VIA PRESS RELEASE | Singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan announces Lookaftering – Expanded Edition, a reissue of her legendary second album, out on February 7, 2025 via FatCat Records. 

Marking the occasion of 20 years since the first release, and coinciding with Vashti’s 80th birthday, the new expanded edition features the original studio album along with a second LP / disc of demos, an alternate take, and a live performance version. This edition also comes with reflective sleeve notes from Vashti, producer Max Richter, Devendra Banhart, and FatCat’s Dave Howell, as well as a 16-page lyric booklet featuring a collection of paintings by Vashti’s daughter Whyn Lewi—paintings that they both say have closely, and coincidentally, reflected the lyrics of the album.

Originally recorded between 2001 and 2005, the demos were created by Vashti at home, accompanying herself on electric and acoustic guitar, and experimenting with synth instrumentation—accordion, piano, strings, pipe organ, harmonium, recorders. The collection of demos offers a more stripped back sound compared to the finished album, and the live version of “Lately” recorded at an early “comeback” gig in L.A. in 2006, orchestrated as on the record, is absolutely pitch perfect.

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Beginning in 1966 with the self-titled debut album from Cream, the supergroup became a rock phenomenon that, even in an age that now seems to signal the end of the significance of rock bands, is still with us. The early era of the rock supergroup was primarily dominated by British groups other than Cream, such as Emerson, Lake & Palmer and another group like Cream that also included Eric Clapton, Blind Faith, among others.

Mixing one British artist (Graham Nash) and two Americans (David Crosby, Stephen Stills), Crosby, Stills and Nash released their self-titled debut album in March of 1969, establishing them as the American supergroup of the day. The album was a runaway smash and the group had created an entirely new sound that defied description.

As loaded with talent as CSN was, in mid-August they added yet another superstar to their lineup, Neil Young. Young had played with Stephen Stills in Buffalo Springfield. Interestingly enough, Crosby had previously played with Stills, when Young decided not to play with the Springfield at the Monterey Pop Festival way back in May of 1967. CSNY became an even bigger supergroup.

In 1969 CSNY set out on tour and began writing music and performing some of the songs that would make up their debut album Déjà vu, which would be released in 1970. CSNY was short-lived and other than a tour in 1974, the group wouldn’t work together in any capacity until they released their second album American Dream in 1988.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs is a Martin Phillipps passion project. A dedicated reimagining of his earlier unreleased songs that became his artistic farewell, a lasting legacy, and a reminder of his huge, underappreciated talent.

As the subject of an undulating life and times movie—The Chills: The Triumph And Tragedy Of Martin Phillipps—Chills’ singer, songwriter and main motivator, Martin Phillipps spent the last decade releasing studio and live albums while careering into his sixtieth year with typical gusto.

Amid such momentum, Martin was stilling digging through old tapes, searching for the foundations that resulted in global rapture in 1987, an overnight success that took a mere seven years to ignite. These early songs and musings were revisited, revised, and finally put to record. As such, Spring Board is the final chapter of The Chills’ immeasurably significant output.

“The album seemed like an easy option,” mused Martin, but breathing life into tunes that were penned by a twenty-something hopeful wasn’t as simple as it sounded. Cassettes fragmented, memories were hazy. “All of the songs needed varying degrees of rewriting; a 60-year old man couldn’t just stick to the lyrics of those formative years. And some of the songs were just vague recollections, incomplete, only blossoming during recording.”

Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs is alarming, personal, brittle and at times hopelessly upbeat. This is a man casting his mind back on an esoteric career that led to nothing short of cult status; someone rediscovering his roots, his innermost thoughts, hopes and fears.

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In the annals of jazz, tenor saxophonist and composer Sonny Rollins is simply incomparable. A man without a creative weakness, he is equally celebrated as an innovator and for his sublime transformations of jazz standards and classic American song. No record gets to the core of Rollins’ greatness better than Way Out West. Originally released in 1957, it comes out in a fresh 180 gram vinyl edition this week via Craft Recordings as part of the label’s Contemporary Records Acoustic Sounds series, remastered from the original tapes by Bernie Grundman and tucked into an utterly swank tip-on jacket.

