Author Archives: Steve Matteo

Marvin Gaye went from strength to strength throughout most of his career. His early Tamla/Motown singles became big hits, and he had some of those hits as a duo, primarily with Tammi Terrell.

His album What’s Goin’ On, released in 1971, was a breakthrough that demonstrated he was a serious artist writing about the issues of the day and expanding his musical palette by incorporating sophisticated musical arrangements, lush orchestrations, and new musical sounds into a conceptual masterpiece that has withstood the test of time. Lyrically, the album is as relevant as ever. Only two years after that album was made, one of the most purely amatory albums ever recorded was released, and he hit the charts yet again with Let’s Get It On.

Even with all this success, behind the scenes, Gaye was, to riff on the title song from the soundtrack album he released in 1972, a troubled man. Drugs, personal demons, record company hassles, and an unraveling marriage would eventually lead him to drop out of the music business and leave Motown. The album that would in many ways be his last real Motown effort of note (even though there would be two more released) is I Want You. While not met with as much critical praise as Let’s Get It On, it did hit number one on the R&B album charts, and the title song was a number one hit there also.

Over the years, the album has gone through a re-appraisal, and in fact, in retrospect, it has become a highly influential work. It’s fitting that the album is now receiving an audiophile release to mark its 50th anniversary. The album, the first recorded at Gaye’s own Marvin’s Room studio, has superb sound, and this is easily one of the best-sounding Vinylphyle releases.

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Celebrating Cat Stevens on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

The singer-songwriter movement that began in the late ‘60s and blossomed in the ‘70s became one of the most dominant musical movements of that very rich era. Its influence seems to continue to grow, and the genre’s key music holds up remarkably well.

While many think of American or Canadian artists as the dominant artists of the genre—Joni Mitchell, Carole King, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Gordon Lightfoot, Carly Simon, and others—some British artists were also key to the sound, particularly Cat Stevens. His 1970 album Tea for the Tillerman became one of the most important and commercially successful albums of the era. A Super Deluxe 50th Anniversary Edition of the album was released in 2020, along with Mona Bone Jakon, his previous album, which was also released in 1970.

Mona Bone Jakon signaled a sea-change in Stevens’s music. He had previously written and recorded very pop-oriented music for the Deram label, which was often lumped in with the then-waning British Invasion sound. Mona Bone Jakon also began his relationship with Chris Blackwell and Island Records. Equally influential and as timeless as Tea for the Tillerman, his next album, Teaser and the Firecat, released in 1971, is now also available in a Super Deluxe 50th Anniversary Edition.

This set is as fulsome as the Tea set, including, for starters, four CDs. CD one is a 50th anniversary remaster of the original 10-track album. CD two includes 17 demos, alternate versions, rehearsals, bonus tracks, and new recordings of “The Wind” and “Bitterblue.” CD three, entitled Live On Air, UK 1970/71, includes 20 live radio and television performances, mostly from the BBC. CD four is a 12-song live performance from Montreux, Switzerland, on May 2, 1971.

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With our previous article on Miles Davis, we kicked off commemorating the jazz trumpeter’s 100th birthday year with a review of an excellent audiophile stereo reissue of Kind of Blue. While the album is the biggest-selling album in jazz history and a seminal modal jazz masterpiece, Davis is more known in jazz circles for his various periods of unprecedented innovation.

Davis shares the watershed breakthroughs with the musicians he plays with, and in many cases, some or all of them contribute equally to his many new phases. While it is the iconic studio albums that are the canvas on which Davis and his sidemen make musical history, sometimes there are historic live dates and/or tours that serve as the incubator for some of his cornerstone musical breakthroughs. One of the most celebrated groups of musicians he ever played with is what is referred to as his second great quintet.

The first great quintet lasted roughly from 1955 to 1958 and included Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, Philly Joe Jones on drums, and, completing the group, John Coltrane, who replaced Sonny Rollins, who had to leave the band because he was dealing with drug problems. The group eventually became a sextet with the addition of Cannonball Adderley.

