Category Archives: The TVD Storefront

Miserablism may be an “ism” of my own devising but it’s a very real thing, and its sufferers—if they’re of the cynical bent, and most are—tend towards the use of industrial strength sarcasm. Take musical miserablist Harvey Williams’ name for his late ‘80s/early ‘90s solo project, Another Sunny Day. It’s every bit as sarcastic as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and were he a believer in truth in advertising he might have gone with “Your Fucking Sunny Day,” which just happens to the title of a Lambchop song.

Another Sunny Day–who only released one LP, the 1992 compilation London Weekend—were on the roster of the British indie pop pioneers at Sarah Records, which basically put the band amongst the jingly-jangly guitar-friendly power pop set celebrated in the New Musical Express’ highly influential 1986 C86 cassette compilation (although Williams was too late on the scene to be included). London Weekend is made up of five of the six ASD singles released by Sarah Records, minus the “Genetic Engineering/Kilburn Towers” single on which Williams covered songs by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and the Bee Gees, respectively.

Another Sunny Day announced itself to the world with the 1988 six-inch flexi-disc “Anorak City,” a very, very low-fi guitar blur of a song on which Williams sings, “Take a trip to Anorak Station/There’s a craze that’s sweeping the nation/So don’t let your credibility slip” and (wonderfully) “Will you be anorak, baby?” I don’t know if Anorak City is London, but I assume the craze he’s talking about is anoraks, which will most likely never take hold in the U.S.A. because most of us wouldn’t know an anorak from a kayak.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Welcome to Feel The Wind—maybe one of the greatest team-ups in Jazz history featuring jazz superstars Art Blakey and Freddie Hubbard!

Art Blakey (1919–1990) needs little introduction, the American Jazz drummer and bandleader made a name for himself in the 1940s and 1950s playing with contemporaries such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker. He is often considered to have been Thelonious Monk’s most empathetic drummer (he played on both Monk’s first recording session in 1947 and his final one in 1971). In the decades that followed Blakey recorded for all THE labels that mattered in the field of jazz (Columbia, Blue Note, Atlantic, RCA, Impulse!, Riverside, Prestige, Verve, etc.). His collaborations were numerous and include working with equally legendary artists such as Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Chet Baker, John Coltrane, and countless others.

Art Blakey was a major figure and a pioneer for modern jazz, he assumed an aggressive swing drumming style early on in his career and is known as one of the inventors of the modern bebop style of drumming. Blakey was sampled and remixed by major acts such as The Black Eyed Peas, Digable Planets, Buscemi, KRS-One, and Madlib. The legacy of Art Blakey is not only the music he produced, but also the opportunities they provided for several future generations of jazz musicians.

Freddie Hubbard (1938-2008) also needs little introduction, he was one of the most renowned American jazz trumpeters who played bebop, hard bop, and post-bop from the early 1960s onwards. His unmistakable and influential tone contributed to new perspectives for modern jazz and bebop. At the age of 20, in New York, he began playing and recording with some of the best jazz players of the era, including Don Cherry, Quincy Jones, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Oliver Nelson, and Herbie Hancock.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Last Samurai marked master screen composer Hans Zimmer’s 100th score, and it was and is perhaps his best.

The 2003 film starred Tom Cruise as a Civil War soldier who travels to Japan and becomes embroiled in the clash between the Imperial Japanese Army and traditional Japanese samurai culture, lending Zimmer ample opportunity to display his unparalleled ability to fuse orchestral, Westernized elements with indigenous motifs (in this case, utilizing the traditional Japanese taiko drum for action sequences and the shakuhachi flute and koto for more pastoral passages).

Fans of his work in The Thin Red Line will particularly enjoy this soundtrack, which, for being a score for an action film, includes long stretches of beautifully contemplative soundscapes (Zimmer liked it too, as “The Last Samurai Suite” appears on his new live album).

We at Real Gone Music are proud to bring this soundtrack to LP for the first time, in a double-album housed inside a gatefold jacket and pressed in gold vinyl limited to 1,000 copies. Highly recommended.

Celebrating Paul Weller, born on this day in 1958. —Ed.

In the year punk broke, 1977, The Jam carried with them a whiff of a year far past, namely 1965. Paul Weller brought punk’s jacked-up velocity and coiled tension to the band’s debut LP, In the City, but the LP is also steeped in the spirit of Pete Townshend and The Who.

