Widely agreed upon as technically perfect, this five-year-in-the-making collaboration among these Oprytown divas should be a diamond -- or three diamonds: a Trio II tiara. But this album, for all its harmonic, sopranic vibrato perfection, is not a glassy ride across the entire lake. Let Linda Ronstadt covet the tracks for her own album projects as ...
Bringing together Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, and Linda Ronstadt for the album Trio was a truly inspired idea, and not simply because they were three of the finest voices in country and pop music at the time. While a gifted entertainer, Parton is also a business-savvy professional who will willingly set aside her gifts as a pure country singer ...
What got into John Mayer? Sometime after the release of his 2003 sophomore album, Heavier Things, a perfectly pleasant affair that expanded on the dreamy, mellow adult pop of his breakthrough hit, "Your Body Is a Wonderland," he decided that he just didn't want to follow that direction anymore. He started penning a monthly column for Esquire ...
In that quintessential breakthrough year of modern jazz -- 1957 -- Norman Granz was fond of pairing the legendary drummerless trio of Oscar Peterson with several different stars from the Jazz at the Philharmonic concert series. In this case, Stan Getz is the nominee, and Granz could not have found a better match for the pianist alongside his ...
Verve's Master Edition of the Oscar Peterson Trio date released as Night Train includes stately covers of blues and R&B standards like "The Honeydripper," "C-Jam Blues," "Georgia on My Mind," "Bags' Groove," "Moten Swing," and "Things Ain't What They Used to Be." Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen provide tight accompaniment, and there are six previously ...
Trio Mediaeval is a group of three women from Norway who sing unaccompanied harmonies using medieval polyphony as a point of departure. Even given that we can never really know what 800-year-old music sounded like in its own time, it can be said that they remake medieval pieces according to their own wishes rather than researching their original ...
For fans of the innumerable Charlie Brown/Peanuts television specials, Charlie Brown's Holiday Hits is a true goldmine, providing an album's worth of previously unreleased material by pianist Vince Guaraldi, written and recorded for various specials over the years. Brand new, yet instantly familiar, Guaraldi's effortless combination of childlike ...
Cha-cha music at its Whitest and most easy listening-friendly, recorded for Capitol in the 1950s and 1960s by Dean Martin, Julie London, Billy May, Martin Denny, Les Baxter, Walter Wanderley, and a number of other performers who are only coming to light in the lounge revival. Yma Sumac, Perez Prado, and Tito Rodriguez add a little (a very little) ...
Some 13 years into his recording career, jazz pianist extraordinaire Bill Charlap's first live album is, perhaps, his most exquisite release to date. While virtually all of his studio albums more than adequately showcase Charlap's virtuosity, good taste, and ceaseless imagination at the keys, it took the spontaneity of the live performance -- at ...
Alkaline Trio added some extra gloom to pop-punk with their almost perfect debut, Goddamnit! Spinning tales of doomed romance, this Chicago three-piece hit too close to home with its stories of obsessive crushes, messy breakups, and alcoholism. Lyrically, Maybe I'll Catch Fire follows in the footsteps of Goddamnit!, while staying true to the ...
There are literally hundreds of muzak albums by the likes of 101 Strings, Ferrante & Teicher, and Mitch Miller. Each album has a theme, like 101 Strings Plays the Ramones or Ferrante & Teicher Salute Root Boy Slim & the Sex Change Band. Most of them are easily ignored. Every so often, however, a true gem arises from the fog. Norwegian Wood by Trio ...
A departure from the type of boring, innocuous elevator Muzak Earl Klugh is best known for, Earl Klugh Trio, Vol. 1 gives listeners a rare chance to hear the guitarist playing straight-ahead jazz. Some bebop musicians contend that playing dull background music year after year means you can kiss your bebop chops goodbye, but there's no evidence of ...
As part of its pact with Turner Entertainment, which controls the vaults of several of the great movie studios, Rhino Records has issued many compilations of soundtrack material from the movie musicals of the 1930s to the 1960s. Somewhere Over the Rainbow: The Golden Age of Hollywood Musicals is an attempt to present the musical highlights of the ...
As space age bachelor pad music goes, these were among the most widely heard examples of the genre. Over half of these 15 cuts, in fact, were hit singles, including such smashes as "Quiet Village" (Martin Denny), "So Rare" (Jimmy Dorsey), "Moritat" (Dick Hyman, and later to be changed into "Mack the Knife" by Bobby Darin), "Yellow Bird" (Arthur ...
Sunday at the Village Vanguard is the initial volume of a mammoth recording session by the Bill Evans Trio, from June 25, 1961 at New York's Village Vanguard documenting Evans' first trio with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. Its companion volume is Waltz for Debby. This trio is still widely regarded as his finest, largely because of ...
Ramsey Lewis staked his claim to fame with The In Crowd, the instrumental version of Dobie Gray's Top 40 hit. He also was one of the first soul-jazz icons of the mid-'60s, based on the strength of the sales of this recording, done over three days during a club date at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington, DC. Over the years, the biggest question ...
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