The reissue of the Grateful Dead’s very first two archive titles, simultaneous with the release of Three From the Vault, reaffirms how endlessly fascinating it is to follow this band. And it’s not just the music, but also the way the group meshed aesthetic and business activities.
Rose Hill Drive’s performance set reached a frenzied conclusion, before a dwindling crowd. The threesome enganged in more free-form improvisation than their previous visit to this same venue back in May of this year: recall the instrumental conflagrations of Cream in their heyday, if you would, and relish the self-renewing aspect of great rock and roll.
Watching Chris and Rich Robinson perform together during Birds of a Feather: Live at the Roxy, prompts the observation that performing without the Black Crowes is the best thing the founders have done for their band in recent memory.
As leader of Mott the Hoople, Ian Hunter was as vulnerable as he was acerbic, seeing rock and roll as a metaphor for all facets of the human condition. The perpetually-shaded iconoclast has continued this work through a dozen post-Mott solo albums, the success of which has depended, as is the case with most literate songwriters, on the balance between musicianship/production and the material as means to a message.
Porter, Batiste and Stoltz launched back into their funk attack, which is what the increasingly animated crowd came to experience anyway: to dance not to trance. The spirit of New Orleans is really a state of mind, residing collectively, at least for one chilly late autumn evening, upstairs in Club Metronome.
All four previous Bob Dylan collections, not counting The Bootleg Series, contained nuggets sufficiently rare to entice both the completists and the novice collector. The choice selections of the new three-cd compilation (also available in a single disc distillation as well as part of a deluxe collections box) counter claims it's redundant.
Time Out, Take Five is the first in a regular Jazz column by Glide contributor Doug Collette, where he’ll take five recent releases and size them up.
With his new album Peter Case has come full circle. While Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John is not the same sharp turn as his eponymous 1986 album was (in contrast to the preceding rockin’ Plimsouls), the Californian’s first on the Yep Roc label does constitute a return to simplicity (not to mention a homage to roots) that’s refreshing in conception and execution.
It’s perfectly appropriate Jorma Kaukonen writes the brief liner notes to this recently exhumed Jefferson Airplane concert recording. Sweeping Up the Spotlight documents Jefferson Airplane just as it was fracturing along the fault line that opened earlier in 1969 when the guitarist/vocalist/songwriter launched Hot Tuna with bassist Jack Casady.