Call the Jam Mod revivalists, then, but make no mistake–the music on In the City is most definitely punk. No Mod ever took enough leapers to keep such a frenetic, breakneck pace. Paul Weller sounds a lot like Elvis Costello, but unlike Elvis he never slows things down–you won’t find a “Watching the Detectives” on In the City, much less an “Alison.” The song “Slow Down,” appropriately enough, goes by in a sonic blur.

Weller’s Who fetish wasn’t the only thing that set The Jam apart from the punk pack. They eschewed safety pins for tailored suits, said no thanks to anarchy in the U.K. and Clash/Mekons-style left-wing polemics, and even tossed in some conventional lyrics about, you know, girls and stuff.

And then there’s Weller’s voice. Rotten’s savage snarl, studied put-on or not, was pure punk, the barbaric yawp of a street-smart yob whose idea of a good time was ripping the antenna off your car. Weller sounds like a full-grown man.

Paradoxically, it was Weller’s backwards-looking glance to the days of “My Generation” that helped make The Jam something so defiantly, brazenly new. His “back to the future shtick” bears ripe fruit. “Art School” opens just like a Who song–for three seconds or so you’re sure the next thing you’ll hear is Roger Daltrey. But The Jam then proceeds to kick into hyperdrive, and you’re rocketed from yesterday to tomorrow in a rocket fuel flash.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “Jesse Rifkin pulls the reader along with him on this wild and deeply researched nostalgia trip through New York’s vanished music scene, starting in the Greenwich Village coffeehouses in the 1950s and ending in present-day Brooklyn. This dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker loved it!”
—Alice Sparberg Alexiou, author of The Devil’s Mile, The Flatiron and Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary

Take a walk through almost any neighborhood in Manhattan and you’ll likely pass some of the most significant clubs in American music history. But you won’t know it—almost all of these venues have been demolished or repurposed, leaving no record of what they were, how they shaped music scenes, or their impact on the neighborhoods around them. Traditional music history tells us that famous scenes are created by brilliant, singular artists. But dig deeper and you’ll find that they’re actually created by cheap rent, empty space, and other unglamorous factors that allow artistic communities to flourish.

The 1960s folk scene would have never existed without access to Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. If the city hadn’t gone bankrupt in 1975, there would have been no punk rock. Brooklyn indie rock of the 2000s was only able to come together because of the borough’s many empty warehouse spaces. But these scenes are more than just moments of artistic genius—they’re also part of the urban gentrification cycle, one that often displaces other communities and, eventually, the musicians themselves.

Drawing from over a hundred exclusive interviews with a wide range of musicians, deejays, and scenesters, the writer, historian, and tour guide Jesse Rifkin painstakingly reconstructs the physical history of numerous classic New York music scenes. This Must Be the Place (Hanover Square Press, publication date: July 11, 2023) examines how these scenes came together, and fell apart—and shows how these communal artistic experiences are not just for rarefied geniuses but available to us all.

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On May 26, Craft Recordings’ relaunch of the Original Jazz Classic series continues with a reissue of Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane on 180 gram black vinyl tucked into a tip-on jacket with an obi strip. It offers essential documentation of a key collaboration in Modern Jazz.

By the latter half of the 1950s the tide was turning in Thelonious Monk’s favor. Sure, many folks were still playing catch-up ball, but to give just three examples of how the man was slowly moving from the fringes of obscurity, ’56 saw the release of his first big seller Brilliant Corners (with Sonny Rollins on tenor sax), ’57 found him holding down a six month residency at New York’s Five Spot, and ’58 saw the first release dedicated entirely to Monk compositions from another artist, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy’s excellent Reflections.

That Five Spot engagement featured John Coltrane in a fine quartet that managed a slight bit of recording for the Riverside label, though contractual problems hindered its release until the Jazzland imprint issued it as Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane in 1961. Expanded upon in the digital era to include a performance of “Monk’s Mood,” that bonus cut, while certainly welcome, is absent here, as the original sequencing delivers a portrait of Monk’s talents with succinct, graspable functionality.

The ’57 Five Spot quartet is the core of this record, featuring mainstays Wilbur Ware on bass and Shadow Wilson on drums tackling three Monk tunes with the rich interaction of a working band. In addition, Coltrane and Ware appear on two cuts as part of a septet that includes heavy hitters such as multi-instrumentalist and composer Gigi Gryce, drum kingpin Art Blakey, underrated trumpeter Ray Copeland, and one of the greatest of all saxophonists Coleman Hawkins (this is essentially the band that appeared on the ’57 LP Monk’s Music, though Coltrane’s name couldn’t appear on the cover).