It would be roughly six years before the second great quintet began in 1964. The lineup would last roughly until 1969. The group originally included Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums), with Wayne Shorter (saxophone) being the last to join. The group relied on a more acoustic sound, often took an almost avant-garde approach, which was never quite free jazz, and, without anyone really noticing early on, began laying the foundation for fusion-jazz.

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Kind of Blue from Miles Davis may be the most examined and re-examined album in jazz music history. The biggest-selling and most popular album in jazz history has been reissued countless times over the years in a myriad of formats. Oddly enough, both the stereo and mono issues of the album have major problems.

The original 1959 mono master tapes no longer exist, making original pressings through the 1960s the only true way to listen to the album in mono on vinyl. The stereo issue has been plagued by problems from the start, as one of the tape machines used at Columbia’s 30th Street studio ran too slowly, causing speed issues and pitch anomalies on the three tracks on side one.

The Analog Productions UHQR Edition, released in 2021, digitally corrected the problem with the later mono pressings. The original list price of that now out-of-print reissue was $150. Thankfully, for the stereo version fix, a more affordable option now exists at around $65. This new, all-analog reissue is sourced from an out-of-print, speed-corrected edition released by Classic Records in 1995, mastered by Bernie Grundman, and includes the late music critic Robert Palmer’s liner notes from that reissue.

This new two-LP set features the full album on disc one with the new speed-corrected side one version. The second album includes side one without the speed correction. The first three sides are 33 1/3. Side four, at 45 RPM, includes a previously unreleased take of “Flamenco Sketches.”

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It’s difficult to explain to today’s pop music fans just how big Frampton Comes Alive! was when it was released in 1976. The double-live album was a blockbuster sales hit and a phenomenon.

Music in the 1970s was driven just as much by blockbuster albums as by a plethora of must-see live acts. Nowadays, the concert business is in shambles because of high ticket prices and the prevalence of popular artists who primarily built their followings on producer-driven music with slick, controlled, mostly electronic studio craft. Some may put on entertaining shows, but many lack the organic musicianship of the classic rock-era groups and artists. Live albums, especially blockbuster live albums, are a thing of the past.

Peter Frampton was in many ways a surprise breakout artist. He was in the short-lived group The Herd, which was formed in 1965 when he was 16, formed Humble Pie with Steve Marriott in 1969, and then departed in 1972 to go solo. He recorded four solo albums before the tour that yielded Frampton Comes Alive! and was slowly building a following and becoming more popular, but was strictly an FM artist. Even for that era, a double-live album that yielded so many hits was an oddity.

It’s hard to remember the last time anyone had a hit with a live track or album. The album yielded the hits “Show Me the Way” and “Baby I Love Your Way” and unleashed the 14-minute-plus FM staple “Do You Feel Like We Do.” That track highlighted Frampton’s dexterity with the vocoder, a vocal tube/mic setup that gave vocals a spacey, robotic, fuzzy sound. Joe Walsh also had success with the effect during that time period.

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There was a time in the early to mid-’70s when Glam was the hottest trend in music. Also referred to as Glitter rock, it had been brewing for a while and often encompassed groups or artists from other musical genres.

The dominant artists, who were all British, were David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, and T. Rex. By the time Glam was at the red-hot center of pop, T. Rex was, for the most part, the primary musical vehicle for Marc Bolan. Bolan had been on the scene for years before he hit big, starting with the short-lived John’s Children in the late 1960s.

Initially called Tyrannosaurus Rex, the group was, in their early days, primarily a duo comprised of Bolan and Steve Peregrin for their first three albums, with Mickey Finn replacing Peregrin for the fourth. The group played a distinctively trippy and heady brand of folk-inspired psychedelia on their first four albums. Two were released in 1968, one in 1969, and one in 1970.

The group became T. Rex in 1970 (thanks to some studio log-sheet shorthand by producer Tony Visconti) with their self-titled debut, which showed a funkier, flashier, more rock-oriented style, although Bolan and Finn were still the two main members. It wasn’t until 1971 with Electric Warrior that the group exploded and became truly a group with the addition of Steve Currie on bass and Bill Legend on drums, and with guests including Ian McDonald on sax, Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman on backing vocals, and Rick Wakeman supplying the keyboards on “Get in On.”

