January 2013 is barely one week old, but a candidate for strangest catalogue music story of the year has already broken. A 4-CD set of outtakes from the early career of Bob Dylan has recently been released, but don’t look for it in your local record shop, or even online. The 50th Anniversary Collection contains […]
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Though the group isn’t often spoken of in the same breath as Crosby, Stills and Nash or The Traveling Wilburys, Mad Season was a bona fide supergroup for the 1990s. The Seattle-based group of musicians - Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, guitarist Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, drummer/percussionist Barrett Martin of Screaming Trees, and […]
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Sexual liberation only goes so far… So went the tagline of director Armenia Balducci’s 1979 film Amo non amo. When the Italian drama starring Jacqueline Bisset, Maximilian Schell and Terence Stamp was slated for U.S. release, though, the decision was made to replace the score by Italian prog/symphonic “horror rock” band Goblin with a new, […]
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Gray skies are gonna clear up... More than seven years before the first Tribe of Hair let the sun shine in, another cast of characters brought rock (and roll!) to the New York stage. Michael Stewart, Charles Strouse and Lee Adams’ smash hit musical Bye Bye Birdie skyrocketed its leading actors Dick Van Dyke and […]
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Shuggie Otis was born into a musical family, the son of Johnny Otis, the "Godfather of Rhythm and Blues." Bandleader, songwriter and performer Johnny (real name: Ioannis Alexandres Veliotes) scored successes with Etta James, "Little" Esther Phillips, Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Ace, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and more, so it could have been no […]
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Norah Jones sure is everywhere. The singer/songwriter with the smoky voice and a deep musical bloodline (being the daughter of Ravi Shankar) exploded onto the scene with 2002's Come Away with Me, a deft fusion of pop, jazz and country that topped the charts in nearly a dozen countries, won eight Grammy Awards and remains one […]
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Todd Rundgren’s 1989 album Nearly Human was conceived with a simple mandate by the artist: record a set of songs that could be performed live in an “R&B revue”-style setting. To that end, it was recorded live with few overdubs. Rundgren intuitively knew that these songs needed to be strong enough to stand on their […]
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As 2012 yielded to 2013, more than a few noteworthy releases may have been lost in the shuffle. Some of the most impressive of those December releases came from Spain's Quartet Records. The label closed out the year with three particularly spectacular titles that no film score buff will want to miss. Two came from the […]
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Pack your bags, we'll leave tonight: U.K. label Rock Candy Records is releasing brand new remasters of four albums by the one and only Eddie Money. The Brooklyn-born Edward Mahoney was a New York cop in the 1960s, but he ultimately decided to chase a more artistic muse. Working his way through the club circuit […]
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Cherry Red’s recently-reactivated FiveFour label’s latest trawl into the Sony jazz archives has delivered another three rare titles to CD. All have been available in the format before, though one is particularly difficult to find, and all three should have great appeal. The oldest selection of the trio hails from 1959. Duke Ellington’s Jazz Party […]
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