Monthly Archives: August 2021

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Keyboardist Walter Bishop, Jr. recorded the second album released by the Black Jazz label, Coral Keys, a masterpiece of Blue Note-style atmospherics infused with ‘70s soul-jazz. But a mere two years later, Bishop, Jr. brought a whole new sound and band into the studio for 1973’s Keeper of My Soul.

Contrary to the album title, the name of the band was not The 4th Cycle; instead, as the liner notes put it, the name reflected “Bishop’s composition and improvisational techniques based on the Cycle of 4ths and his various personal musical cycles as performer, student and teacher.” The album also was imbued with a spirituality owed in part to his studies with yogi Parmahansa Yogananda; little wonder, then, that Keeper of My Soul was a more ambitious, electric, and “out” record than its predecessor.

With the estimable support of flautist/ sax man Hubert Laws, bassist Gerald Brown, and vibraphonist Woody Murray, Bishop explores Keith Jarrett-like free-form passages (“Those Who Chant”), Latin stylings (Kenny Dorham’s “Blue Bossa”), and offers one of the most unusual and funky interpretations of “Summertime” you’ll ever hear.

All in remastered sound with liner notes by Pat Thomas. First-ever vinyl reissue of a long-lost classic (also available in orange with black swirl vinyl, limited to 750 copies and exclusive to indie record stores).

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Omnivore to reissue Songs of the Spires, Walk on Well Lighted Streets, and Welcoming a New Ice Age, all with bonus tracks.

If you listened to L.A.’s World Famous KROQ or the many KROQ-inspired radio stations throughout the nation in the 1980s, you’ve probably heard Gleaming Spires. Their song “Are You Ready for the Sex Girls?” was hard to avoid. On September 17, 2021, Omnivore Recordings will reissue the duo’s three albums, Songs of the Spires, Walk on Well Lighted Streets, and Welcoming a New Ice Age, in expanded editions with bonus tracks, and track-by-track commentary by the band members.

Leslie Bohem and David Kendrick met in the late ’70s when David went to check out Les’ band Bates Motel. Kendrick joined as the band’s drummer. Bates Motel soon entered the studio with musician/producer Andrew Gold, to capture their repertoire on tape.

They garnered a regional following and played gigs up and down the West Coast, but a record contract eluded them. They met Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks in 1980 and invited them to come see the band. But instead of the brothers producing them, they asked Leslie and David to join Sparks. While performing with Sparks, the two began to create music as Gleaming Spires.

Gleaming Spires’ debut album, Songs of the Spires, was issued in 1981 and the follow-up, Walk on Well Lighted Streets, in 1983. Both were produced by Stephen Hauge (New Order, Pet Shop Boys, OMD). Prior to recording their second album, the Spires grew to a quartet with the addition of Bob Haag (Bates Motel, Sparks) and Jim Goodwin (John Cale, Sparks).

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Last year, the New York-based Dot Time label issued The Duo Sessions, which featured privately made tapes of groundbreaking jazz pianist Lennie Tristano in dialogue with fellow pianist Connie Crothers, saxophonist Lenny Popkin, and drummer Roger Mancuso. An enlightening spotlight on an artist who’d effectively disappeared from recording studios and bandstands later in his life, its format was CD only; by extension, the praise the set received in the pages of this website was substantial, but fairly brief. In a sweet development, Dot Time’s vinyl edition, with an accompanying download, is freshly available, its arrival spurring a deeper evaluation of Tristano’s work and his tight but intense sphere of influence.

Born on March 19, 1919, Leonard Joseph Tristano made a strong entrance onto the jazz scene during the bebop era, playing in bands with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie for radio broadcasts and then getting his own group together, first with saxophonist Lee Konitz and a little later adding another saxophonist in Warne Marsh, both horn players inseparable from any worthwhile consideration of the pianist’s life and work (they figure prominently in this review).

Tristano began teaching piano in the 1940s and seems to have never quit, this practice eventually overtaking his interest in studio recording and gigs, though the biggest hunk of his discography is sourced from live performances. By 1978, the year of his death, his body of work was amongst the slimmest of any major jazz figure.

