Charlie Parker; Dizzy Gillespie; Bud Powell; Max Roach; Charles Mingus; The Quintet: Jazz at Massey Hall

By Jemiah Jefferson

This new remaster of The Quintet: Jazz At Massey Hall—a truly historic convergence of five of the most celebrated musicians in jazz—is so classic, so iconic, that at first it’s hard to understand what’s so special about it. It really does take some schooling, and some careful and studied listening, before the true magic trick is revealed. For anyone with an interest in jazz, however, this album is essential listening, and can be enjoyed without knowledge of its importance.
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Things I Love: I’m a Monk, You’re a Monk, We’re All Monks

By Emily Carney

Remember the hilarious bowling alley scene in The Big Lebowski, in which Walter goes insane and brandishes a gun telling some poor sap with a mullet to “mark it zero”? The background theme forever passed into ubiquity—it is called “I Hate You,” and was one of The Monks’ signature songs.

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Assemblog: Less Lee Moore, May 18, 2012

Donna Summer, 1948 – 2012

New on Popshifter this week: Reviews of the remastered reissues of The Bill Evans Trio’s Moon Beams and Thelonious Monk’s Misterioso, plus some righteous indignation about women and guitar culture.
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A Riot Of One’s Own: Women & Guitar Culture

By Kai Shuart

OK now, I’m gonna spout off about something very, very near and dear to my heart. Since I was about thirteen, I have loved guitars. I own a few. I play them. I find them sexy. You want to really see me geek out? Get me in a Guitar Center. I’ve been told I drool. Yet, while I have worshiped guitars from a very early age, there has been something I don’t worship: Guitar culture.
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Thelonious Monk, Misterioso

By Jemiah Jefferson

It must have been a thrill for audiences in 1958 to imagine that the performances they witnessed in smoky nightclubs could be recorded and released as brilliant record albums to be savored and studied at home by those less lucky than they. I doubt that many of them could have imagined that more than fifty years later, those same performances would be captured on a shiny silver disk, played back by a laser beam, and savored and studied just as avidly. It’s also possible that the audience listening to what would be titled Misteriso, the live performance by the Thelonious Monk Quartet at the Five Spot Café in New York had no idea of future audiences or listening technologies at all, being entirely too occupied in experiencing the delights of a genius at the peak of his abilities.
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The Bill Evans Trio, Moon Beams

By Emily Carney

By 1962, jazz pianist Bill Evans was emotionally bereft by the car crash death of his bassist, Scott LaFaro. Indeed he was so devastated, he wouldn’t perform for months. He was already in the grips of a powerful addiction to heroin, which he wouldn’t overcome until the end of the 1960s; however, this addiction would be replaced by another: cocaine. No one was shocked by Evans’s death in September 1980, characterized by one of his peers as “the longest suicide in history.”

After LaFaro’s death, Evans had reformed his trio, adding new bassist Chuck Israels. While Evans and his distinctive style of piano playing—hunched directly over the keys—may be a ghost in the machine, this reissue of 1962′s Moon Beams takes the listener back to his melancholy brilliance.
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Assemblog: Less Lee Moore, May 11, 2012

Livide

New on Popshifter this week: Reviews of Turing Machine’s latest release What is the Meaning of What, the remastered reissue of Hey Little Richard, and You and I in Heaven, the new EP from Tyburn Saints.
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Tyburn Saints, You And I In Heaven EP

By Less Lee Moore

Can we just go ahead and define ’80s music as a genre? I think enough great music was made during that decade and enough time has passed that it qualifies. Especially when so many bands continue to profess their love for the ’80s through amazing music (School of Seven Bells, The Chain Gang of 1974, Weep, White Lies, etc.). With their latest EP, You and I in Heaven, Tyburn Saints carry the torch with a firm grip and full hearts.
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Little Richard, Here’s Little Richard

By Hanna

For the 55th anniversary of the original release of Here’s Little Richard, Concord Music Group has reissued a remaster of his debut on Specialty Records. This reissue also features a bunch of extras to put the album into context and provide some information on its meaning and background (and make total nerds like me wig out, of course). I wish I could just shout my review, but here it is in written form.
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Turing Machine, What Is The Meaning Of What

By Less Lee Moore

In fact, Turing machines are not intended to model computers, but rather they are intended to model computation itself . . .
—Wikipedia, “Turing Machine”

Perhaps there are those who, unfamiliar with minimalist, drone, or ambient music, may lobby the complaint that it doesn’t go anywhere. Nothing could be further from the truth. These styles of music can certainly take you places, but to paraphrase Dr. Crane in The Dark Knight, they might not be places you wanted to go. This is certainly true of Demdike Stare, who reside at the disturbing end of that particular spectrum. As Turing Machine’s new album What Is The Meaning Of What reveals however, these places may simply be the ones to which you didn’t expect to go. And the ride there is invigorating.
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