What are you listening to? October 2017

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Rod Price - Open
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Pere Ubu - 20 Years In A Montana Missile Silo (2017)



I originally acquired this in 24 bit 96kHz, when all I really wanted was 16/44.1. Tonight I managed to find the Bandcamp site where I bought another copy... which turns out to be 24/44.1.

It seems if I want 16/44.1, I am going to have to buy the CD. :(
 
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Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5 "Emperor" / C Minor Variations [Mitsuko Uchida / Kurt Sanderling / Bavarian Symphony Orchestra]

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VisionQuest (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

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Ah yes, it's wacky album choice day (not the albums necessarily but the choices) or in Sam's household, Tuesday ;) - first up isn't THAT wacky I suppose. It's the soundtrack to the 80s wrestling film VisionQuest. Before Foxcatcher came out a couple years back there just weren't that many good wrestling movies...but calling this a good movie would be generous. Matthew Modine's (who reappeared in a rarely-speaking role in the Netflix series Stranger Things) performance (as Dorothy Parker once famously wrote about Katherine Hepburn) runs the gamut from A to B. Still, to early 80s pop fans, not a bad album including artists like Madonna ("Crazy for You"), Journey ("Only the Young"), Sammy Hagar, Foreigner,etc. Also includes that great 80's track "Lunatic Fringe" by Red Rider. I actually think I had this way back when on cassette. Not bad revisiting it.
 
Claudine Longet - We've Only Just Begun (1971)

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Next up on today's docket - Claudine Longet whom I recently learned about reading about odd stories of the 1970s. Longet was a natural beauty who found minor successes appearing on various TV shows and variety shows of the 1960s. She is better known for two reasons - first, she was the wife of singer Andy Williams from 1961 to 1975 (separating in 1971). He was 32 when he met 18 year Longet so a bit of a May-September romance. They had three kids together. Both of them were also good friends of Bobby Kennedy

Longet, however, achieves odd-70s status for her murder of her boyfriend in 1976, Olympic skier "Spider" Savich in Colorado. The arrest was marked by procedural errors one being they did a blood sample on Longet (which showed cocaine) without a warrant. She claimed the gun accidentally went off when Savich was showing her how to use it. The jury would eventually find her guilty of "negligent homicide". The judge was criticized for allowing her 30 days imprisonment to be served on separate days chosen by Longet (she picked weekends) so that she could spend more time with her children. After sentencing she was found to be vacationing with her (married) defense attorney (who later divorced his wife and married Longet).

So juicy stuff from the 1970s, a decade that has always intrigued me not only musically but politically and socially. As for the album itself, not so intriguing. Longet coos in her French accent through pop songs of the day like "Close to You", "I'll Be There", "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", "Make With You" in versions even softer than the originals. Great story...mediocre albums.
 
Andy Pratt - Resolution (1976)

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Some may know Pratt here, but this is my first exposure. Although a search of "weird but good albums" yielded this, I wouldn't call it weird at all. Multi-instrumentalist Pratt occasional falsetto might make some cringe, but this is a pretty good album. Further research yielded a glowing Rolling Stone review on initial release where RS stating "By reviving the dream of rock as an art and then re-inventing it, Pratt has forever changed the face of rock". Well, that certainly seems hyperbolic - rock didn't change too much from Resolution, but if you're a fan of 70s singer/songwriters or artists in the mold of Eric Carmen and Todd Rundgren, Pratt's kind of a mix of both (not as experimental as Rundgren, not as soft as Carmen). This one contains some good melodies with songs of the 70s soft rock vein. Will be playing this in the future.
 