There was side one of Crosscurrents, cut in ’49 for Capitol but unreleased until ’72 (alongside unrelated recordings by Buddy DeFranco and Bill Harris), Tristano and The New Tristano, both for Atlantic, from ’56 and ’61 respectively, and the fairly obscure but fascinating Descent Into the Maelstrom, first released in Japan by East Wind in 1976 and in the US two years later by Inner City. Without a bunch of live recordings dating from ’49-’65 (and it’s worthy of note that Tristano and Maelstrom are partly comprised of performances), the man’s shelf would be meager, indeed.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | To mark the 50th anniversary of the 1970 concept double album, Jesus Christ Superstar, it has today been announced that a variety of special anniversary edition albums will be released September 17. This landmark release, which includes full cooperation from the creators Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, features an array of exclusive demos, commentaries, interviews and much more.

In 1970, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber released Jesus Christ Superstar as a concept double album. It became a massive global best-seller, topping the US Billboard Top LPs chart in both February and May 1971, as well as ranking at number one in the year-end chart. By 1983, the album had sold over 7 million copies worldwide.

However, the journey to international success was far from straightforward. As unknown names in musical theatre, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber were unable to find a producer willing to stage their ambitious idea for a religious-themed rock opera. Eventually, they persuaded MCA records to let them record the score first. Using a full orchestra, and with the outstanding talents of Ian Gillan, Murray Head, Yvonne Elliman and The Grease Band, they created a masterpiece that revolutionized the form of musical theatre.

Within a year of its chart success, stage productions of Jesus Christ Superstar began to appear all over the world, leading to record-breaking runs in the West End, a hit Hollywood film, Tony nominations and Olivier Awards. Its influence and impact have not diminished: in 2018 the NBC live production of the show, starring John Legend and Sara Bareilles, resulted in Emmy Award wins for Rice and Lloyd Webber (thereby making them two of the 16 people in history to have won an Emmy®, a Grammy®, an Oscar® and a Tony®).

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For decades, the prime fount of Afrobeat has been Nigeria. However, turning retrospective attention southward to the landlocked nation of Zambia reveals a distinct strain of ’70s African rocking; Now-Again Records’ two Welcome to Zamrock! compilations spotlight this movement with appropriate depth. The CD editions come with a 104-page hardcover book co-authored by Now-Again’s Eothen “Egon” Alapatt and Zambian music historian Leonard Koloko, while the 2LPs are accompanied with an edited booklet and a WAV download card. Together, they offer 34 tracks recorded from ’72-’76 that in the label’s words represent every important Zamrock band.

The music blog wave has long ebbed and without much in the way of commiseration, but it’s worth noting that an occasional curatorial gem did shine amidst the sea of digitized record collections. For example, music blogs are where this writer first heard a pair of Zamrock’s most prolific acts, specifically the Ngozi Family and WITCH; in a positive turn, Now-Again has licensed full-length reissues of both (amongst others) and awarded them prominent positions on these two overviews of the style.

In terms of groove, Zamrock is certainly related to the sounds that emanated from Nigeria during the same period, but overall, the Zambian approach is distinguished by a larger ratio of rock in the mix, a circumstance that can be attributed to the impact of colonial rule. Having broken free from Britain less than a decade prior to the start of Welcome to Zamrock’s timeframe, the country’s reality is succinctly expressed in Now-Again’s choice of subtitle: How Zambia’s Liberation Led to a Rock Revolution.

The Ngozi Family’s “Hi Babe” is illustrative of the Zambian recipe, and it smartly opens side one of Vol. 1. The cut’s most striking element is a distortion-soaked guitar riff that registers far beyond fuzzy to the point of being downright serrated, the garage-like production bringing it a slightly muffled quality as the sharp crack of the drums strengthens the hard rock foundation.

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“There is nothing more distinctive than listening to a recording on vinyl. The feel, the one of a kind sound, the obsession it can lead to. For a long time I was picking up a few records a month, rather than a streaming service subscription. I figured it helps the bands out way more, and I get to own something that I will really appreciate having in my collection.”

“I would say I am a modest collector compared to some of my friends, and that my collection really has come from an urge to support artists I love, more than necessarily wearing down the needle with play after play. Whenever I see a new band that I really love putting out their music this way I try my best to pick it up. I don’t want more MP3s or burned CDs around the house; they sound exactly the same on the internet. A record is unique, and I absolutely want to indulge in that.

