Alto saxophonist Art Pepper is well represented in Craft Recordings’ Contemporary Records Acoustic Sounds Series. Originally released in 1960, Gettin’ Together is available in a fresh 180 gram vinyl edition on October 11. It’s the second of three Pepper LPs landing in the store bins across 2024, and if not his most lauded studio date, the contributions of pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Jimmy Cobb, and trumpeter Conte Condoli elevate the whole, along with Pepper, who is up to his usual high standard throughout.

The most celebrated album in Art Pepper’s discography remains the first one he cut for the Contemporary label, Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, which was released in 1957 with Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums, a triumvirate highly regarded at the time of the album’s recording (with no loss of esteem today) for their association with trumpeter Miles Davis.

Pepper first came to prominence in the big band of Stan Kenton, a gig that began in the early 1940s. With the exception of WWII military service, Pepper remained with Kenton through the beginning of the following decade. During this stretch Pepper contributed to some of the progressive bandleader most ambitious albums.

Although Pepper’s profile continued to rise through a handful of LPs released as leader or co-leader in the mid-’50s, it was Meets the Rhythm Section that vaulted him to the forefront of the era’s jazz scene and cemented his name into the canon. Rest assured that any serious list of the essential jazz recordings will include Meets the Rhythm Section, and rightly so.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Vol. 9: 1992 and Vol. 10: 1983 of On Record, a comprehensive series of award-winning books celebrating popular music from 1978 to 1998, have just been published. “I’m thrilled and grateful to see this 21-book series arrive at the halfway point,” says author and Colorado Music Experience director G. Brown.

Vol. 9: 1992 sees the rise of the grunge movement (Nirvana’s Nevermind) and the continued emergence of hip-hop, plus controversial recordings (from Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” to Madonna’s Erotica) and the performances at MTV’s Unplugged. Also the year in country (the first No. 1s for Wynonna, Collin Raye and Tracy Lawrence) and heavy metal, shoegaze, and riotgrrrl.

Vol. 10: 1983 covers bands at their commercial peak (Genesis, The Police), U2’s first global hit (War) and David Bowie’s biggest success (Let’s Dance), plus acts finally making it big (Prince, Bryan Adams, Def Leppard). Kiss appearing sans makeup (Lick It Up), Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All breaking ground for the thrash-metal genre, and Quiet Riot’s Metal Health becoming the first heavy-metal album to hit No. 1. Also acts of the second British Invasion, plus country, hip-hop and jazz.

Marking more than 50 years as one of America’s foremost popular music writers, G. Brown has interviewed more than 3,000 musicians, ranging from superstars to one-hit wonders in every genre—pop, rock, country and hip-hop to punk, folk, alternative and beyond. Each edition overflows with rare, powerful and informative editorial photographs from Brown’s personal archive of close to 15,000 images amassed over decades. These beautifully crafted, reader-friendly volumes, presented in a lively, engaging style, invite perusing at any point within the book.

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Celebrating John Mellencamp on his 73rd birthday. —Ed.

I’ve always liked John Mellencamp. Sure, I’ve been known to call him the poor man’s Bruce Springsteen, but I mean it as a compliment. I’m all for the poor man. Anyway, what I’ve always liked the most about the fellow who started out calling himself John Cougar is that he’s a curmudgeon. Mellencamp casts a gimlet eye at such things as Hope and the American Dream and smirks because he knows they fall short. He understands that our forefathers talked about the Pursuit of Happiness, but were wise enough to remain mum about the possibility of ever catching the slippery fucker. Mellencamp is no dreamer. He sees what he sees and he’s not happy about it.

Take “Jack and Diane.” You can call it hokum, a clichéd look at growing up horny in the heartland of America and all that, but its core message (“Oh yeah, life goes on/Long after the thrill of living is gone”) is as dark as anything dished out by the likes of Lou Reed or Bob Dylan. Mr. Mellencamp is most certainly not out to sell fairy tales.