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Mercury Studios will release on July 7 a special three-CD boxed set of Hot Tuna, in-concert from the ‘90s. Complete with full acoustic band—no drums—at The Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, California two nights in a row, and at Stove’s in Yokohama, Japan. Originally released by Relix in the ‘90s, then reissued/remastered with bonus tracks by Eagle Records in 2004, the box will house for the first time all three shows in one sterling package complete with poster.

Singer/songwriter/guitarist/author Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady have been performing as Hot Tuna since 1969 when they were both in San Francisco’s pre-eminent rock ’n’ roll band, Jefferson Airplane. When the Airplane morphed into Jeffferson Starship, the pair went on as a duo and as a collective with a rotating cast to concentrate on their blues, folk, country, early pop, and jams to make Hot Tuna an early forerunner of Americana.

Loved by millions for decades ever since, these shows contain the best of what they’ve been known for: hot rockin’ blues, bluegrass, folk, and country. (In the ‘90s, they were even doing Jefferson Airplane covers, plus covers of Elvis, Dylan, Bill Monroe ,and Johnny Cash!) Special guests include Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir and folksinger Happy Traum. Of special note is an exceedingly rare version of Jefferson Airplane’s 1966 “Embryonic Journey” performed acoustically with no drums.

Jorma has been for years now the foremost exponent of the Southeast Piedmont Blues Guitar fingerpicking style that legends like Blind Blake, the Rev. Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Brownie McGhee, and Blind Willie McTell brought to prominence. His 2018 Been So Long autobiography explains his transition from Acid Rocker to Folk Blues Hero. He now is, in fact, that which he first started out emulating: the real deal…a bluesman of the finest order. And no one adds to his oeuvre like Jack Casady. Be prepared to be blown away.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | In 1973, Garrett Saracho was an ambitious 23-year-old jazz musician from East Los Angeles, having just released his debut album, En Medio (as Gary Saracho) on Impulse! Records, representing what the New York Times praised as the label’s “West Coast contingent.”

Despite receiving a five-star review from DownBeat magazine, the authority on all things jazz, which led to friend Herbie Hancock calling and congratulating him on the perfect review, praise from Wayne Shorter, and interest from famed concert promoter George Wein to take Saracho on tour in Europe, a cosmic confluence of unfortunate events—an oil embargo in the Middle East, changing label leadership, slashed budgets—led to En Medio not receiving the promotion and ultimately not gaining the traction it so deserved at the time.

Disappointed, the composer and keyboardist, who had come up in L.A.’s fertile jazz underground alongside notable figures such as Azar Lawrence and was later mentored by Lalo Schiffrin and David Raskin while studying at UCLA, shelved his dreams of stardom to return to school. He would go on to have a successful career in the film industry, first as a carpenter, later as an editor for several blockbuster films, more recently as a screenwriter and filmmaker.

He’d eventually return to music, touring with the legendary Native American rock band Redbone, fronted by his cousins Pat and Lolly Vegas, and after retiring, would continue to quietly make music in his home studio in Southern California. In the last several years, however, Saracho’s work has been rediscovered by a new generation of aficionados, with the long out-of-print and previously unavailable on streaming platforms En Medio being regarded as an incomparable and peerless hidden gem in the Impulse! pantheon by crate diggers and deep listeners.

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Continuing to reissue some of the best jazz music in bespoke audiophile editions, Craft Recordings has released Birth of Bop: The Savoy 10-inch LP Collection, a five-disc, 10-inch vinyl box set, that is easily one of the best jazz vinyl box sets of the year and which celebrates the 80th anniversary of Savoy Records.

The music included in this historic set represents the change jazz music was going through in the wake of the end of WWII. This music represents an evolving break from the big-band, swing sound of jazz that dominated the war years and, as the title of the box states, the birth of bop. The music here includes players who were part of that sound and, in some cases, the music still has the kind of exuberance inherent in swing music, but there is new-found confidence and joy and new modes of expression that paved the way for the genre’s sound for decades.

The recordings here are from 1944–49. Savoy Records was founded in Newark, New Jersey, by Herman Lubinsky in 1942. The label was independently owned until 1974 when Clive Davis of Arista Records purchased it. Since 1986 it has been part of the stable of many record labels, including the Warner Music Group, which purchased the label in 2009, others in-between, and since 2017 it has been part of the Concord label which owns Craft Recordings.