The past year has been a little slower, but I have managed to pick up a few of The Wonder Years and Frightened Rabbit albums that I’ve been chasing for a while. I am really proud to finally own those, as well as some pals’ bands like October Drift and Wrest’s debut albums.

The best way I have found to experience a band’s work comes from putting on a record, sitting back and taking it all in—listening to a body of work exactly how it was intended, from start to finish. No skips, no bloody adverts—you’re just in it until the end—it’s absolute magic.

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Stumbling onto the indie-pop stylings of The Umbrellas could easily lead to assumptions that they reside in Merry Old England, but no; the map to their digs leads west to San Francisco, USA. Flush with chiming and distorted strings, urgent rhythms, sweet harmonies, and alternating guy-gal lead vocals, the band’s full-length debut is out August 6 on limited edition Coke bottle green vinyl, compact disc, and digital download. Dishing a dozen songs in 38 minutes, the album hits all the marks, and is another treat in a long string of delights from the ever-reliable Slumberland label.

The Umbrellas are Morgan Stanley on vocals and guitar, Matt Ferrara on vocals, guitar and keyboards, Keith Frerichs on 12-string acoustic guitar, drums, and vocals, and Nick Oka on bass. Their sole prior release is the “Maritime E.P.,” which came out just a smidge over one year ago on 33 1/3 rpm 7-inch vinyl and cassette.

Three of the four songs on the 7-inch are also featured on the LP, but in distinctively different versions, with the EP recorded in Ferrara’s apartment and the album at Cidra Studios. Additionally, the rhythms heard on the EP were solely sourced from (or at least only credited to) a drum machine. While said apparatus hasn’t exited The Umbrellas’ scene, the sound of an honest-to-goodness drum kit can’t help but deepen the band’s indie-pop bona fides.

While on the subject of the legit, the cassette version of the “Maritime E.P.” offers an extra track, a nifty cover of “Dance” by the ’80s UK outfit Strawberry Switchblade. If you dig that band but don’t know that song, that’s likely because its only recording was a David Jensen radio session in October of ’82. “Dance” did morph into Strawberry Switchblade’s “Since Yesterday,” the opening track and first single from their eponymous debut album in ’84, but the revamping denoted a stylistic move toward synth-pop and new wave.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | 2021 is shaping up to be the year of Alan Vega. Every year should be, but this year is definitely it.

The announcement of the opening of the Alan Vega archives, which will be unleashing an untold amount of unreleased material dating back to 1971 via Sacred Bones, the release of Mutator (a lost album from the mid ’90s) which has gained rave reviews, a massive feature in The New York Times, Alan has been celebrated everywhere of late. In The Red is over the moon to participate in this celebration with the release of Alan Vega After Dark—an album that captures a late night rock n’ roll session with Alan backed by Ben Vaughn, Barb Dwyer, and Palmyra Delran (all members of the incredible Pink Slip Daddy as well as countless other cool projects). This album serves as a reminder that Alan Vega was an incredible rock n’ roll/ blues/ rockabilly vocalist. He was one of the best.

From the desk of Jason P. Woodbury: I only spoke with Alan Vega once. It was over the phone and the topic of discussion was the 2015 reissue of Cubist Blues, the phenomenally out there album he’d originally released with collaborators Alex Chilton and Ben Vaughn in 1996. I was in a noisy stadium for reasons that no longer matter at all, on a cell phone, but even with all that extra noise considered, Alan was exceptionally difficult to understand.

At first at least. He’d suffered a stroke a few years earlier, in 2012, which still had lingering effects on his speech. But even before that, his heavy East Coast accent had sometimes made him hard to decipher, lending his voice the character of “a cab driver describing fine art,” Vaughn says. If you weren’t from New York—specifically Alan’s New York, an older version of Gotham that may have died with him on July 16th, 2016, when he passed in his sleep—it could be hard to keep up. But after a few minutes, I adjusted to the rhythm.

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Celebrating Ted Turner, born on this day in 1950. —Ed.

Four English song-smithies who couldn’t figure out if they wanted to be guitar heroes or fey sylvan Medievalists playing music to seduce water sprites by, Wishbone Ash really gets my goat–wowing me one minute, and making me want to scream the next.