On 1982’s Uh-Huh, Mellencamp cynically lets us know that we’ve all been sold a bill of goods that has landed us in cookie-cutter pink houses in the spiritually dead suburbs, that you can fight the law but will never win, that in the end you’ll trade in your dreams for a warmer place to sleep, and there ain’t no golden gates gonna swing open, not in this life. The last refers to “Golden Gates,” a truly beautiful and anthemic ode that almost contains a strain of hope, when Mellencamp sings, “Only promises I know to be true/Are promises made from the heart.”

But aside from “Golden Gates” and “Jackie O,” a love song and collaborative effort with John Prine that is sweet and slow and is driven by some wonderfully simple Holiday Inn lounge keyboards (or vibes, I’ll be damned if I can tell the difference), the LP is knock-down, stripped to the basics, gut-bucket rock ’n’r oll. And to make things even better, the songs never fail to boast catchy melodies.

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Some random thoughts on Journey’s 1981 blockbuster LP Escape:

1. Remember that final, 2007 episode of The Sopranos with the open ending that everybody hated, the one where Tony and family are sitting in the diner and you don’t know whether Tony gets whacked or not? Well, what pissed me off was not knowing whether Tony lived or died. What bugged me was that the booth jukebox was playing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Tony’s kid, a teen from the year 2007 who had never shown any symptoms of being a congenital idiot, never said “What is this shit?” Any normal rebellious teen male from the year 2007 would have said “What is this shit?” but Tony’s kid didn’t SAY shit. Ruined the entire episode for me.

2. I don’t think Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” is shit. I USED to think it was shit, thought it was shit for decades, but then something horrible happened, I had a brain aneurysm or something, and now I love it. I love it! This has happened to me with other bands and other songs and maybe it’s a function of growing old and senile but believe me, it’s disturbing. I’ve always considered myself a person of taste, although I’ve also always liked Black Oak Arkansas and Foghat while despising the likes of Patti Smith and The Clash, so that’s debatable. But Journey? Journey is no grey area. When a person tells me they like Journey I give that person the stink eye and write that person out of the Book of Life. Journey is the enemy.

3. On a completely random note, Escape’s cover falls into the great Boston/Electric Light Orchestra tradition of album covers with spaceships on them escaping Earth because who doesn’t want to escape Earth, especially if you’re a teen and your parents are hard-ons and school may as well be Leavenworth and what’s the point of growing up anyway? To get a job? To go bald and get married and STOP smoking pot? Life HAS to be better in another galaxy!

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Today, The Beatles have announced a special 60th anniversary reissue of their third studio album A Hard Day’s Night, in celebration of National Album Day. The limited edition reissue on 180g white vinyl will be released on October 19th.

At a time when popstars either spoke BBC English or tried to emulate the American rockers they so idolised, there was no hiding where The Beatles—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr—came from: they sang, as they spoke, in a Liverpool accent. Although the demands of the music business meant they soon had to relocate to London, in many ways they never left their city—in song and in story, the group are inextricably, indelibly linked to Merseyside.

Recorded between January and June 1964 and released that July, if ever there was a pointer to what an album could achieve, it’s the 13 songs and 31 minutes of A Hard Day’s Night, the third long-player by The Beatles. It is the sound of a group with the wind in its hair, the confidence that their hard work was paying off. The (partial) soundtrack to their first film, at a time when an LP was a collection of recent singles and cover versions, A Hard Day’s Night was penned solely by Lennon & McCartney. “Can’t Buy Me Love,” the first track from the forthcoming album to be released, topped the US and UK charts in April 1964.

In the 476 days since the release of their debut LP, Please Please Me in March 1963, The Beatles had gone from local to national to international phenomenon. A Hard Day’s Night, both the beloved 1964 film directed by Richard Lester and the album, captured that rocket in a bottle. With songs about working men going home to their loved ones (the title track, “When I Get Home”); the exhilaration of early love (“I Should Have Known Better,” “If I Fell,” “And I Love Her,” “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You”); the ups and downs of relationships (“I’ll Cry Instead,” “Tell Me Why,” “You Can’t Do That”) and, already, a strong sense of time (“Things We Said Today”), on A Hard Day’s Night, Lennon & McCartney put words in the mouths of teenagers around the world.

