KANSAS CITY, MO | Kansas City is a weird place to be the weekend of the SuperBowl Whatever matchup between the internet and Taylor Swift. It’s the same weekend the Association of Writers & Writing Programs has taken over the Convention Center and much of downtown. A suppressed but manic energy vibrates under everything like a passing subway train. Five days from now two teenagers will, in what is fast becoming an American tradition as deeply ingrained as the SuperBowl itself, shoot up a parade. But on this breezy, freezy Friday night, Matthew Sweet is playing the Madrid Theatre and it promises to be a pretty good time.

Sweet’s Midwest tour is the first after a long hiatus, but when I spoke to him in January he already had a live gig with Tommy Stinson under his belt and was looking forward to an outing with his new lineup, which includes Debbi Peterson of The Bangles on drums (Susanna Hoffs is also a frequent collaborator of Sweet’s) and John Moreland on lead guitar. Releasing alongside the tour is Sweet’s first live album, WXRT Live in Grant Park, Chicago IL July 4 1993, which draws material mostly from the same year’s Altered Beast and Sweet’s 1991 breakout Girlfriend.

Kansas City’s Madrid Theatre is already crowded when I and a few other rogue writer friends arrive fresh from ten or twelve hours of publishing shop talk. There don’t seem to be many other AWP attendees, but there’s certainly some demographic overlap, with a particularly strong showing of well-behaved middle-aged eccentrics cutting loose for the weekend and a healthy minority of precocious hipster twenty-somethings. A kid to my left who can’t be more than eighteen is wearing a Paul Westerberg 1993 tour tee.

Sweet looks and acts his age and it feels oddly punk rock to do so while Aerosmith and Madonna are still touring like nothing’s changed since 1987. He’s seated for the entire show, sporting a tweedy driving cap over shoulder-length hair, a graying beard, and an impish, dimpling smile. His voice, however, hasn’t aged at all.

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When examining the enormous influence of The Beatles, one factor stands out and that’s the peerless songwriting team of Lennon and McCartney. The greatness of their partnership also extends to the covers of their music over the years. This three-CD, 75-track compilation offers an exhaustive, comprehensive, and fun collection of covers of the music of The Beatles, which also includes the songs of George Harrison.

The set is housed in a clam-shell box and spans covers of songs written between 1964 and 1966, suggesting that a second volume is a very real possibility. All the recordings here are from the 1960s, except for one from 1970 and one from 1974.

The set includes some covers we’ve heard before by the likes of Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas, Cilla Black, Peter & Gordon, Joe Cocker, and The Mamas & the Papas. The Billy J. Kramer track included here is “Do You Want to Know A Secret.” He also had a big hit with “Bad To Me,” but the cover of that song included here is by Mike Redway.

Cocker’s track, “I’ll Cry Instead,” is from 1964, long before he broke big and had hits with more well-known covers of songs from The Beatles, and features Jimmy Page on guitar. Along with Kramer, Black, and Peter & Gordon, others that were part of The Beatles’ inner circle, such as Alma Cogan and Glyn Johns, also contribute.

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A familiar figure on the New York rock scene since he was a teenager on Television guitarist Richard Lloyd’s solo debut, James Mastro went on to help found The Bongos and later the alt-country Health and Happiness Show before becoming an in-demand guitarist for other artists, from John Cale and Garland Jeffries to Alejandro Escovedo and especially Ian Hunter, on the English rocker’s solo work since 2001 and in the reunions of his legendary band Mott the Hoople.

Only now is he releasing his first solo album, Dawn of a New Error, in stores now on MPress Records. We talked to Mastro, almost as familiar for his ever present Bolero hat as he is for his riffs, before he ventured out on an Alejandro Escovedo tour where he’ll both open solo and play in the headliner’s band.

It’s hard to believe this is your first solo album after all these years.

Yeah, in Health and Happiness Show, I was the main songwriter, but it was still a band. It was kind of a gentle dictatorship. But yeah, this is it. I have no one to blame but myself.

Are these all new songs, or the result of a long period of songwriting?

I’ve been writing all along. And the inspiration kind of came from COVID, because being inactive, Ian [Hunter] and everyone I was working with was pretty much stalled out. It forced me to finish this and realize, well, I have this record out and if no one else is going out to play, I guess I should.

So some of these songs are some you may have had but hadn’t finished?