Having debuted on record in 1949, backing hipster jazz vocalist Babs Gonzalez in his band Three Bips and a Bop on a 10-inch 78 rpm disc for the Capitol label, Sonny Rollins played and recorded extensively and by the mid-1950s he was the top tenor saxophonist in jazz. After cutting an LP a year as a leader from 1953-’56 for Prestige, Rollins exploded onto the marketplace in ’56 with a half dozen albums, all for Prestige, including what many consider his greatest recording, Saxophone Colossus.

After exiting his Prestige contract, Rollins became something of a free agent across an equally productive stretch, cutting three albums for Blue Note and one record for Riverside, plus half of a split album shared with the Thad Jones Ensemble for the Period label and the record under review here, all released in 1957.

Of the studio albums, Way Out West stands out for it’s lack of piano. On Rollins’ trip to California (hence the title and its accompanying cover motif, which was reportedly Rollins’ idea), he was joined by bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne in a foray into what the saxophonist described as “strolling,” which in short means improvising in a band that lacks a chordal instrument (e.g. piano or guitar).

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Steely Dan’s sophisticated jazz pop fourth album, 1975’s Katy Lied, with such standouts as “Black Friday,” “Bad Sneakers,” and “Doctor Wu,” will return to vinyl for the first time in more than forty years on January 31, 2025, via Geffen/UMe, continuing the extensive reissue program of the band’s classic ABC and MCA Records catalog.

The series, which began in November 2022 with the Dan’s legendary debut LP, Can’t Buy A Thrill, is being personally overseen by founding member Donald Fagen, and returns the group’s first seven records to vinyl, most of which haven’t been available since their original release. The series will close out with 1976’s guitar-driven The Royal Scam (“Kid Charlemagne,” “The Fez”) in mid-2025.

Katy Lied has been meticulously remastered by Bernie Grundman from the original analog tapes for release as a limited edition premium 45 RPM version on Ultra High-Quality Vinyl (UHQR) from Analogue Productions, the audiophile in-house reissue label of Acoustic Sounds. Analogue Productions is also releasing this series of titles on Super Audio CD (SACD). UMe’s standard 33 1/3 RPM 180-gram version has been remastered by Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound from high-resolution digital files and pressed at Precision. They will be housed in reproductions of the original artwork.

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Monk’s Music was the fifth Thelonious Monk LP released by Riverside Records across a strong mid-1950s stretch. It helped to increase the pianist-composer-bandleader’s visibility on the scene and repair an undeservedly formidable reputation, but even after it was selected for inclusion in the Original Jazz Classics series of reissues, it’s become one of the less celebrated masterpieces in Monk’s extensive discography. But a fresh mono edition by Craft Recordings should help raise the profile of an immensely pleasurable session with an august supporting cast. It’s available now on 180 gram vinyl, mastered from the original tapes in an attractive tip-on sleeve.

It might seem strange given Thelonious Monk’s secure position in the jazz pantheon, but the first two records he cut for Riverside consisted solely of standards, with his debut for the label entirely devoted to compositions by Duke Ellington and the second offering a blend of well-known selections from the American Songbook. Both hit stores in 1956.

Thelonious Monk debuted on record as a leader in 1951 for the Blue Note label with two 10-inch discs, each titled Genius of Modern Music. In 1956, those volumes were expanded into LPs with additional material from the original series of sessions Alfred Lion organized from 1947–’51, plus one more date from the following year. Those two albums, further expanded in the CD era, are the logical place to begin a solid Monk collection, but they didn’t a cause retail firestorm. The five records Monk cut for Prestige from ’52–’54 saw no curtailing of creative momentum but befell similar the same commercial fate.

In 1957, Riverside’s Orrin Keepnews pivoted with Brilliant Corners, which featured all Monk tunes save for one. Later in the year Thelonious Himself, a more balanced mix of originals and standards, was released. As the title suggests, Himself is a solo piano affair, with the exception of closing track “Monk’s Mood,” where tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Wilber Ware are added.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “I give something extra every time I do Montreux Jazz. In ’23 it was deep cuts like ‘Mass Production,’ ‘Endless Sea,’ ‘Five Foot One,’ and a hell of a lot of sweat.” —Iggy Pop

On January 24, 2025 Iggy Pop will release Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 2023 via earMUSIC. The album is an essential Iggy Pop live album, celebrating a career, a catalog and a performer that only gathers more raw power throughout the years.