The 60th anniversary reissue of A Hard Day’s Night will be released on October 19th to celebrate National Album Day.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Acclaimed archival label Light in the Attic (LITA) continues their partnership with legendary singer, actress, activist, and icon Nancy Sinatra with the latest two installments off their Nancy Sinatra Archival Series: definitive reissues of the 1967 albums Sugar and Country, My Way.

Sugar was the fourth album recorded by Sinatra in 1966, an uncanny feat considering The Beatles were recording around two albums a year at the time. The album followed on the heels of her hit debut album Boots, her sophomore follow-up How Does That Grab You?, and the Swinging Sixties offering Nancy In London. In 1967, Sinatra would continue her artistic ascent into the pop stratosphere with the James Bond You Only Live Twice theme song, the groovy technicolor television special Movin’ With Nancy, recording one of the most beloved duets of all time, titled “Some Velvet Morning,” and a cross-country pilgrimage to the center of the country music scene to record Country, My Way.

Due out November 29th in vinyl, CD, and digital formats, with both LP editions being offered on classic black wax and special limited-edition color wax (Sugar is available on “Sugar Town Pink” and “Let’s Fall In Love” pink and white swirl; Country, My Way is available on “Bye-Bye Birmingham” blue and “Hello LA” red and white swirl). Sugar and Country, My Way are available to pre-order now.

All formats feature audio freshly remastered from the original analog tapes by GRAMMY®-nominated engineer John Baldwin. Pressed at Record Technology, Inc. (RTI), both vinyl editions are presented in expanded gatefold jackets accompanied by 20-page booklets (featuring a new Q&A with Sinatra conducted by the reissue’s GRAMMY®-nominated co-producer Hunter Lea, plus never-before-seen photos from the artist’s personal archive). All music configurations, plus limited-edition autographed vinyl, will also be made available at Nancy’s Bootique.

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Celebrating Brian Johnson on his 77th birthday. —Ed.

A very brief history lesson. First Attila was the greatest hard rock band in the world. Then Sir Lord Baltimore took over as the greatest hard rock band in the world. Then along came AC/DC to produce an electrical surge that brought down the hard rock power grid, settling the debate forever. Their ascendancy caused many a band to give up the ghost. Some sold their gear and returned to England to resume their careers as bricklayers. Others picked up dulcimers and went full folkie. I saw Deep Purple at a Greenwich Village folk club and their lute and bodhrán take on “Smoke on the Water”inspired some discerning fan with a flare gun to burn the place to the ground.

AC/DC played a primal, zero frills, straight ahead hard rock that led morons (like the younger me) to conclude their music was for dummies. Frank Zappa (my then idol) played cerebral brain music. AC/DC just punched you in the solar plexus. Theirs was gut music, like Iggy and the Stooges or a souped-up, oversexed early Black Sabbath.

And on 1980’s Back in Black—the band’s seventh studio LP—AC/DC forged its metal into a tool of sledgehammer simplicity. It was former Geordie vocalist Brian Johnson’s first LP with the band, Bon Scott having died from alcohol poisoning the previous February. The band recorded the LP in the Bahamas, where a diehard fan in the form of a crab scuttled across the studio floor. With his cheerleading the band recorded ten tracks that stripped hard rock to its essentials. Three chords, no poofter organ solos, just barf in your face music for the lads at the local.

You get a little dark stuff in the form of “Hell’s Bells,” are invited to have a drink with the lads, and get a lecture on how rock and roll isn’t poisoning the aural environment. But what you mostly get is not so subtle sexual innuendo that reveals Ted Nugent to be a loincloth feminist. This is 12-year-old stuff, but to be fair to the band, there’s nothing on Back in Black as pubescent as Zappa’s “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow.”

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Television began life as a punk band—Richard Hell made sure of that. But Tom Verlaine soon tired of Hell’s determined amateurism and wildman antics (didn’t like him, you know, MOVING on stage) and so out went Hell, and as time passed Television became something very different. Twin guitars, lots of soloing, no “fuck rock ’n’ roll” nihilism—Television went from Dionysian to Apollonian, from raw and visceral to tight and (somehow) both wound up and ethereal. They weren’t America’s answer to the Sex Pistols—they were America’s answer to Wishbone Ash.