Buckner & Garcia - Pac-Man Fever (1982)

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Sure everyone knows about the top 10 single "Pac-Man Fever", but did you know that Akron duo Buckner & Garcia released a whole album of video game songs including "Froggy's Lament" (for Frogger), "The Defender", and (of course) "Do the Donkey Kong"....oh...you did know that (but had suppressed your memory of that fact for 35 years)....ah

Did you know though the same duo had an earlier novelty number "Merry Christmas in the NFL" imagining Howard Cosell as Santa that Cosell found offensive..no?
Well here it is then in all it's so-bad-it's good glory ...you're welcome! ;)

 
Ferrante & Teicher - Blast Off! (1958)

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Worth listening for the cover alone. No, this isn't an album of the lounge piano duo doing song with a sci-fi/space age theme (though the cover is clearly trying to capitalize on the sci-fi/space phase of the late 50s - remember the Mercury astronauts would be named a year later). The pair, who released 60 albums over the course of the 1950s and 60s, were quite experimental in their own way:

Allmusic.com:
The piano duo was not originally budgeted for a full orchestra for the recording of its third album for ABC-Paramount. Undaunted, the pair experimented and created the necessary sounds through modifications to their concert grands. Strategically placed pieces of rubber, wood, metal, and wads of paper achieved the desired instrumental effects. Unlike John Cage, who was performing similar modifications for art's sake, Ferrante and Teicher were doing it for the masses.

Though much of the repertoire on Blast Off! are standards other lounge artists were covering at the time ("S'Wonderful," "Ain't Misbehavin'," "I Got Rhythm"), Ferrante and Teicher's approach is novel enough to sustain interest. Even today, it's amazing the sounds they were able to coax out of concert grand pianos -- at times they sound as otherworldly as synthesizers, or as down to earth as harps, zithers, and celestes. The best quality about the album is that it doesn't sound like a novelty or a gimmick, just two guys using their imagination to surmount the obstacle of not having the necessary instrumentation to create the sounds they desired.
 
I hear Akron is an up-and-coming city to be watched.

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Monsoon- Third Eye (1983)




A (and the only) full length album compiled of Shiela Chandra's singles. Psych-pop? Yes. India-pop? Yes. Slick and well done? Yes. Highlights include "Ever so lonely" and her cover of "Tomorrow Never Knows". Her singles are all amazing. Almost every song she sings in English is available in Hindi. Thank god for my vinyl collection.

 
Claudine Longet - We've Only Just Begun (1971)

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Great story...mediocre albums.
@Zeeba Neighba it's great to see Claudine get some love around here. But you didn't pick the best place to start. I am in the midst of a listening project for her. As you can see from the rather wasted looking cover photo, Mlle. Longet was past her peak by the time she recorded this album for her husband's label, Barnaby. (It's hard to take seriously a label named for a boxer dog). Any of her A&M releases are far superior, especially Colours:

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Eddie Morton - Ed. Morton's "Bit Of Broadway" rec. 1910-1917, Archeophone comp. 2012)

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Archeophone's second volume of tunes by the long-forgotten vaudevillian. Wiki sez:

Eddie Morton was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of a Scottish immigrant. From about 1898 until about 1905, he worked for the Philadelphia Police Department, leading to his later billing as "The Singing Cop". He then became a variety performer, and in 1907 appeared at the Madison Square Roof Garden in New York City in the cast of The Maid and the Millionaire, a musical comedy. The following year he toured as part of M. M. Thiese's Rollickers burlesque show, and then became a popular attraction in the vaudeville shows run by Benjamin Franklin Keith and Sylvester Z. Poli.

He first recorded, as a gruff-voiced comic baritone, in 1907, and over the next few years recorded for Victor, Columbia, Edison, Zonophone and other companies. His successes included "That's Gratitude", "Just a Friend of the Family", "In The Right Church, But The Wrong Pew", "You Ain't Talking To Me", "The Party that Wrote ‘Home, Sweet Home' Never Was a Married Man", "What's the Matter with Father?", and "Oceana Roll", first released in 1911 on the flip side of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" by Collins and Harlan.

Morton did not record after 1917, but continued as a popular vaudeville attraction until 1926. He then retired to run a golf club and a restaurant, Ed Morton's Little Bit of Broadway, at Wildwood, New Jersey. He died of a heart attack in 1938 at the age of 67.


Eddie's recordings have a lot of personality, which comes across well thanks to Archeophone's terrific reworking of the old acoustic masters. RIYL Billy Murray.
 
Trombone Shorty - Parking Lot Symphony (2017)

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All right, after a day filled with wacky choices (for me at least), now it's time to get down, get funky...Here's Troy Andrew's latest (and his first for Blue Note).


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