It’s extraordinary that a label so new at the time boasted such an all-star cast of jazz artists on their roster, many of whom are included here, such as Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro, Stan Getz, and Milt Jackson, among many others. While the recordings here from Getz and Jackson are timeless classics, they also hinted at how the two would become groundbreaking artists of the future of jazz with Jackson’s place in the Modern Jazz Quartet, and the collaborations between Getz and other artists spearheading the popularization of bossa nova music.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | BMG and the Montreux Jazz Festival today announce the forthcoming releases of McCoy Tyner: The Montreux Years and Modern Jazz Quartet: The Montreux Years on Friday 23 June 2023. The live albums, which will be available in multiple-format configurations, including LP and CD, are restored to their full glory and with exclusive liner notes. The releases feature sublime collections of the musical legend’s finest Montreux Jazz Festival performances, which will also be available on digital download and streaming services.

A force of nature in the maelstroms of jazz improvisation, McCoy Tyner’s musical style and methods have influenced every generation of jazz pianists since the 1960s and stood shoulder to shoulder with such illustrious keyboard modernists as Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and Bill Evans. A ground-breaking pioneer of the jazz piano, McCoy’s performance at the 1973 Montreux Jazz Festival set the febrile 1970s jazz scene on fire and inspired the release of the live album Enlightenment. The first release from McCoy Tyner in over 10 years, McCoy Tyner: The Montreux Years encapsulates the jazz legend’s time at the festival from 1981 to 2009. The release opens with the mesmerising “Latino Suite,” which was recorded live at the 1986 Montreux Jazz Festival.

Delving further into McCoy’s repertoire of music, fans of the American jazz pianist can immerse themselves in his unique recordings such as 1981’s “Eternally Yours” and “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” from the 1973 live album Enlightenment. Taken from McCoy’s ninth album and his third release on the Blue Note label, fans can enjoy the powerhouse performance of “African Village” and “Fly with the Wind” from the 1976 album of the same name.

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Real Gone Music just keeps on rolling with the inspired reissues in 2023 and even finds time to include some new sounds in the mix. Dionne Warwick’s The Complete Scepter Singles 1962-1973 3CD (limited to 3,000 copies), Mary Mundy’s Mother Nature LP (1,000 copies), Roslyn & Charles’ Everything Must Change LP (1,000 copies), The Donnas’ Early Singles 1995-1999 CD, The Reverend Horton Heat’s Spend a Night in the Box LP, and NXTOFKIN’s Where Did We Go Wrong? CD are all available now. Sylvester’s Disco Heat: The Fantasy Years 1977-1981 2CD is out June 2.

That Real Gone has rounded up all the 45s Dionne Warwick cut with Burt Bacharach and Hal David for Florence Greenberg’s Scepter label is cause for sustained waves of good cheer, as it’s the first time that run of recordings has been available altogether in a retail capacity. The span covered is impressive commercially, as nearly every A-side included on The Complete Scepter Singles 1962-1973 charted in some capacity, with 20 songs making the Top 40 and seven rising to the top 10.

But more importantly, the collaboration was uncommonly successful from an artistic standpoint, as the principals adopted something of an “if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it” strategy, with the high quality of the songwriting and of course the strength and beauty of Warwick’s voice ensuring that the output didn’t stagnate.

In 1962 The Beach Boys released Surfin’ Safari. In 1973 Led Zeppelin unveiled Houses of the Holy. The point being that a whole lot had transpired in the period covered by The Complete Scepter Singles, but there’s a clear lack of trend hopping across the three discs. Instead, they just developed what came naturally, and as the boldness and confidence tangibly increases, the music blossoms throughout. The consistency is pretty remarkable, with disc three unusually strong for an extensive anthology. Often lush, but devoid of schmaltz.

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Celebrating Phil Selway, born on this day in 1967. —Ed.

Not long after Radiohead released 2000’s Kid A, my friend Patrick and I gave it a scathing review without having actually listened to it, on the basis that its only appeal was to depressives better served by listening to the Archies. We also surmised that if Thom Yorke was such a creep why bother, because who wants to hang out with a creep? And seems we weren’t alone. Author Nick Hornby lambasted Kid A, and a critic for England’s Melody Maker dismissed it as “tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory, look-ma-I-can-suck-my-own-cock whiny old rubbish.” You won’t hear that sort of language on The Crown.

It was the Melody Maker review that finally convinced me to give Kid A a listen–if the the damn thing was really that bad, I wasn’t going to miss out on the opportunity to pile on. But Kid A isn’t the space age fiasco I’d hoped for; its Pink Floyd/Brian Eno vibe make it the perfect accompaniment to a hard day over a hot bong. Your more active types, on the other hand, risk drowning in its ambient ooze. That sound you hear off in the distance is a non-fan, crying out hopelessly for a lifeguard.

