Photo By Jeff Boule

Picking up from where we (mercifully) left off last week, we are smack-dab in the middle of what is part of the box set from Todd Rundgren and Utopia chronicling their Deface The Music tour. To recap, Deface The Music was Utopia’s tribute to the Beatles. Rundgren and Sulton have frequently stated that the Beatles were tremendous influences on them both. Powell and Wilcox are more comfortable in the jazz realm, but also have Beatle-influence (come on, everybody has Beatle influence, even if you didn’t like them, odds are, many of the artists you DO like were influenced by the Beatles so vicariously, you are influenced).

But this isn’t about the Beatles, it’s about Utopia, maybe for this tour we should call them Beatleopia.

Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

Although I grew up on rock, in what many believe was the “classic” era of rock (the 60s), I am now far more immersed in the jazz scene than I am in rock.  Don’t get me wrong:  I still can be engaged and moved and excited by rock music, especially if it pushes the boundaries:  boundaries of “good taste,” boundaries of commercial expectations; boundaries that bug the status quo.  But very little of what I hear on what remains these days of commercial rock radio meets these criteria.  The market now is all for and about “tweens,” the kiddies to teen market that just adores “Hannah Montana,” Justin Timberlake, and a host of other lip-synched, drum-synthed,  generic  popsters, who come and go with amazing rapidity.  Yes, there is a market for alt- and prog-rock, but it, like jazz, has been pushed to the margins, and its audience forced to hunt for the music.  Maybe just as well.  As has been proven time and again, the commercial process, like the ancient gods, destroys what it first makes great.  So what does my little screed have to do with today’s blog?  Not much, I’ll admit, except that my post today deals with a rock album, and what I think is a great modern rock album, a classic really, that can stand, if not quite with “Sgt. Peppers,” at least with the Rolling Stones’  “Their Satanic Majesties Request.”  (OK, I realize I’m likely in the minority on the latter pick).  Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

We’ve been very busy with back-to-back weekend events, so this is a little belated, but we wanted to give a big thanks to all the folks who came out and supported us on Record Store Day! Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

No, not “Thing,” that disembodied hand that creeped you out in “The Addams Family.”  No, “The Thing” I’m talking about is the kick-butt Scandinavian free jazz trio, with Swede Mats Gustafsson on tenor sax, and Norwegians Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass, and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums.  The band has been touring the U.S. behind its new album, “”Bag It,” and a new CD box set.  These guys are as much influenced by the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and The Clash, as they are by Coltrane, Ornette,  and Albert Ayler.  When you go, you know it is going to be loud, intense and full of high-voltage energy.  I could feel that energy traveling way down to DC, enough so to make me drop what I was doing and make the two and a half hour trek to club Kung Fu Necktie (no, I have no idea either what the name means) on North Front Street, in Philadelphia, this past Friday night.     Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

“I just want to be part of all this beauty, want to be part of all this flight on little wings”, sings the lovely Kris Delmhorst in her song, “Little Wings” I see her as one of the most remarkable musicians I have ever come across. Her lyrics are as beautiful as the leftover drops on bushes after a sweet summer rain. In her song, “The Drop and Dream”, Kris wistfully sings “It’s both our curse and our grace, here in this place to reach for heights that we’ll never climb”. She sculptures her pieces with light, philosophy, self-reflection, cracked bits of robins’ eggs, and broken guitar strings tied in a bow. Yet, her name is only whispered, and according to “Little Wings”, Ms. Delmhorst does not mind that a bit. She confidently professes, “Now I don’t want to be a jet airliner, I just want to be a little bird, I don’t want to rip the skies wide open, I just want my song to be heard” . I heard her exquisite melodies long after one of my favorite music writers unveiled her . Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (1)

The 2nd annual Record Store Day is this Saturday April 18, 2009! 

We here at Princeton Record Exchange are proud to be one of the largest remaining independent record stores in the country and are pleased to be participating in this exciting event. 

There are a lot of reasons to visit us and join the fun.  Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (1)

Online shopping has its uses. With it, I have built and repaired computers for myself and others. I’ve located a new tweeter for a friend’s 1970’s-vintage loudspeaker. And at long last, I’ve finally found a source for sneakers which fit my feet properly.

But in my humble opinion, for finding music, online shopping misses the point. Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

My order from Clean Feed came in yesterday.  In case you’ve been misled by those pop-jazz magazine polls into thinking the usual suspects (Blue Note, Verve, ECM) are actually issuing jazz recordings of real artistic interest, let me fill you in:  Clean Feed, a label based, perhaps rather improbably, out of Portugal,  is among the new leaders in creative improvised music.  The label, started in 2001, has performed brilliantly, and features some superb artists:  Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, Tony Malaby, Steve Lehman, Charles Gayle, Paul Dunmall, and many other artists who are continuing to advance the art of creative improvised music.  Where the industry “giants” look for the next Norah Jones clone, or pop star in need of a jazz “makeover,” Clean Feed is still about the “sound of surprise.”   Blue Note used to be like this, but it has lost its way, depending upon a stream of reissues and pop crossovers to fill its roster and beholden to a corporate titan to adhere to the bottom line.  Blue Note is now part of the “industrial-musical complex.”    Anyway, the first two Clean Feeds out of the shipping box and into the CD player were Tony Malaby’s TAMARINDO, and Evan Parker’s A GLANCING BLOW. Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (2)

I’ve been telling my friends about how much I like Amadou & Mariam’s music. Since they’re not well-known in the U.S. yet, the question that inevitably comes up is, “What sort of music is it? Who do they sound like?” After trying several weakly descriptive, “it’s-sort-of-like-this-and-sort-of-like-that” responses, I’ve settled on, “It’s just great, fun music. You should give it a listen.” Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

Earlier this week, I started giving guitar lessons to a young boy.  On the first day, I taught him how to tune the instrument and showed him some chords, then we started writing down some ideas for songs he can learn.  During this process, I asked him what he thought of the Beatles, and what happened next still scares me a little.

