Claire Hamill: October (Island Records)

Claire Hamill was a direct contemporary and label-mate of the late, but increasingly mythical, Nick Drake. Her second solo outing, October, proved her the mistress of tender bedsitter missives that still can haunt the heart. Fans of confessional songwriting should value and explore this neglected selection of artistry and craft that has stood the test of many passing seasons.

Jennifer O’Connor: Here with Me (Matador)

There are thousands of whiny emokids complaining -- or perhaps boasting -- in song about how they can’t find love because nobody understands them, nobody feels their pain, nobody even feels pain as intensely as they do. They don’t know shit about pain. They should all be locked in their rooms and made to listen to Jennifer O’Connor; it should be decreed that their creative efforts will not be issued until they pack at least a tenth of the power of O’Connor’s stoic songs. O’Connor is our great poet of loss, and next to her all-enveloping, richly textured music and profoundly moving lyrics, their shallow songs are as but the buzzing of small, annoying insects.

The Smiths: The Sound of the Smiths (Deluxe Edition) (Warner Bros.)

Had Morrissey taken a vow of silence, and Marr left his guitar in a battered, stickered case, the legacy of the Smiths would stand secure. The Lennon and McCartney of indie rock created an almost divine catalog of songs, a soundtrack for the lives of others, a perfect collision of hope and sorrow. This timely compilation acts as a perfect reminder of the glories flown, and will likely convert certain stragglers from among the uninitiated. The Smiths already are a generation distant.

It might be hard to believe nowadays, when (not counting the occasionally hip-hop aberration) major record labels consider December a dumping ground for failed projects, but thirty years ago good albums by top-tier artists used to be released mere weeks before Christmas. Take Minute by Minute, for example. The Doobie Brothers had had ten Top 40 singles in the five years before it was released in December 1978, so they were certainly stars. And its release date was no commercial handicap: Not only did it hold the No. 1 album slot for six consecutive weeks and sell over three million copies, it spawned three Top 25 singles: "What a Fool Believes" (#1), the title track (#14), and "Dependin' on You" (#25), and the Doobies cleaned up at the 1980 Grammy Awards with four trophies.

Paul Reddick: Sugar Bird (northernblues)

High praise was awarded for Reddick’s previous outings. The “hard blues for modern times” themed Rattlebag (2001) with his band The Sidemen featured muscular arrangements with relentless guitars and Reddick’s powerful amplified harmonica style. The music steered clear of clichés, with Reddick’s intensely poetic lyrics creating sort of a thinking person’s ZZ Top quality.

McCoy Tyner, born in Philadelphia on December 11, 1938, celebrates his 70th birthday this week.

He established his reputation as an integral part of the classic John Coltrane Quartet from 1960 through 1965, creating an archetypal dense, modal style; in the past 45 years, only Herbie Hancock among living pianists can compare to Tyner in influence.

The great French composer Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born in Avignon on December 10, 1908. He was the first son of extraordinary parents: Cécile Sauvage, his mother, was a poet of note, and his father, Pierre Messiaen, was an English teacher who translated Shakespeare’s plays into French. At the precocious age of eleven Olivier entered the Paris Conservatory, where he studied with Paul Dukas, Charles-Marie Widor, and Marcel Dupré – a famed composer and two famous organists – and, most crucially, Maurice Emmanuel, who though not as well known as the above-named would prove to have arguably the greatest influence on Messiaen’s music through Emmanuel’s interests in birdsong and scales and rhythms of other cultures, notably India and ancient Greece.

Satan and Adam: Word on the Street: Harlem Recordings, 1989 (Modern Blues Harmonica)

Adam Gussow and Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee were a fixture in New York City in the late '80s and early '90s: a young, white, Princeton-educated harmonica player and a black, experienced Mississippi-born blues/soul veteran who sang while simultaneously playing electric guitar and percussion. They eventually got club gigs, but they started out playing on the streets of Harlem, where Magee had been playing regularly and Gussow sat in one day in 1986 and, after a good response from the crowd (the tip bucket got filled), they became a team.

Much has been made of the death of the CD and moving digital music to third party servers that deliver your favorites songs to desktops, laptops, mobile phones, MP3 players, flash drives, hard drives, and anything else that will hold that precious binary code. I still like my vinyl and CDs in the three-dimensional plane. I like being surrounded by the walls of music in my cramped, bulging domicile. I love randomly picking out a CD, cranking my stereo with a sound that can shake the bricks of my entire building.

