Remembering Miles Davis who would have turned 100 yesterday.
—Ed.

In the autumn of 1955 trumpeter Miles Davis hit the studio for the first time in the company of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Philly Joe Jones. Miles: The New Miles Davis Quintet was the first album to see release by this combo, a wholly worthwhile undertaking that set the stage for bolder achievements to come. 

It’s occasionally difficult to shake the notion of music history being shaped by particular inevitabilities. That is, certain great musicians, and specifically those who innovated across extensive discographies, were just creatively unstoppable. Their brilliance simply had to happen. And in the realms of jazz, perhaps no single musician can foster this atmosphere of the inescapable more than Miles Davis.

The man was responsible for an enormous number of masterpieces; listing only a third of them here would only serve to pad out the length of this review. But think of it this way; Davis was part of the original bebop wave, played a crucial role in the subsequent advancements of hard bop, and was an (arguably the) innovator in the cool, modal and fusion genres.

And if Davis eschewed free jazz, his “second great quintet” could occasionally creep up near the borderlines of that movement. That group’s string of mid-’60s studio albums remain sterling examples of a transitional and exploratory style that many describe as post-bop. And for that matter, Davis’ electric period is fairly assessed as experimental.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Seven months after changing its name from the Warlocks, the Grateful Dead was a scuffling, unsigned band searching for an identity when it played Bill Graham’s Independence Ball on July 3, 1966. That show—making its vinyl debut exactly 60 years later—captures the transformative energy of a band moving almost too fast to catch.

Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA (7/3/66) arrives July 3 from Rhino.com on 2CDs. A 3LP-set will be available exclusively from Dead.net, limited to 6,600 copies and featuring a custom etching on the final side. The live album will also be available digitally to stream and download. The original performance was recorded by Owsley “Bear” Stanley and produced by Grateful Dead Legacy Manager and Archivist Dave Lemieux. Mastered by Jeffrey Norman at Mockingbird Mastering with speed correction and tape restoration by Plangent Processes. Pre-order here.

While the Dead’s archive is legendary for its depth, complete high-fidelity documents of the band’s first year are rare. The July 3 recording—which debuted in 2015 as part of the 50th-anniversary boxed set 30 Trips Around the Sun—stands as a primary exception. It captures the group in the midst of a radical mutation, a charged R&B dance band already moving toward new musical terrain in the star-spangled ether of the Independence Ball. At the time, the band featured Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and Bob Weir.

The performance includes the earliest known live recordings of several songs, including rare originals like “Tastebud,” “You Don’t Have To Ask,” and “Cardboard Cowboy.” These tracks, along with a cover of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Gangster Of Love,” would largely vanish from the band’s repertoire by the end of the summer.

Read More »

Remembering Sonny Rollins. —Ed.

Sonny Rollins’ name met the marquee of The Village Vanguard in the fall of 1957, and by November 3rd the saxophonist had honed his group to basic rudiments and figured out exactly what he wanted to do. With drummers Elvin Jones and Pete La Roca and bassists Wilbur Ware and Donald Bailey, he delivered one of jazz’s core documents, the undyingly superlative A Night at the Village Vanguard.

According to Leonard Feather’s liner notes for the original 6-track LP documentation of Sonny Rollins’ ’57 Vanguard stand, the saxophonist first hit the stage for a week with a quintet including trumpet and piano. Not happy with the results, he ditched the other horn and grabbed a new rhythm section for week two. Dissatisfied with the quartet lineup as well, Rollins then decided upon a sax-bass-drums trio. And that’s what we hear on the still startling A Night at the Village Vanguard. If Rollins’ rapid-fire retooling seems odd for a concert engagement, understand that he was basically using the bandstand as a live laboratory, experimenting loosely and approachably for proprietor Max Gordon’s hip urban clientele.

Though the Vanguard opened its doors in 1935, based on Feather’s notes, through the ‘40s and well into the next decade most live jazz had moved uptown, and Gordon’s club had then only recently underwent a substantial return to its now legendary intersection of serious jazz and bohemia. In attempting to steer his joint back in the direction of the cutting edge, Gordon casually inviting Rollins to spontaneously create in his spot was an extremely bright maneuver.