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Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys is one of the most influential albums in pop music history. Released in 1966, it became a major influence on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Of course, Pet Sounds would never have happened if it weren’t for The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, released in 1965.

What must be considered The Beach Boys’ best album has been reissued countless times over the years in a variety of formats. While Brian Wilson favored the mono mix of the album, it has also been issued and reissued in various stereo mixes. In 1997, 2006, and 2016, fulsome box sets of the album on CD, with bonus material, were released to commemorate the album’s 30th, 40th, and 50th anniversaries, respectively. Several new reissues to mark the 60th anniversary have been released, with a heavy focus on vinyl. The two we will focus on here are the Vinylphyle double-album, black vinyl reissue, and the Pet Sounds Sessions Highlights double-album, black vinyl.

In less than a year, there have been fourteen Vinylphyle reissues. This particular release includes both a mono and a stereo version of the album. Brian Wilson favored the mono mix, but he also remixed the stereo version in 1972 because he wasn’t happy with the original stereo mix.

That version has been referred to as the Artisan Sound Recorders EQ’d tape and alternately as the Reprise tape, as it was for the 1972 reissue of Pet Sounds packaged with a new album entitled Carl and the Passions So Tough that was released through the group’s own Brother Records, distributed by Reprise/Warner. The stereo version here is from an assembled master reel from 1996 and is not the Artisan EQ’d tape/Reprise tape, and does include a digital step. The mono album is from the original 1966 mono mix analog tape.

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Supertramp is one of the many groups or artists who started in the late 1960s or early 1970s as artsy, offbeat, or even underground unknowns and, by sometime before the end of the 1970s, became multi-million-selling blockbuster album artists.

The British band released their self-titled debut album in 1970 and quickly followed up the next year with Indelibly Stamped, establishing them as a quirky and uncompromising group that created richly drawn albums of deeply thematic pieces, with indescribable music. Not quite prog, something more than jazzy or folk rock, the group’s music was something entirely new and original.

After a three-year hiatus, they released Crime of the Century, an album that was a massive leap forward, with such FM faves as “Bloody Well Right” and “Dreamer,” and a recording that immediately became an audiophile landmark as the first UHQR Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab release.

Their next album, Crisis? What Crisis? released the following year only further solidified their growing stature in the FM album rock world and set the stage for their massive commercial breakout. Even In The Quietest Moments…, released two years later and now available as one of three new Supertramp reissues, began the group’s ascension to massive breakout success, mostly due to the album’s opening track, the epic sing-song “Give a Little Bit,” which dominated FM radio at the time.

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If there ever was a group that began in the 1970s but whose music was tailor-made for the 1980s, it was The Alan Parsons Project, the brainchild of famed producer Parsons and his partner Eric Woolfson, who passed away in 2009. Their studio-oriented music, which featured a rotating cast of singers and musicians, took full advantage of all the electronic toys available to make music at the time, and had futuristic, thematic concepts that were perfect for what was to come, for good or bad, in the 1980s.

While their 1976 debut, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, was very much a product of the ’70s, their next album in 1977, I, Robot, based on the interconnected short story collection by Issac Asimov published in 1950, wasn’t just the perfect soundtrack for the ’80s, but is even more relevant today.

Pyramid, in 1979, thematically presented eternal questions and used ancient symbols as a guidepost, while musically approached the themes with very modern electronic sounds. Eve in 1979 was a dramatic departure and signaled that the group may have decided to leave the past and maybe even the future behind them. Which brings us to the latest batch of reissues from the group and the first albums they released in the ’80s.

The Turn of a Friendly Card, recorded in Paris and released in 1980, was almost a reset for the group and, in some ways, oddly and conversely, almost a follow-up to their debut. The album had many musical attributes of ’70s music, was a lush, immersive experience, and boasted what turned out to be their biggest hits to date, “Games People Play” and “Time,” eclipsing “Damned if I Do” from Eve. Rather than tackling overreaching themes, the album used a simple game for the thematic metaphor. It’s hard to argue which of the group’s albums is their best, but this one is at least clearly among them.