R.E.M.: Murmur Deluxe Edition (Universal)

When I first heard the news, my heart jumped ever so slightly. I was so excited that Universal were releasing one of their famed Deluxe Edition versions of an album I loved, R.E.M.’s 1983 full-length debut, Murmur. "What cool gems had they unearthed?" I wondered. Sure, there had been many before, enough that I had been able to compile my own nine-track compilation of B-sides and extras, but I didn’t have access to their vaults. My mind reeled with possibilities.

Virtuosity comes with its own perils. Compound that with prodigy, and you're in some tricky waters. Too often flash substitutes for feeling, spectacle for connection, hoopla for art. Twenty-six-year-old Hungarian pianist Adam Gyorgy flirted with all of the above at his recent Carnegie Hall recital, but, happily, the marks of a true artist won out.

His chops are amazing, and we got fireworks galore, barn burners such as Liszt's Rhapsody No. 2 delivered with articulate aplomb.

Enrico Pieranunzi at Birdland with Steve Swallow and Paul Motian
October 29, 2008

Enrico Pieranunzi, who will turn 59 in five weeks, is an Italian jazz pianist of formidable and varied talents. The Musica Jazz critic’s poll named him Musician of the Year in 1989 and 2003, and in 1997 he received the Django d’Or Award as best European jazz musician. But given the record industry’s lack of interest in jazz and Americans’ lack of interest in jazz artists from other countries, his career has not received the attention it deserves.

Love Train: The Sound of Philadelphia
The Sound of Philadelphia: Gamble & Huff’s Greatest Hits
Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia International Records
Patti LaBelle: The Essential Patti LaBelle
Patti LaBelle: Live in Washington, D.C.
The O’Jays: The Essential O’Jays
The O’Jays: Back Stabbers
Teddy Pendergrass: Teddy Pendergrass
Teddy Pendergrass: Life Is a Song Worth Singing

Of Montreal at Roseland, Friday, Oct. 10

Of Montreal plays the music that you have to hope young people are listening to, and Roseland revelers brought that hope to fruition Friday night. Playing at close to capacity the band from Athens, Georgia rocked the audience, bringing back some of the former glory of the old dance hall. I haven’t sweated that much at a concert in while, but it’s hard not to when you have over three thousand fans bouncing and jumping in a crazed frenzy of music-endued energy.

Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette – s/t (Tompkins Square)

When was the last time you saw a new CD that comes with a supporting quote from Mark Twain? "I think that Polk Miller and his wonderful four, is about the only thing the country can furnish that is originally and utterly American. Possibly it can furnish something more enjoyable, but I must doubt it until I forget that musical earthquake, 'The Watermelon Party.'"

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds at Madison Square Garden: Friday, Oct. 4th

For the practicing agnostic or atheist in search of a religious experience, Nick Cave might be the high priest you’re looking for. Tales of sorrow, loss, hope, and murder tempered with Biblical allusions made for an entertaining evening at the venue formerly called WaMu Theater this past Saturday night.

Nick Cave summons faint memories of Frank Zappa, surrounding himself with a small army of expert musicians who he conducts from center stage as he commands most of the attention for the evening.

Bill Dixon Orchestra
17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur (AUM Fidelity)

Few jazz innovators or heroes of the avant-garde are as little known beyond the cognoscenti as Dixon. An utterly distinctive trumpeter who pioneered the use of extremely non-standard timbres on his instrument, he is also an improviser and composer of boundless imagination who applied that adventurous deployment of timbres to works of uncompromising artistry with a painterly sense of color and abstraction unlike anyone else’s jazz.

I suppose I should have a clever theme to tie all these together, but the best I can do is that with one exception they’re all recent and I like them all (and I stick to popular genres -- no classical, jazz, blues, etc.). First up are six new releases, followed by one that’s two years old, followed by five reissues.

Tricky: Knowle West Boy (Domino)

Tricky's first album in five years, and his best in ten, or maybe even since Pre-Millennium Tension in 1996, is occasionally a return to his Maxinquaye/PMT style and definitely their mood, though the first track is as drastic a departure from any of his previous styles as you could imagine: jazzy, cool, laid-back.