The way this record was done was so leisurely and without any intention of making a record. My friend Tony Shanahan, who produced it, just got a studio up and running probably seven, ten years ago, he called me and said, “Hey, I just want to just test out the gear and see what the room sounds like. What do you have? Come in.”

So it was a very easy way to make a record. Whenever time opened up, he called me: “What do you got?” So it either forced me to finish a song or forced me to write one for a session the next day. And when COVID hit, I thought I got just enough songs here for an album. And they all seem to have some kind of cohesive thread. So we just kind of finished it up.

What would you say the cohesive thread is? A reaction to the modern world? General angst?

I guess everything is a reaction to something. If I say it’s a reaction to the modern world, I’ll sound like a crotchety old man.

But there is a case to be made for a terrible world.

It can be a terrible world. For the most part I think for me this is a hopeful record thematically. I’m forced to look at it more as I do interviews, and things I don’t think about and just do, now I have to justify it and think about. But I realize there is hope in all of it. So if it is a crappy world, I’m hoping it will get better. Or I’m trying to make it better for me and my friends.

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Julian “Cannonball Adderley” ranks amongst the finest alto saxophonists in the history of jazz. In pianistic terms the same is true for Bill Evans. Putting them in the studio together meant brilliance was bound to happen. And that’s exactly what’s heard on Know What I Mean?, an album first released in 1962 by the Riverside label that’s getting a fresh 180 gram pressing on March 1 by Craft Recordings as part of the label’s Original Jazz Classics reissue series. Add bassist Percy Heath and drummer Connie Key to the lineup and the result is an essential entry in the discographies of all the participants.

Those clued into the achievements that shaped jazz music’s boom years likely know the most celebrated album to feature both Adderley and Evans isn’t this one, but rather Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. Recorded in 1959 and released by Columbia later that year, Kind of Blue remains a highly lauded and well-liked album, a groundbreaking recording that has endured as a consumer favorite.

Know What I Mean? isn’t a milestone in jazz or in the careers of Adderley or Evans for that matter. There are in fact two prior Adderley releases that feature Evans, both recorded in 1958, a quintet session Portrait of Cannonball for Riverside and an orchestral date Jump for Joy for EmArcy, but this final collaboration is the best of the bunch, a thoroughly enjoyable set and furthermore distinct as it captures Adderley at his most expressive as the sole horn, while Evans’ creativity, integral to the record’s success, flows forth without being dominant point of focus.

The opening version of the cornerstone Evans composition “Waltz for Debby” is case in point, as Adderley’s entrance after the pianist’s stately opening gives the tune’s swing-shift an extra boost and without steamrolling the foundational beauty. By early 1961, the year Know What I Mean? was recorded in NYC, “Waltz for Debby,” now a standard and heard on numerous subsequent Evans releases, had been recorded only once before, on the pianist’s 1956 studio debut New Jazz Conceptions.

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PHOENIX, AZ | Colter Wall and the Little Songs Tour made its fifth stop at the Arizona Financial Theatre in downtown Phoenix. Playing alongside was special guest Vincent Neil Emerson; the night was a country fan’s dream.

Taking a break from his ranch duties in Canada, Wall carved some time out for his recent album Little Songs and the tour. The Saskatchewan native has already played eleven shows in 2024, and is scheduled to play five more on the current tour.

The show was opened by Texas native Vincent Neil Emerson. With support from the Red Horse Band, the group rocked out with a classic, southern rock sound that resonated with the southwest Phoenix crowd. Vincent has been releasing music since 2019, and his most recent album is The Golden Crystal Kingdom. Vincent considers himself a songwriter first, and he’s had a lot of success with his music in the few years he has released songs since the pandemic.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Future Days Recordings, an imprint of acclaimed archival label Light in the Attic, proudly announces the long-awaited reissue of Pete Jolly’s 1970 masterpiece, Seasons, on vinyl for the first time in over 50 years.

Sought after by crate-diggers, DJs, and jazz aficionados alike, as well as sampled by everyone from Jay Dee and Cypress Hill to Busta Rhymes, the album was far ahead of its time and a stylistic departure for Jolly, full of atmospheric grooves and soulful vignettes like “Springs,” “Leaves,” “Sand Storm,” and “Plummer Park.” Produced by Herb Alpert (who originally released the album on his label A&M Records), Seasons also features a who’s who of session musicians, including the Wrecking Crew’s Chuck Berghofer and Milt Holland, plus Emil Richards, Paul Humphrey, and John Pisano.

