Posts by Doug Collette

[rating=6.0] By far the very best track on John Fogerty’s Wrote A Song For Everyone is “Long As I Can See the Light” recorded with My Morning Jacket.  Jim James’ voice turns him into something a younger version of Fogerty when he sings, while the prominent piano and organ echo the arrangement of the Cosmo’s […]

[rating=9.0] Packaged with a collector’s loving eye for, the 25th Anniversary edition of Green recognizes a most significant milestone in the career of R.E.M. Notwithstanding the nay saying of the alternative music community of the time, the Athens GA quartet’s signing with Warner Bros was a logical extension of their career path to that point. […]

[rating=8.0] In its latest incarnation, Robert Walter’s 20th Congress may be a slightly realigned and augmented version of The Greyboy Allstars, of which he is a founding member. But as captured on Get Thy Bearings, this band has as much of a distinct, albeit understated personality, as its leader. Recorded around the same general timeframe […]

As the Grateful Dead organization entered its transition from an independent business entity to its full-fledged collaboration with Rhino Records in the middle of the last decade, the titles in the ‘Dick’s Pick’s’ archive series became available only sporadically. Beginning in 2011, however, Real Gone Music began the regular reissue of the titles. Dick’s Picks #24, recorded March 1974 at the venerable Cow Palace, is testament to a high level of inspiration in the band’s playing, no doubt elevated even further as it takes place on the group's home turf in San Francisco. Even more notably, this concert represents the first use of the hallowed ‘Wall of Sound’ in its entirety.

The Waterboys' An Appointment with Mr. Yeats actually predates the concept of the Billy Bragg/Wilco Mermaid Avenue project as well as New Multitudes' more recent homage to Woody Guthrie. Nurtured by bandleader Mike Scott over a period of two decades, the album's exalting music, roiling ("The Hosting of the Shee") and reflective ("Song of Wandering Aengus), has its inspiration in the verse of the genius Irish poet William Butler Yeats.

Mofro’s appearance at Higher Ground was a reminder of what a rare pleasure well-performed live music can be.  And it’s all the more so pleasurable when that performance takes place in front of an audience present for the music above all else. The larger of the two rooms at the South Burlington venue held roughly two hundred people by the time The Eric Krasno Band finished, but given the acclamation afforded the openers (who proffered a well-intentioned but decidedly work-in-progress set), they were all there for the music.

During their original alliance, Graham Parker and The Rumour never released a live album that accurately represented how powerful they sounded in concert (the execrable The  Parkerilla is only worth mentioning as an aside. These double-disc packages, however, stand as essential documents of the early stages of the partnership between this supremely smart songwriter and a crack band.

With 82 tracks carefully collated over four CDs with a triple fold package  designed to hold them (alongside the accompanying 116 page booklet), the Stephen Stills anthology Carry On is borderline cumbersome but ultimately enlightening, as much perhaps for the light it sheds on such history-spanning collections as on this particular artist. Like any great album, the continuity of the vivid graphic design of Carry On mirrors that of the music inside.

Glide jazz writer Doug Collette takes a quick look at recent recordings from Stan Killian, Benny Green, Giovanni Moltoni, Robert Hurst and Samuel Barber Quartet.

A constant stream of guest musicians, planned or spontaneous, usually doesn't lend itself to generating any discernible momentum during a concert as each successive unit invariably begins to gather individual steam with the entrance of a new player. At least on this DVD, Jorma's 70th Birthday Celebration avoids that drawback largely because the solidity of the core band has continuity in line with its repertoire.