VIA PRESS RELEASE | Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, has released the full album from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Season 5 (Music From The Amazon Original Series) today, Friday, May 26. The digital album now features songs from the entire fifth season with 6 new songs added, including a Tegan and Sara cover of the Dave Edmunds song, “Girls Talk,” featured in the finale episode. The song was also released as a single and is available now. The original song by Dave Edmunds was featured in the pilot episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Tegan and Sara say of the song, “We were thrilled to cover Dave Edmunds’ ‘Girls Talk’ for the finale episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. This remarkable series has been a constant source of inspiration, captivating us throughout the past four seasons. Being included in the final moments of such a beloved series felt beyond exciting. We hope fans of the show will enjoy our rendition of this iconic song once they’ve wiped away all their tears.”

Featuring the same music as the digital album, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Season 5 (Music From The Amazon Original Series) will be available on CD (June 9) and 12″ vinyl (September 22) and may be pre-ordered HERE. The new songs released include: Richard Burton, “How to Handle a Woman”; Bobby Short, “I Happen to Like New York”; Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer “Shy”; Barbra Streisand, “I Stayed Too Long At The Fair”; Tegan and Sara, “Girls Talk”; Rachel Brosnahan, “The Final Minutes.” The full tracklisting is below.

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Remembering Levon Helm, born on this day in 1940. —Ed.

Talk about your survivors; legendary Band drummer/vocalist Levon Helm was 69 years old when he released 2009’s wonderful (and moving) Electric Dirt, and he packed a whole lot of very hard living (and a near fatal case of throat cancer) into those 69 years.

But this proud son of cotton farmers from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas triumphed over it all, and went out on a valedictory note with a pair of twilight LPs (2007’s Dirt Farmer garnered him a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album in 2008) that did nothing but enhance his status as one of the most distinctive vocalists and drummers of the rock era.

Helm may have run with real slick customers (Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson, for starters), and he spent his fair share amount of time atop the Big Rock Candy Mountain, but he never lost that rural twang. His singing was equal parts white clay grit, visionary yowl, and sly country swing, and it provided some much needed American coloring to Robbie Robertson’s Canadian songwriting palette–he was the only fella in the Band who could have pulled off “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

The years that followed the break-up of the Band were no kinder to him than to anybody else in the group; he messed around some, landed a memorable movie role or two, and put together some great touring bands and played his ass off, but his recording career was spotty at best.

Which is what makes the last two LPs he recorded before his death so wonderful. On Dirt Farmer he reached way, way back to explore his folk roots; come Electric Dirt he stretched out and went the funky Americana route, and ended up winning the first ever Grammy Award for Best Americana album for his efforts.

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One of my old film professors used to say that one had never really seen a film unless they had watched it at least once with the sound off. Audio—be it music, or sound—adds so much detail to a moving picture that sometimes the viewer misses a few visual nuances because they’re also busy listening. While my professor’s approach might be an extreme way to evaluate a movie, there’s no denying that music and film have long had a strong cooperative association. Long before film even had sound, there was always an attempt to fill the auditory gap.

While the days of the chart-topping soundtrack albums are long gone, there are still some directors who lean heavily on the mixtape concept to source sound for their films, and Wes Anderson is one of them. Marty Isenberg is a bassist and composer based in New York City and on July 7th, he’ll release his newest collection of songs pulled from, and inspired by, the films of Wes Anderson. The album will be titled, The Way I Feel Inside and it will be released on the Truth Revolution Recording Collective label. The music is stellar, of course, but the icing on the cake is the album cover which was illustrated by Renan Campus who tapped into the wonder of Anderson’s aesthetic palette.

Marty and I delve not only into the music that Wes Anderson has employed in his films, but we talk a bit about the films themselves. We also discuss the players that Isenberg employed on his auditorily filmic adventure including the outstanding work of Sami Stevens who added vocals to many of the album’s tracks, adding a crucial layer of dynamism and lyrical context to Isenberg’s vision. So, the lights are going down, join me and Marty as we take our seats and listen to the movies of Wes Anderson. Maybe my old film professor should add another layer to his approach: perhaps one should listen to a film at least once without watching it.

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector, and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Evan Toth Show and TVD Radar on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.

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?” Recorded on a shoestring in the back rooms of South London, the single carried the same unpolished charm found in the city’s fanzine scene and late-night haunts—places where posters for local gigs shared wall space with discreet ads for sexy london escorts, part of the same restless underground culture that thrived on impulse and anonymity. 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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