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The Zombies are often remembered almost exclusively as a British Invasion 1960s pop group, best known for such delightful hits as “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No,” and “Time of the Season.” The group’s full career, however, reveals a much more varied and fascinating story.

For starters, “Time of the Season” was from what would turn out to be a highly influential album, Odessey and Oracle, released in 1968. The album was to be the group’s swansong, and on initial release, while garnering some good press, it didn’t really catch on. It took a while for “Time of the Season” to finally become a hit, and the album has gone on to become one of the cult ’60s masterpieces whose stature has only grown over the years.

After The Zombies broke up, the group’s lead singer, Colin Blunstone, released some fine solo albums, and keyboardist Rod Argent had success with his band Argent, whose music received considerable FM airplay during their heyday. In the late 1970s, the group Santana scored big with a cover of “She’s Not There,” turning the catchy pop tune into a sizzling rocker. Finally, in 1989, various members of the group reformed in different iterations, leading to a full-fledged reunion that tentatively kicked off in the early 1990s and became even more regular in 2004, with continued touring and their first fully realized new albums since the 1960s.

While the group has now wound down due to Rod Argent’s inability to tour, they have, through their Beachwood Park Records, been involved in an ambitious and successful series of reissues of their albums. The latest reissue, Begin Here, like all the rest so far, is an excellent release. While there have been reissues of their 1964 debut album before, this new one is presented in glorious mono.

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Bob Dylan turns 85 on May 24. June 20 will mark the 60th anniversary of the release of Blonde on Blonde, perhaps Dylan’s most ambitious album and the one that concluded the trilogy of albums that was the peak of his legendary rise to mythical musical supremacy in the 1960’s. Dylan is still going strong today and is in the middle of the so-called “never-ending tour.”

A recent box set of his music—yet another laudable archival project in his long-running Bootleg Series—magnificently frames the era when Dylan, the musical artist, was being born and then exploded like a comet in the early ’60s. There have been some exceptional bootleg series releases, but this one is truly consequential and could not have come at a more opportune time.

The Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963 is available in various formats, including an eight-CD box set with 139 tracks and a 4-LP Highlights package with 42 tracks. Both will be covered here.

The release doesn’t just cover Dylan’s emergence as a musician and songwriter, but also places his music and its significance in the context of the folk revival and the fertile, historic Greenwich Village folk scene of the early ’60s. It also reflects the watershed protest voice of a generation of songs that Dylan himself called his finger-pointing songs. Dylan was never comfortable with the protest-singer/voice-of-a-generation label and quickly shed that sobriquet as his songwriting matured.

Dylan fans who relish collecting and hearing his unreleased recordings will be thrilled by the overflowing bounty of never-before-released recordings included in this set. The eight-CD set includes a whopping 59 previously unreleased recordings.

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Lovers of bespoke, limited edition, audiophile reissues are living in a golden age as new audiophile reissue series continue to be launched. One that debuted recently is the Vinylphyle series. In this roundup, three of the initial releases in the series will be covered. They are The Velvet Underground & Nico from The Velvet Underground, originally released in March of 1967 on Verve Records; Northern Lights-Southern Cross from The Band, originally released in November of 1975 on Capitol Records, and Exodus from Bob Marley & The Wailers, originally released in 1977 on Island Records.

The Velvet Underground & Nico by The Velvet Underground may not be considered an audiophile recording. Still, it’s easily one of the most influential albums of all time, with its influence felt more overtly years after the album’s release. While Lou Reed is often the member of the group most talked about, and who would have a long and highly regarded career, all of the members here (which also includes John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Moe Tucker, and Nico) contributed in key ways.

Cale was Reed’s primary collaborator at various points in their career and an innovative musician. Tucker was more influential as one of the few female drummers in music at that time. Morrison’s contributions were more subtle. Nico, although she adds a sophisticated European glamour to the group, offers a stark contrast to some of the darker, dissonant music here, with her lovely lead vocals on “Femme Fatale,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror.”

