Listening to...
These reviews have been nabbed from the web. Though highly unlikely, if I ever get the time, I may offer my own critique...
Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate
Guitarist Ali Farka Touré and kora player Toumani Diabaté, both of whom come from Mali, are two of Africa’s greatest musicians. In the Heart of the Moon is their first full-length album collaboration and it is also the first new album by either artist in 5 years. The original idea was that they would duet on just one track, but their creativity could not be contained, and the result is an album’s worth of new material. There were no rehearsals, and the improvised performances were recorded over three magical two-hour sessions at the Hotel Mandé, on the banks of the Niger River, in Bamako, Mali. With Ali on acoustic guitar and Toumani’s kora, there was some extraordinary interplay between the pair. The recordings also feature subtle contributions from Ry Cooder on kawai piano & ripley guitar, Sekou Kante and Cachaíto López on bass, and Joachim Cooder and Lekan Babalola on percussion.
Chris Hillman
Seven years have passed since Chris Hillman's last solo recording, 1998's Like a Hurricane. This gave him plenty of time to conjure The Other Side's 14 new recordings, even with four songs, including an elegant and filigreed version of the Byrds classic "Eight Miles High," being reworkings of previous efforts. One of the architects of country-rock through his membership in the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, Hillman (mandolin, guitar, lead vocals) here continues to blend folk, alt-country, bluegrass, and the roots of rock with the occasional surprise--particularly the guest appearance of Jennifer Warnes on a startlingly beautiful and despairing version of "The Water Is Wide." Throughout, old pal Herb Pedersen joins him on guitar, banjo, and backing vocals, and Sally van Meter contributes a haunting Dobro. Highlights include an anxiety-laden reprise of "It Doesn't Matter," which Hillman and Stephen Stills cowrote for 1972's Manassas; the affecting, minor-key modality of the Jesus-themed "True He's Gone"; and the delightful old-timey title song.
José González
Twenty-six-year-old Gothenburg resident José González makes a little go a long way. Armed with just a dextrously plucked Spanish guitar and his own warm but clipped vocals he paints intimate portraits that sound like classics from a golden singer/songwriting yesteryear. Of Argentinean descent, González counts bossa nova and Joy Division among his influences, and sure enough, stately, quietly expansive songs like Heartbeats and Hints are equal parts Latin passion and gothic introspection. The lilting Stay In The Shade, meanwhile, sounds like a luminous Nick Drake outtake. No mean achievement.
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan's remarkable first album after his debilitating 1966 motorcycle accident isn't as urgent as the ambitious folk and rock songs he wrote earlier in the decade. Even considering the rocking "All Along the Watchtower" (covered famously by Jimi Hendrix), the album's overall feeling is soft and laid-back, all gently strummed guitars, perfectly timed harmonicas, and some of Dylan's best pure singing to date. The 1968 release sounds as if the songwriter and his three sidemen set up a few tape recorders in a bedroom and began playing as soon as they woke up in the morning. They open with the title track (a folk fable), move into the piano-driven "Dear Landlord", and close with the sweet love song "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight".
John Rebourn
Anyone with just the slightest love for guitar music should own an album by Renbourn. This is from his early period, and it showcases his technique and style with a wit and humour that other Renbourn records don't have. This album, along with "Another Monday", makes a perfect document of Renbourn music.
Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo means "second companion", but this 94-years-young guitarist-composer is undisputed top cat in the Cuban music firmament. And with the retrospective La Coleccion Cubana CD, Nascente notches up another splendid hit. The grandson of a freed slave, Compay Segundo started work in the tobacco fields, but his facility on the clarinet--and on the seven-string guitar he invented--soon put him into national orbit as a band musician. He "retired" to work as a tobacconist when Cuba's blockade hit the industry in the 1960s, but his second career with the Buena Vista Social Club has seen him hit the heights. Many of these tracks, which span a wide variety of Cuban styles including son, bolero, and guajira, are from his heyday in the 1950s: his voice was lighter and more boyish then, and the backing has great period charm.