Jobriath: Jobriath & Creatures of the Street (Collector's Choice)

Jobriath set out to be a star of stratospheric proportions; what he became, if he was remembered at all, was the leper boy of Glam. Excluded from features and books on the subject, he was written off, and written out of, the picture. The Bowie clone and wannabe, a parable of hype over content, he fell beneath the radar of the taste-makers and shakers. Maligned and marginalized, he died in obscurity; the man who never came back, but the one who sang in supper clubs in Manhattan for out-of-town tourists. A record industry joke that wasn't all that funny.

Jake Holmes: Dangerous Times (Private Pressing)

That a new set of songs from Jake Holmes should have slipped without fanfare into the wider world is remarkable, a little sad, but of no real surprise. Holmes, not exactly a name of the household variety, hadn't released an album for thirty years. That Dangerous Times is superbly crafted, sounding like the sort of distinguished fare reviewers dust down their clichés for when delivered by young pretenders (Holmes was born in 1939) isn't a big deal either. Good records come and go, and as good things go, this one went nowhere.

Metallica: Death Magnetic (Warner Bros.)

In a weird way, Metallica has kind of become like Star Wars. While the conventional wisdom dictates that both have lost their way, that they were better in their early days, true fans of both know this just isn’t the case. Sure, Metallica’s previous release, 2003’s St. Anger, wasn’t their best album any more than The Clone Wars was the best Star Wars movie, but both have some great moments.

Joe Lovano & Hank Jones Kids: Live at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola (Blue Note)

I have often noted that saxophonist Joe Lovano, for all his greatness, does his best playing on other people’s gigs. Well, he shares the billing here, but once again he achieves the unrestrained feeling I’ve mostly heard from him when someone else is in charge. Maybe here it’s because Joe knew he could relax, secure in the certainty that everything was going to be taken care of without him worrying about it when the only other guy on the bandstand was pianist Hank Jones, who’s always got twice as much experience as anyone else in the room (unless Barry Harris is in the room, but even then Hank has the edge).

Wolfert Brederode Quartet Currents (ECM)

Sixteen years ago, while working for a music magazine in New York City, a CD came across my desk that immediately caught my attention. The album was 1961, a compilation of two albums from the titular year, Fusion and Thesis, by the Jimmy Giuffre 3, a mid-'60s jazz trio whose line-up included bassist Steve Swallow and pianist Paul Bley. But what caught my attention was that the group had no drummer, unusual for small jazz combos, and was led, also unusually, by a clarinetist named Jimmy Giuffre (who, I sadly noted while working on this review, passed away just this past April).

Jenny Lin
InsomniMania (Koch International Classics)
Silvestrov: Piano Works Nostalghia (Hänssler Classic)

Jenny Lin has seemingly infallible piano technique, not merely in terms of velocity but also evenness of touch and beauty of tone. She also has an admirable devotion to modern classical music, with the majority of her releases exclusively concerned with the music of our time. On her newest CD, these are applied to a program built around the theme of "night": states of sleep, lack of sleep, dreams, nachtmusik, and more.

Marsha Malamet: Coney Island Winter (Decca)

Some records are evocative and wistful, conjuring with just the right amounts of longing and loss. One such artifact is Marsha Malamet's 1969 LP Coney Island Winter. A small chill of abandonment runs through this brief and hauntingly expressed affair. Where Summer footfalls and romance would have filled the air, this is a record of intense, short evenings and the intimation that what was once a cause for celebration has become a source of sighs and reflective glances.

Clive Kennedy: Clive Kennedy (UK)

Glam was a peculiar time in popular music. It allowed the genuinely weird to posture, albeit briefly, whilst forcing the sadly mundane to look like trainee drag queens. The New York Dolls got it genuinely and alarmingly right, as did Marc Bolan. Bowie claimed the era as his pilfered kingdom, but the sad buffoonery of the Glitters and Stardusts were hot on his heels as also-ran competitors. Early Roxy Music were divine Glam at its most arch. Eno, all feathers, finery and ambient soundtracks; Ferry like the decadent space-age spiv, a routine that would finally entomb him as a lounge lizard fossil.

Martial Solal Trio: Longitude (CamJazz)

Because he’s (Algerian) French, many American jazz fans have overlooked Martial Solal, but as he moves into elder-statesman status, that may be changing, as is certainly due one of the greatest living pianists. Thanks be, his albums are appearing more regularly here than they used to. Here’s the latest one, with twins François and Louis Moutin on bass and drums, respectively (one of the great current rhythm sections).