He gave me a confused look and said “I don’t know who they are.” Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (1)

It arrived on the scene inconspicuously, without fanfare.  It had been on my want list for ages.   I only came across it online while I was looking for something else.  I found out it was released on February 24, 2009 in its current incarnation.  A welcome arrival, indeed.  What am I talking about (you may well ask)?   I am referring to the Rudy Van Gelder series release on Blue Note of trombonist Grachan Moncur III’s  laconically titled Some Other Stuff, recorded July 6, 1964 at RVG’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, and released initially in 1965 on Blue Note.  It is one of the great “inside -outside” albums produced by Blue Note.   For some reason, previous issues of this album on both LP and CD had proved hard to come by.  Even repeated trips to our dearly beloved PREX failed to turn up a copy.  I mulled purchasing the Moncur 3-CD box set on Mosaic just to get it, but I had all the other albums contained on the set and was loathe to pay the asking price just to complete my Moncur collection.  Now the Moncur set is out of print (and already commanding high asking prices), but here was the individual album that I sought, complete with Reid Miles original and enigmatic cover art, and with an added annotation by Bob Blumenthal.   It did not take long to hit “Buy,” and pop it into the CD player on arrival.  Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

I am coming up on my first year anniversary of scribing for PREX.  I tend to get introspective around such events.  It has been a most eventful year, both personally and here on the blog.  Some pretty outrageous things have happened behind the scenes and on the pages of this blog over the past year.  I am going to use this blog entry to review, examine the possibilities of an open future, some short-term goals, long term goals, and more.  Time to delve…

Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

The title of the new The Bad Plus (hereafter TBP) CD on Heads Up, “For All I Care,”  is as ambiguous, ambivalent, and inscrutable as the rest of the album.  Perhaps the band is telling us that it cares for all types of music and things and people, that its approach is determinedly egalitarian and universal.  Or maybe it is telling us, defensively, in advance, and in anticipation of the usual TBP criticism, that it doesn’t much care what we think of the album, that they are going to do what they want, not what we want them to do. I suppose that it is both of these things.  They want us to hear them; they’re not terribly interested in hearing us.  For example, their blog, DO THE MATH, demonstrates their wide interests in things musical and cultural; however, they long since stopped accepting comments from readers on their posts.  It’s a High Modernist conception of the artist as creative and aloof, and perhaps more, creative because they are aloof.   No matter, for in “For All I Care,” they have created an album that challenges and connects. Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

This past week was finals for Winter Term. After 9 weeks of pretending I could understand inorganic chemistry (i don’t), it was time to lock myself in a study room, not sleep for 30 hours at a time, and drink 97 cokereward points worth of coke zero. To survive this nightmare of a time, I relied very heavily on a playlist which was a combination of breezy folk and femme fatale, Lady Sovereign and Damien Rice, among other artists. Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (2)

Blue Note Ridge is Roger Powell’s fourth solo album.  The largest difference between this album and the three preceding ones is that these previous albums were significantly synthesizer-based.  As his former band–mate, Todd Rundgren used to say, “you were born, to synthesize”, and this new CD on Fossil Poets Records is largely based on piano.  Plain old acoustic piano with maybe a synth note here and there.

Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

There must be something about the blues that keeps its disciples young. B.B. King turned 83 last September (16th). I saw him last June at the Chicago Blues Festival, when he headlined the festival on a rainy Sunday night. We were getting soaked, but the crowd kept growing, right up until show time. He walked onto stage very slowly and he performed sitting, as he has for a few years. Old age might make walking difficult, but it hasn’t silenced his booming blues growl and it sure hasn’t weakened his guitar skills. Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

The liner notes to his recent CD, “Sketch,” put it bluntly:  “David Schnitter is the jazz world’s forgotten messenger, a marvelous musician who just happened to be in the right place before the right time.”  Except I would amend that statement to read:  “…in the right place after the right time.”   For Schnitter was not just a “jazz messenger,” but a “Jazz Messenger,” one of the members of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, a graduate of Blakey’s famed College of Hard Bop, that saw such other alumni as Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Jymie Merritt, Cedar Walton, Curtis Fuller, and Bobbie Timmons.  I went to Twins Jazz last night to hear Schnitter and to see if the jazz message was still being delivered.  Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

With each day, more and more disparaging news comes across our collective desk.  This could have been titled The Death Of Progressive Part Two.  The world’s premiere drummer, Bill Bruford, announced on his website his retirement from public performance effective the first of this year.  Before you all get bent out of shape about who the best drummer in the world is, remember, at the top of this post it SHOULD say “opinion” or “editorial”.  Remember, you don’t have to agree with my opinion.  But let’s examine what, in my opinion, makes Bruford the best.

Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)

Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express
Closer To It
Original vinyl: RCA APL1-0140
CD Reissue: Fuel 2000 Records

I pulled this record, which I’d found years ago in a bargain bin, off my shelves just the other day and slapped in onto my garage-sale-bought Harman-Kardon turntable. Damn, but I’d forgotten just how flat-out funky this album is! Read the rest of this entry »

read comments (0)