Thelonius Monk
'Genius of Modern Music' released on Blue Note. Basically, jazz with avant-garde leanings - these volumes offer a great overview of the Monk. While not complete, they offer alternate takes of tracks - openers 'Humph' & 'Evonce' bridge the gap between Parker & Davis. 'Thelonious', 'Nice work if you can get it', 'Ruby my Dear', 'Well you Needn't', 'Round Midnight' etc all provide reasons to purchase...This album needs to be heard - the re-mastering has given a wonderful clarity.
Doc & Merle Watson
Doc Watson has had a profound influence in traditional, folk and bluegrass music ever since coming to national attention in the early 1960's. His recordings and performances have inspired generations of aspiring guitarists to explore the mysteries of his phenomenal playing.
Ry Cooder & Manuel Galbán
If there's a certain instant familiarity to this collaborative celebration between U.S. guitar icon/musicologist Ry Cooder and Cuban fret legend Manuel Galbán, it's only testimony to how deeply the island nation's rich musical heritage permeated American pop music in the '50s, '60s, and beyond. Cooder and Galbán (a key compatriot in the American guitarist's Buena Vista Social Club project) invent a back-to-the-future sound--twin guitars fronting a Cuban rhythm section of two drum kits, congas, and bass--whose dreamy swing quotient is matched only by its sense of mirthful abandon. Thus tracks like "Dru Me Negrita" and "Los Twangueros" manage to evoke everything from Link Wray, Duane Eddy, and the Ventures to Mancini and Esquivel, while Cooder and Galbán twirl a standard like "Patricia" and the nervy title track around dueling poles of tradition and experimentation with deceptive grace. It's joyous, mercurial stuff that the two musicians conjure at their fingertips.
Old Crow Medicine Show
During the "folk music-scare" of the early 1960s, a bunch of white middle-class youths with names like the Greenbriar Boys and the Even Dozen Jug Band discovered the mountain music of the Stanley Brothers, Skillet Lickers, and Uncle Dave Macon and set about introducing it to the country's college kids. Four decades later, the members of OCMS fit the profile of those early revivalists, yet if anything they have tapped deeper into the primal elements of an American art form. As demonstrated on their debut, they have assimilated not just the sound--banjos, harmonicas, acoustic guitar and bass--but more importantly the haunting spirit of music that was made to keep hard times at bay. How else to explain their ability to take a well-worn chestnut like "CC Rider" and infuse it with an energy that reveals once again why it is a classic? Not content to live completely in the past, they wrote "Big Time in the Jungle," which, though it is about Vietnam, could easily be transposed to 2004's desert conflicts.
Martin Simpson
One of today's finest slide guitarists and interpreters of traditional music, Martin Simpson continues to grow, inspire, and delight with his razor-sharp picking and grainy voice. On this album -- the most sonically diverse of his career -- Simpson swings effortlessly from the crisp, modal twang of his native British Isles to the haunting cry of Delta blues and low-key swagger of New Orleans funk. His timbral palette is huge: In addition to acoustic and electric guitars, he plays 5-string banjo, ukulele, lap steel, and percussion. Sometimes flying solo, but most often backed by various American and British players (including bassist Rick Kemp of Steeleye Span, and guitarist Dave Malone and bassist Reggie Scanlan of the Big Easy's legendary Radiators), Simpson delivers chimey ragtime counterpoint, rippling close-interval melodies, and snarling slide riffs with robust tone and flawless intonation. Whether he's putting a fresh twist on classics like "Rollin' and Tumblin'" and "John Hardy" or digging into vibey originals, Simpson never flaunts his monster chops. Instead, he seduces with mysterious 6-string textures and poignant tales of lost love and drunken murder.
Django Reinhardt
This wonderful five-disc box is an indispensable collection of prewar, prebop jazz that belongs in the company of your finest Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Benny Goodman sets. Django Reinhardt was both the first great jazz-guitar soloist and the first European jazz musician to have a significant influence on American musicians. Just as Earl Hines had found a way to transfer Louis Armstrong's assertive solo style to the piano, Reinhardt did it with the acoustic guitar, mixing inventive melodic improvisation with a decorative gypsy-guitar idiom and vigorous rhythm. He did it most often with the Hot Club of France, a quintet including violinist Stephane Grappelli, two rhythm guitarists, and a bassist that created its own distinctive style, a lightly propulsive mix that was an ideal setting for Django's mix of drive, invention, and charm.