For at this point in his career Sonny Rollins was at an early peak. Frankly, the previous sentence is understating the case almost criminally; from ’56-’58 he cut 17 LPs as a leader, and by my count (and I’m far from alone in this arithmetic) at least ten of those recordings are classics. The performances corralled on A Night at the Village Vanguard arrived in the midst of all that activity, and the vinyl configuration’s slim but thoughtful annotation of the significant invention presented by these group’s (there are two, each with individual characteristics) remains an absolute masterpiece.

Read More »

Bass clarinetist Jason Stein, double bassist Damon Smith, and drummer-percussionist Adam Shead constitute an improvising unit with two prior releases as a trio plus two in combination with pianist Marilyn Crispell. With Five Nights in the Midwest, the threesome explodes back onto the scene with a 3CD set documenting a tour from December of 2025. The seven improvisations, presented with no edits or cuts, retain the continuity of the tour and reinforce the sheer brilliance of the trio as they personify free jazz at its very best. This astounding release is out now from Irritable Mystic Records and Balance Point Acoustics.

The tour, encapsulated in Five Nights in the Midwest, ran from December 9th to the 14th across five performances in four states, starting at the Sugar Maple in Milwaukee, WI, moving on to State Street Pub in Indianapolis, IN, then Spot Tavern in Lafayette, IN, after that Dissonant Works in St. Louis, MO, and last, Reverberation Records in Bloomington, IL.

These five gigs are represented by seven improvisations. The Spot Tavern performance consists of three pieces from two sets, as the other locales found the group unfurling one improv, most of them over 25 minutes long. Interestingly, the first Spot Tavern set is Five Nights in the Midwest’s longest by a whisker at 29:26.

The music created by this triangle is intense but never grueling. It expands the potentialities of free jazz at its most energetic, tapping into the Fire Music-Ecstatic root while mapping distinct territory and more than doubling their output as a trio; they debuted in 2022 with the Volumes & Surfaces CD and followed up that disc with Hum the next year.

Read More »

We’ve closed TVD’s HQ for the Memorial 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, 5/26.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | A Certain Ratio celebrate two anniversaries this year: 45 years since they went into Revolution Studios in Cheadle Hulme, Stockport to record Sextet (1982) and 40 years since the release of the 1986 album Force—and mark the occasion with companion releases for each of the albums out on 28 August, and an anniversary tour in October. Sextet and Force are two of ACR’s classic, and beloved, album releases so the band have put together two very different albums—The Joy of Sextet and Force Majeure—to accompany their anniversaries.

Sextet was ACR’s third studio album and showed a whole new side to the band. It was described on release as “… an album of the present, killing the present and agreeably ignoring the future” by Sounds and more recently reappraised by Pitchfork who said it “still sounds like no other record.” The line-up for Sextet features Martha “Tilly” Tilson, who the band had met in New York while they were recording To Each… Tilly’s lyrics, Jez Kerr explains, “reflect her take on life in Manchester, “walk along the waterline, see the ships passing by, grey skies, still water.”

This singular release—which spent 11 weeks in the UK Independent Chart, reaching the #1 slot—has been given a brand-new mix by long-time collaborator Andy Meecham (The Emperor Machine) from the original album session tapes. Talking about the process, Meecham explains, “Taking on an epic album like this involved pushing up the faders again from the original 1981 2”multitracks adding some new dynamics while recapturing the sound of 1981 without losing the original raw energy and feel.”

Read More »

Celebrating Morrissey on his 67th birthday. —Ed.

Morrissey has long been the funniest man in the rock biz. The King of the Miserablists (my own word) and high priest of unrequited love has turned self-pity and general anomie into pop gold, and in the process has proven Samuel Beckett’s famous adage that “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” But the Moz is more than just a jilted jester. He can hit the tragic notes too, although he often filters them through irony and his trademark humor.