On July 6, 2023 Iggy Pop made a triumphant return to the Montreux Jazz Festival. It marked Iggy’s third appearance at the festival and his performance was recorded and filmed by the Montreux Jazz Festival team. Backed by a seven-piece band he thrilled a filled-to-capacity Stravinski Auditorium crowd with a career-spanning set that including tracks from his time with The Stooges, his Idiot, Lust for Life, and New Values albums, as well as songs off his most recent release Every Loser.

Iggy Pop Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 2023 will be released as a Blu-ray+CD digipak, 2 LP gatefold, and digital download on January 24, 2025—pre-order the album HERE. With the album’s announcement earlier this week, Iggy also released the first single, “Five Foot One (Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 2023).”

Celebrating Ted Bluechel Jr. on his 82nd birthday. —Ed.

The Association didn’t exactly win friends and influence hippies with their square-john antics in the mid- to late sixties; they may have been the first band to perform at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, but most of your smirking counter-culture types considered them about as authentic as a cheap plastic peace symbol.

But hey–as that great philosopher Huey Lewis pointed out it’s hip to be square, and all of your REAL swinging girls and boys know The Association are the Nazz. So what if they flunked the Acid Test and would have been more at home at Tricia Nixon’s wedding than a Human Be-In? The Association rose above it all, producing a rapturous dream pop that Tricky Dick himself might have tapped a toe to.

And you can hear The Association in all their vocal glory on the 2018’s Anthology: Just the Right Sound. Its 51 songs are a definite case of overkill–and I’ve docked it a half-grade accordingly–but it’s worth the purchase price (and more!) if you want to hear not only the songs that melted your heart but such berserker numbers as “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies,” to say nothing of a couple of cuts off 1972’s justifiably neglected Waterbeds in Trinidad!

Just about everybody knows their big ones. “Windy” is a sunshine pop classic about a girl with stormy eyes; its opening guitar riff and superlush vocals are for the ages, and I die a little every time I hear that flute. And then there’s the motorvatin’ “Along Came Mary,” with its handclaps and badass (by Association standards) vocals. And who could forget the moon-eyed “Cherish,” which makes the perfect mate for the lovely “Never My Love,” both of which say I’m going to love you forever by means of those perfectly pureed vocals that were The Association’s bread and butter.

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Acid rock comes in two flavors—good trip and bad trip. The former evokes images of Woodstock, big day-glo flowers, beautiful naked people doing blissful, ecstatic dances in the wonders of nature. The latter evokes images of Altamont and the flowers of evil. As for the beautiful naked people they’re the Manson Family, and they’ve come to your house to do the devil’s business.

Austin, Texas’ The Black Angels play bad trip rock. They’re the house band at 10050 Cielo Drive, the real Death Valley ‘69, and they are not groovy. Forget the Grateful Dead’s sunny “China Cat Sunflower.” The Black Angels sound features indecipherable and incantory lyrics buried alive in a fuzz and feedback-drenched drone underlaid by a drum pummel that will not make beautiful naked people want to do blissful, ecstastic dances. It will make them want to barricade themselves in a closet somewhere.

This is drug deal gone fatally south music, the sort of thing you’d expect from a band that got their name from a Velvet Underground song and included Edvard Munch’s “Illness, insanity, and death are the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life” on the inner jacket of their 2006 debut LP Passover. As for their 2008 follow-up Directions to See a Ghost, it surprises me not a whit that the History Channel saw fit to include some of its songs on their 2009 documentary Manson.

But here’s the thing about acid rock bad trips—some people love them. Especially when a band like The Black Angels are handing out the brown acid. Guitars, lots of them. Effects pedals out the wazoo. All producing a chaotic, wall-of-sound drone drenched in reverb, feedback, rogue electric sitar, and ghostly vocals, all nailed to the world of the living by the drum bash of one Stephanie Bailey, modern psychedelia’s answer to Maureen Tucker.

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