These three tracks work perfectly with the album’s opening number, “Sunday Morning,” proving that, amidst the dissonant decadent squalor of such songs as “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Heroin,” and “Venus in Furs,” there are some beautiful and softer tracks at the heart of this album.

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The music world lost Robert Flack in February of 2025. Flack began her singular career in 1969 and released her 15th and final album in 2012. Her Atlantic Records albums make up the bulk of her recorded output and easily represent her best music. It’s no surprise that an iconic artist whose music was initially rooted in jazz and R&B, and later in pop and soul, would record for Atlantic Records. She is one of the key artists who made the label the undisputed supreme record company of the music business during its heyday of the 1960s and 1970s.

A new box set includes the first eight albums she recorded, all on Atlantic. Two more Atlantic albums are not included in this box. Flack’s beautiful, silky, smoky, and sultry style evolved slowly over these eight albums. This is the sound of a singer fully in command of her art and life, who sings with an understated yet powerful, mature grace unmatched.

Many may not know that her debut album, First Take, released in 1969, was the result of her being discovered by jazz pianist and vocalist Les McCann. Joel Dorn, veteran producer of many legendary jazz recordings, produced the album. It begins with her singular interpretation of the jazz classic “Compared to What.”

Flack was also adept at interpreting folk-based material at this time, with a Leonard Cohen cover and the album’s big hit, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” written by English folk artist Ewan MacColl. The song, in its earlier folk incarnation, was popularized by Peggy Seeger. Flack’s version was featured in the Clint Eastwood film Play Misty for Me. It was her commercial breakthrough.

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It’s a wondrous time to be a fan of the music of Yes. The group’s classic period albums (The Yes Album, Fragile, Close to the Edge) have recently received mammoth reissue box sets, and there have also been some excellent live albums, including much-coveted Record Store Day releases.

The album that followed Close to the Edge, 1973’s Tales from Topographic Oceans, has now also been released in a fulsome reissue box. Unlike the three aforementioned albums from the group’s most beloved period, Tales from Topographic Oceans has its fans and its detractors. Some of those detractors even include members of Yes, most notably keyboard player Rick Wakeman.

Up until Close to the Edge, prog was a commercially successful musical genre, and many critics applauded its imaginative, ethereal, and conceptual approach, as well as the musicians, who were true instrumental craftsmen of the highest order. Tales from Topographic Oceans was an album that was, for some, an album that unfortunately reflected too much of what the genre’s critics considered the worst aspects of the sound; its indulgent, long musical passages and sometimes nearly incomprehensible lyrical flights of fancy that would make C.S. Lewis blush had them questioning whether two full LPs was overkill.

For some, the album was a symptom of how music was losing its way as the mid-’70s approached and may have even been signaling the first stirrings of listeners looking for something more immediate and simpler that harkened back to the roots of rock, which would eventually lead to punk and new wave and, much later, indie and grunge.

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We spotlight two Record Store Day 2026 releases from Craft Recordings that landed in the racks last Saturday.

That’s Him! from Abbey Lincoln is another in a long line of bespoke jazz reissues from Craft Recordings. It’s an RSD 2026 Exclusive with a run of 4,200 copies. Cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing on 180-gram vinyl, the reissue comes in an archival sleeve, is a limited mono edition, and replicates the period Riverside label.

Originally released on Riverside as part of the Contemporary Series in 1958, but recorded in 1957, Lincoln is backed by what is billed as the Riverside Jazz Stars, and that’s not hyperbole. The quartet is Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Sonny Rollins on tenor sax, Wynton Kelly on piano, and Paul Chambers on bass. Max Roach, not part of the Riverside stable, plays drums.

Lincoln is a powerful singer, but approaches the songs here with understatement and nuance. “Strong Man,” “My Man,” “I Must Have That Man,” and “When a Woman Loves a Man” form the lyrical thematic core of the album, along with the album’s closing track “Don’t Explain,” written by Billie Holiday. The way Lincoln handles the Oscar Brown Jr. composition “Strong Man,” which opens the album, sets the mood for an extraordinary set.

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