Television had a short but brilliant run—epochal debut (1977’s Marquee Moon), a second album that disappointed most but was at its best utterly sublime (1978’s Adventure), plus a live album that was released post-breakup (1982’s The Blow-Up) and an album they recorded after reforming briefly in the nineties (who cares). They weren’t a better to burn out than to fade away proposition—they succumbed to sheer fatigue and disappointing record sales, and went their separate ways with the usual “Why aren’t we stars, fuck this.”

Richard Hell had an interesting thing to say about the Tom Verlaine (then still Paul Miller) he’d first met at school in Delaware. He said Verlaine “…had this fundamental belief in his absolute inherent superiority to everyone else on this earth.” Such people tend to be control freaks, have delusions of grandeur and to be intolerant of the shortcomings of others, so it was perhaps inevitable that he’d end up a solo artist. Fellow Television guitarist Richard Lloyd’s drug problems, and the group’s failure to achieve commercial success mentioned above, didn’t help.

Verlaine didn’t let much time pass before he released his first solo album, 1979’s Tom Verlaine. It didn’t hurt that more than half of its songs—including the two best—dated back to Verlaine’s time in Television. Like Lou Reed, Verlaine didn’t walk away from his old band without taking a few mementos with him. Getting a fresh start is easier when you don’t have to make a fresh start.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Resonance Records proudly presents Lights on a Satellite: Live at the Left Bank, a blazing set of previously unissued 1978 concert recordings by Sun Ra and his Myth Science Cosmo Swing Arkestra, as a limited two-LP set for RSD Black Friday, November 29. Co-produced by Zev Feldman and Sun Ra archivist Michael D. Anderson (who also played drums on the ’78 concert), the newly unearthed live session is an exciting successor to Sun Ra at the Showcase: Live in Chicago, another archival find that Feldman issued on his Jazz Detective imprint for Record Store Day this April. The new collection will also be released as a two-CD set on December 6.

Prophetic avant gardist Sun Ra’s big band is heard in blistering form—playing repertoire ranging from space-age jazz to interpretations of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and jazz standards by Fletcher Henderson, Miles Davis, and Tadd Dameron—on a dynamic 12-track set recorded at a show mounted by the Left Bank Jazz Society at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 23, 1978. Those recordings are augmented by two tracks captured at the concert and featured in the classic 1980 film Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise by the acclaimed music filmmaker Robert Mugge, who also provided images for the new package.

The deluxe Resonance packages include an essay by noted jazz critic J.D. Considine (who attended the ’78 show); reminiscences from Anderson, Mugge, Left Bank member John Fowler, critic Dan Morgenstern, and Arkestra veteran and latter-day bandleader Marshall Allen; and thoughts on Sun Ra’s artistry from musicians Gary Bartz and Craig Taborn.

Feldman says of this newest discovery, “It was very exciting to learn from Sun Ra archivist Michael D. Anderson that these recordings from the Left Bank in 1978 even existed. Filmmaker Robert Mugge was also very kind to us by allowing us to borrow the music he had recorded for his film, which is presented here as bonus tracks. Also thanks to Mr. Mugge, we’ve included various high-resolution screen captures from his film that help capture the energy of what it was like to be there at the Famous Ballroom that night.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Animals announce a 2CD reissue of their classic debut album The Animals which features the full album in both mono and stereo with bonus track “House of the Rising Sun,” to be released on 18th October. Pre-order here. Alongside this, The Animals will be available on exclusive yellow vinyl as part of this year’s National Album Day on 19th October.

Originally released in 1964, this groundbreaking record introduced the world to the raw energy of British rock fused with deep American blues. It features a mixture of blues, R&B, traditional folk covers and covers of songs written by John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino. Produced by Mickie Most, The Animals featured Eric Burdon on lead vocals, Hilton Valentine on guitar, Alan Price on keyboards, Chas Chandler on bass guitar, and John Steel on drums.

The 2CD reissue includes “House of the Rising Sun.” Initially a traditional folk song, The Animals’ cover went to number one in the UK, US, and Canada and has since been dubbed as the “first folk rock hit.”