Since his beginnings with The Smiths, Morrissey has cut a unique figure on the pop landscape. Fey, sensitive as a flower, yet possessed of a wit as cutting as a straight razor, Morrissey is the closest we’ve ever gotten to a second coming of Oscar Wilde. He strikes one as being much too tender a violet for this world, yet can vent contempt as well as Bob Dylan. Throw in a unique voice, and a personal life that is veiled in myth and conjecture, and you’ve got my idea of the perfect pop figure—one who looks at life darkly, but transmutes that darkness into irresistible pop songs. Really, is there—or has there ever been?—another pop star who could pull off a song as complex, ironic, and ultimately hilarious as “Girlfriend in a Coma”?

I’m one of those rare birds who, all things considered, slightly favors Morrissey’s solo work to his work with The Smiths. That said, I’ve always felt the pull of Strangeways, Here We Come, from its title with its mention of a now-defunct English prison to such moving songs as “Death of a Disco Dancer” and “Paint a Vulgar Picture.” Strangeways was the fourth and final Smiths studio LP, with Morrissey and Marr parting ways after some false information in the press giving the impression that Morrissey was exasperated by Marr’s side projects managed to sever their remarkably successful partnership.

The Smiths hailed from Manchester in 1982 and included Morrissey on vocals; Johnny Marr on guitar, keyboards, harmonica, autoharp, synthesized strings, and saxophone arrangements; Andy Rourke on bass; and Mike Joyce on drums. Marr wrote the music, Morrissey the lyrics, just like Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | “Tony Fletcher, one of the great post-punk inspirational writers and thinkers: his fanzine Jamming! inspired me to start Creation. POW! is his story of that period. Take a bow Tony, you always were a cool chap.” —Alan McGee, author of Creation Records: Riots, Raves and Running a Label

Before authoring 11 books, including best-selling biographies of Who drummer Keith Moon, R.E.M., and The Smiths, Tony Fletcher was a teenage music magazine publisher in his native England. But, with a degree of industry that sounds absolutely exhausting, he also ran a record label, interviewed rock stars, led a band, promoted concerts, worked as an on-air TV interviewer—and still found time for romance.

Fletcher chronicled the early days of his life and career in Boy About Town (2013), but had enough extraordinary experiences left over for this colorful and engaging memoir.

1980–’84 was an explosive time in British rock, as the disruptive energy of bands like The Clash and Sex Pistols gave way to more sophisticated and chart-friendly genres and bands. Fletcher was on the front lines, running a record label with the Jam’s Paul Weller, attending all the important concerts and meeting the top acts, many of whom became MTV regulars: Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Wham!, Echo & the Bunnymen, Killing Joke, Adam and the Ants, The Smiths, and more. Then there’s the time he interviewed Paul McCartney…

Read More »

When Stephen King set out to make the 1986 film Maximum Overdrive (the only film he ever directed), he knew exactly who he wanted to produce the music for the soundtrack—AC/DC.

And in order to show AC/DC how much he loved their music, he sat them down and sang over their song “Ain’t No Fun (Waiting Round to Be a Millionaire)”–all six minutes and fifty-four seconds of it. I don’t know if King attempted a Brian Johnson imitation as he did this. But the band promptly said, “Okay, sure, count us in.” I suspect it was out of fear that King would follow “Ain’t No Fun” with a version of “Big Balls.”

The film was a monumental flop. It was so bad that King himself would later call it “a moron movie.” The band didn’t think much of it either (“…when we watched his film we thought it should be made into a comedy to be honest,” said Malcolm Young). Their opinion was shared by every marsupial in Oz. And said one outraged dingo drily, “THIS is the baby we should have eaten.”

By contrast, the soundtrack by every rock-loving sentient being’s favorite band from Down Under is merely a disappointment. 1986’s Who Made Who could have been the unofficial Greatest Hits record by a band that has never released a Greatest Hits record.

It isn’t for three reasons. The first is song selection. The second stems from King’s request that the band write some original songs for the soundtrack, and two of the three songs the band came up with were instrumentals. The third is the Who Made Who soundtrack, which includes only one Bon Scott number.

Read More »