Take 1972’s Argus, Wishbone Ash’s most successful outing. This baby totally befuddled me as a kid; I loved the groovy guitar interplay between Andy Powell and Ted Turner, but got thrown every time by all the King Arthur’s-in-the-house horseshit. The damn thing sounded like a cross between a Renaissance Faire and Lou Reed’s Rock n Roll Animal, and I simply couldn’t wrap my poor teen mind around it.

You got, for instance, “Sometime World,” which begins life as a moody evocation of England’s green and pleasant land and ends it as a guitar rampage for the ages. “Throw Down the Sword,” similar deal. It opens with a drum tattoo like you might have heard at the beheading of Anne Boleyn before going all Alfred, Lord Tennyson–or Styx–on your ass. But just when you’re ready to dismiss it as a piece of pretentious prog wankery, it goes out blazing in a fiery fandango of guitars that’ll set your hair on fire. It’s furious-making.

Why, oh why, couldn’t these princes of pettifoggery just throw away their suits of armor and kick out the jams like righteous 20th Century motherfuckers? “Warrior” comes on like a case of 21st Century schizophrenia, man, it’s all blistering guitars and cymbal smash and you think “Yes! Finally!” Only to then collapse like Percy Bysshe Shelley in a poetic swoon!

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PHOTO: JAMIE HARMON | Van Duren emerged from the same burbling Ardent Studios evolutionary pond alongside Jody Stephens and Chris Bell, with whom he played in a Memphis band (and also auditioned for their onetime band Big Star). He recorded a couple of Todd Rundgren-like albums in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s that became collectors items for power pop fanatics, and inspired a couple of smitten Australian fans to to seek him out, a pilgrimage captured in their subsequent 2018 documentary, Waiting: The Van Duren Story.

Not a long-lost songwriter like Sugarman had been in his similar rediscovery documentary, Duren could easily be found right in the same rich musical territory where he was raised: Memphis. After years with his well-considered band Good Question, he has more recently been turning out duet albums with Vicki Loveland, a well-kept Memphis secret of her own.

The third Loveland Duren release, Any Such Thing on Edgewood Recordings, won’t be out until October 1, but The Vinyl District is proud to debut a track from it today, “Tumbledown Hearts.” Like a lot of their music, it’s both catchy and emotional as it addresses real relationships among grown up people.

The two say it’s “really is a song about two people finding a way to celebrate life together in spite of turmoil, misunderstandings, disappointments, and a life lived long enough to know that while rose colored glasses may not be reality, we can sure put them on if we choose to.” Such is life among creative romantics. But, they add, the song is “also about sharing companionship and comfort in an adult world with another battered but hopeful and optimistic soul.”

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This album is an abomination. The only things that make the Electric Flag better than their horn-heavy brethren in Blood, Sweat & Tears is their guitarist (Mike Bloomfield) is 1,000 times better than BS&T’s and they don’t have David Clayton Thomas on vocals. David Clayton Thomas ruined lives. Oh, and they didn’t give us “Spinning Wheel.” “Spinning Wheel” is one of those gifts you can’t give back. Once you’ve heard it, you’re soiled forever.

Michael Bloomfield was one of the premier blues guitarists of his (or any) time, but he shouldn’t have been allowed to get within 500 yards of a horn section. This is what ambition can do to a person—they end up hurting people. Admittedly he wasn’t the only musician to come up with the idea of fusing jazz and the blues. B.B. King and Booker T & the M.G.’s (amongst others) had already done it, and they bear part of the blame.

But Bloomfield—who dubbed his new sound “American Music” as if Chuck Berry hailed from Uzbekistan—took things too far with Electric Flag and their 1968 debut album A Long Time Comin’. But let’s be fair; as with the Kennedy assassination, Bloomfield did not act alone. He had accomplices on the grassy knoll in Buddy Miles, Nick Gravenites, Barry Goldberg, and Harvey Brooks. I will omit the names of the others (particularly the horn players) out of respect for their families.

As for that album title, I would argue a long time isn’t long enough. The ideal release date for A Long Time Comin’ would have been ten years after my demise. Which isn’t to say the album is a complete waste. Its cover—which depicts a “groovy” chick in an LSD haze encircled by some of the boys in the band—is a classic example of Haight-era psychedelic kitsch. And that band name is great. Lose the band, and we’d have a winner on our hands.

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