Due out March 29th and available to pre-order, Seasons has been remastered from its original analog tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and pressed at RTI on two special color variants: clear amber and clear light green (both seen below and are available exclusively at LightintheAttic.net). Rounding out the album are insightful new liner notes by music journalist Dave Segal (The Stranger, Pitchfork, Aquarium Drunkard), who interviewed Alpert and Berghofer about their memories of Jolly.

Two-time GRAMMY®-nominee Pete Jolly (1932–2004) was a virtuosic multi-instrumentalist whose work on the piano, organ, and accordion, in particular, could be heard on classic West Coast jazz albums, as well as on countless TV and film scores–including M*A*S*H, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Clint Eastwood’s Charlie Parker biopic Bird, during which he faithfully recreated Bud Powell’s piano performances with the legendary horn player.

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Remembering Walter Becker, born on this day in 1950. —Ed.

The passing of Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker hit me hard; my fond memories of them go all the way back to their debut LP, 1972’s Can’t Buy a Thrill, which an unusually hip (for the tiny Nowhereville I grew up in, at least) high school music teacher used to make us listen to in class. She was doing her best, that intrepid educator, to help us turn on, tune in, and drop out. Or if not to drop out, at least to alert us to the fact that contemporary music didn’t begin and end with Carole King’s Tapestry.

Steely Dan has always had its detractors; I know because I’ve slagged them my own damn self. I love their early work, but rued their slow slide into the smooth jazz precincts of such LPs as 1977’s Aja and 1980’s Gaucho. Was I too hard on Becker and Donald Fagen? In hindsight, yes. “Deacon Blue” may be a bit too Vaseline-based for my tastes but it has its charms—indeed, when it comes to loser anthems, it’s one of the best.

As for those folks who hate Steely Dan altogether, well, I just don’t understand them. Nor do I understand the labels (soft rock? really?) some critics have slapped on the band over the years. (Why, Rob Sheffield went so far as to write off Can’t Buy a Thrill as—alas and alack—“mellow folk rock”!) Sure, Can’t Buy a Thrill makes for relatively mellow listening.

But it’s a smart person’s mellow listen and doesn’t include an ounce of folk. Its songs are complex and its cynical lyrics are the best a good cynicism-breeding Bard College education can buy. And unlike almost any “soft rock” band then in existence, Steely Dan could always be counted on to throw a fiery guitar-fueled spanner (“Reelin’ in the Years”) into the works. Elliott Randall, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, and Danny Dias all appear on Can’t Buy a Thrill, and all three are guitar slingers straight off the top shelf.

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On February 23 Craft Recordings and Acoustic Sounds kick off a year-long 180 gram vinyl reissue series sourced from the catalog of Contemporary Records with a welcome new edition of Smack Up by the Art Pepper Quintet. Cut in 1960, it captures alto saxophonist Pepper in superb form leading a top-flight band of West Coasters on six selections that mingle accessible swing with bluesy and occasionally progressive motifs. The cohesiveness of the whole is playful but sharp and will broaden perceptions of Pepper for listeners who mainly know him for a certain canonical quartet session.

Art Pepper’s undisputed entry into the jazz canon was also his debut for Lester Koenig’s Contemporary label; cut and released in 1957, Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section teamed the saxophonist with pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones, aka Miles Davis’ celebrated rhythm section of the time (hence the title).

The quality of the music this august group produced in a one-day session (January 19) has endured since and helped bolster the album’s legendary stature. It was a first time meeting, connecting the East Coast to a rising West Coast star who was to some extent unprepared for the date (sources vary), in part due to a drug problem. This is all long-established info, but it’s particularly worthy of mention in this review, as the title Smack Up has been perceived as either a direct or coincidental reference to Pepper’s heroin addiction.

It’s also this album’s opening cut. “Smack Up” was composed by Harold Land and appears on the tenor saxophonist’s 1958 album for Contemporary, Harold in the Land of Jazz. This adds a bit of ambiguity to the drug association (Land having stated the piece’s title was inspired purely by the music’s structure) as it clarifies Smack Up’s conceptual reality; all six tracks were composed by saxophonists.

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We’ve closed TVD’s HQ for the Presidents’ Day holiday. While we’re away, why not fire up our Record Store Locator app and visit one of your local indie record stores?

Perhaps there’s an interview, review, or feature you might have missed? Catch up and we’ll see you back here tomorrow, 2/20.