, bass; Billy Higgins, drums) wheels uninhibitedly through the cycle of human experiences, expressing exultation with rollicking riffs, wonder with gentle breathings, anxiety...
Rounding out the package are the Schoenberg piano works, which Gould plays with the sense of divine order and mystery that Gieseking used to bring to Debussy; an excellent stereo rechanneling of the album that launched Gould's recording career 13 years ago, the Goldberg Variations ("In those days, my tempi were souped up and rather breakneck"); and a conversation LP in which he admits that his nine years as a recitalist were "rather unpleasant, rather traumatic." In the time since, Gould says that he has had "four of the best years of my life." It hasn...
Like so many rock troubadours, S. & G. see pain in the affluent society-in alienation, lack of communication, insincerity, mindless cocktail-hour chatter-but they succeed with these tattered themes by understating them rather than by reviling them. In Punky's Dilemma, in their latest album, Bookends, they even take up the subject of draft evasion, but gently, gently. The song begins innocently: "Wish I was a Kellogg's Cornflake floatin' in my bowl takin' movies/ Relaxin' awhile, livin' in style, talkin' to a raisin who 'casion'ly plays...
...evening is essentially a family album of George M. Cohan's music. This may be the only musical at which the audience comes into the theater humming the songs. They hold up remarkably well, even though they celebrate the memory of a simple, ardent and unskeptical U.S. that no longer exists. No one now can summon up the unblemished patriotic fervor of You're a Grand Old Flag, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Over There. Few men now can adorn a woman in the romantic gauze and adoring awe of a song like Mary. Every addicted New Yorker...