The band itself was split over Kid A’s new direction; vocalist/songwriter Thom Yorke went into the studio convinced rock music had “run its course,” while guitarist/keyboardist Jonny Greenwood and bass player Colin Greenwood worried that they risked producing “awful art-rock nonsense just for its own sake.” Yorke was full of it–folks have been writing rock’s obituary since the early 1960s. The Greenwoods were wrong as well–Kid A may not be my cup of studio overkill, but it’s a noble foray into the realms of electronica that works, at least in parts, very well indeed.

Dreamy atmospherics abound, and on occasion Radiohead take things too far. The soundscape that is “Treefingers” is a limpid pool of nothing special, and if Yorke thinks he’s breaking new sonic ground he’s dead wrong; David Bowie was doing this sort of thing in the late seventies. The title track is a trifle livelier thanks to its snazzy drum beat and electronic squiggles, but Yorke’s distorted vocals serve only to annoy, and the big bass thump at the end of the song is too little too late.

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Formed in California by singer-guitarist Miranda Zipse and drummer Kim Sollecito, Miranda and the Beat began life as a duo before an impromptu coastal shift to Brooklyn found them picking up Dylan Fernandez on Farfisa, and after a few different bass players vacated the position, grabbing Alvin Jackson, who currently strengthens the foundation. Inspired by ’60s garage and ’70s punk with nods to soul/R&B, their self-titled full-length hits stores on electric blue transparent vinyl and digital May 26 through the Ernst Jenning Record Co. and King Khan’s Khannibalism label.

Having issued a handful of digital singles since 2018 and one vinyl 45 for Third Man in 2020, Miranda and the Beat deliver a solidly contempo blend of the styles mentioned in the intro above. There’s no mistaking the garage roots and the punk edge, but it’s just as clear the sound essentially postdates every garage-punk revival that’s made the history books into the 21st century.

The classique-moderne thrust is immediately heard in album opener “Sweat,” which hits hard with a big beat, a riff descended from late ’50s-early ’60s twang (think Wray, Eddy, and Dale), waves of Farfisa and shouted vocals swaddled in beaucoup echo. But the highpoint of it all is the boot of raucousness in the guitar break and the accompanying soulfulness at the microphone.

“Out of My Head” is less harried, with large bass and a pop hook to the songwriting that harkens back to late ’70s NYC. Importantly, they keep the guitar raw in mix, as Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs serves as the record’s producer. But they waste no time in revving up the tempo, as “Concrete” is a compact dose of the blistering jitters that should please fans of pre-hardcore Cali punk at its wildest.

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WORDS AND IMAGES: JAMES COFFMAN IN LAS VEGAS | Sick New World Festival in Las Vegas on May 13th, 2023, was an electrifying celebration of rock and alternative music, showcasing a lineup that left no stone unturned. With System of a Down headlining the event, fans eagerly anticipated an unforgettable experience. The festival was a rollercoaster ride of energy, talent, and passion, with special and exciting performances throughout the day by Flyleaf with Lacey Sturm, P.O.D, Soulfly, Papa Roach, Death Grips, Mr. Bungle, Chevelle, Sevendust, Spiritbox, Incubus, She Wants Revenge, Deftones, Korn, and The Sisters Of Mercy.

The festival kicked off with a bang with Alien Ant Farm delivering a fantastic rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.” P.O.D. followed suit, delivering a high-octane set that ignited the audience’s enthusiasm. Directly after, Flyleaf took the stage, accompanied by the powerful vocals of Lacey Sturm. Their explosive performance resonated with the crowd, setting the tone for the day ahead.

Soulfly’s intense and hard-hitting performance left no doubt about their place in the metal scene, captivating fans with their signature blend of heavy riffs and tribal influences. Papa Roach’s energy was infectious, as they unleashed their chart-topping hits with unabashed fervor. Death Grips brought a unique and experimental edge to the festival, pushing boundaries and defying expectations. Mr. Bungle’s eclectic sound and theatrical presence mesmerized the crowd, creating an atmosphere of anticipation for what was yet to come.

Chevelle commanded the stage with their powerful and melodic rock sound, delivering a performance that was both captivating and emotionally charged. Sevendust brought their distinctive blend of heavy riffs and melodic hooks, showcasing their undeniable talent and leaving fans wanting more. Spiritbox enchanted the audience with their ethereal melodies and haunting vocals, proving that they are a force to be reckoned with in the alternative music scene.

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