Artists need to be inspired to create their best works, and it’s not always easy to have the wherewithal to clearly see the inspiration around us. In fact, for a musician, the insight to this inspiration is often more important than musical or production ability. Listeners love sounds that touch them on an emotional level, but how do you search out that spark? How does the musician find the muse?

This is the journey that Charlie Bruber finds himself traversing on his latest album Finding the Muse, and as you’ll learn, Charlie is open to the idea that there are many sources of inspiration to explore. It may be a famous musician, a vintage keyboard, or something else. In any case, Charlie has created a far-reaching album that delves into all facets of his talents and skills as a multi-instrumentalist and composer. While you’re listening, you may wonder if you’re hearing the same performer, but you’re just seeing all the many different sides of Charlie Bruber.

Charlie joins us directly from his recording studio in Minneapolis, Minnesota and we end up digging through our respective record collections in real-time for a fun back-and-forth about albums we both appreciate. We also discuss Charlie’s other important musical projects, specifically, Black Market Brass on Colemine Records. It’s entirely possible, by joining in on our search for Charlie’s muse, you might be given some direction in finding your own.

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.

Please afford me this brief opportunity to praise Gino Vannelli before burying him. The impossibly good-looking Italian-Canadian pop rocker—I would gladly change my sexual orientation for the chance to push my nose into his Tom Jones-quality (and no doubt subtly perfumed) chest pelt—was responsible for the slinky “People Gotta Move,” which is less song than sex lube and undoubtably the best disco number to emerge from the Great White North. Why it’s even better than Gino Soccio’s “Try It Out” or Erotic Love Band’s “Love Disco Style.” And he also bequeathed us the underrated disco number “Powerful People” and the great Yacht Rock power ballad “I Just Wanna Stop.”

But something unspeakably terrible happened on Gino’s fourth outing, 1976’s The Gist of The Gemini. Disco was at its prime but did Gino give us disco? Well he does on the jazz-fusion-flavored dance track “Fly Into the Night,” which is no “People Gotta Move” but is the only listenable track on the LP. What he does have on offer on The Gist of The Gemini are a few execrable (and inexcusably heavy-handed) ballads and—this is the kicker—a whole lot of progressive rock. Yes, you heard me right, progressive rock. And this at a time when prog rockers were beginning to scatter in the wind, routed by disco and punk.

Why would Vannelli march straight into the desperate mob of prog rockers moving in the direction of pop with the almost eighteen minute, six-part “War Suite,” which is pompous and overblown even by progressive rock standards? And speaking of standards “War Suite” doesn’t have any—it’s literally the least savory example of prog bombast I’ve ever suffered through. Which is a strong statement, what with Emerson, Lake & Palmer out there. It’s true that American prog rockers like Styx and Kansas were at the height of their powers, but they played melodic prog lite, which “War Suite” most definitely isn’t. You won’t find a “Come Sail Away” or “Carry on Wayward Son” on The Gist of The Gemini. What you’ll find instead is a pop singer with dance inclinations possessed by that demonic entity named Keith Emerson.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | In the summer of 1961, John Coltrane headlined at the celebrated music venue, the Village Gate. With a lineup of musicians that included McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman, Elvin Jones, and the fiery playing of Eric Dolphy, Evenings at the Village Gate captures the creative and transformative spirit that sprang from the pairing of Coltrane and Dolphy, and the evolving short-lived quintet.

Evenings At The Village Gate: John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy will be released globally July 14 on Impulse! Records/UMe. The first track from the fabled performances, “Impressions,” is available now and you can listen to the track and pre-order the album now. You can also order a special orange vinyl variant here.

Recently discovered at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the recordings on this album—recorded by engineer Rich Alderson as part of a test of the club’s new sound system—were seemingly lost, then found, and then disappeared again into the vast sound archives of the Library for the Performing Arts. The tapes’ circuitous route over several decades seemingly mirrors Coltrane’s ongoing musical journey in August of 1961.

Recorded during Coltrane’s month-long Village Gate residency with his quintet (often with a revolving cast of musicians), the album consists of eighty minutes of never-before-heard music. It offers a glimpse into a powerful musical partnership that ended much too soon—Dolphy sadly passed away three years later and this recording is the only live recording of their legendary Village Gate performances. In addition to some well-known Coltrane material (“My Favorite Things,” “Impressions,” and “Greensleeves”), there is a breathtaking feature for Dolphy’s bass clarinet on “When Lights Are Low,” and the only known non-studio recording of Coltrane’s composition “Africa,” that includes bassist Art Davis.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Steely Dan’s broadly acclaimed third album, Pretzel Logic, will return to vinyl for the first time in over 35 years on July 28th via Geffen/UMe. Originally released in 1974, the best-selling album marked the band’s first to break Billboard’s Top 10, on the strength of their most successful hit, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” plus such favorites as “Any Major Dude Will Tell You,” “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” and “Barrytown.”

Pretzel Logic marks the latest release in Geffen/UMe’s extensive reissue program of Steely Dan’s classic ABC and MCA Records catalog, which returns the band’s first seven records to vinyl—most of which haven’t been available since their original release. Overseen by founding member Donald Fagen, the series launched in November 2022 with the group’s legendary debut, Can’t Buy A Thrill, followed most recently by 1973’s Countdown To Ecstasy in May 2023.

The album was meticulously remastered by Bernie Grundman from the original analog tapes and pressed on 180-gram black vinyl at 33 1/3 RPM. Additionally, Pretzel Logic will be released 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).

Additional titles will roll out over the next year, including 1975’s swing-pop perfection Katy Lied (featuring “Black Friday,” “Bad Sneakers,” and “Doctor Wu,” as well as the addition of Michael McDonald on vocals); 1976’s guitar-driven The Royal Scam (“Kid Charlemagne,” “The Fez”); 1977’s platinum-selling jazz-rock masterwork Aja (with the hits “Deacon Blues,” Peg,” and “Josie,” plus the elegant title cut); as well as Steely Dan’s final album for MCA, and last for 20 years, 1980’s brilliant Gaucho (featuring “Hey Nineteen” and “Time Out Of Mind,” with Mark Knopfler on guitar).

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Celebrating Boz Scaggs on his 79th birthday. —Ed.

It took seven albums, but blue-eyed soul man Boz Scaggs hit pop paydirt with 1976’s Silk Degrees. If you were alive and had ears during America’s Bicentennial Year you’ll remember the Boz was every bit as hard to avoid as Fleetwood Mac.

But why would you want to avoid him? Silk Degrees is a small landmark in music making, and what’s all the more remarkable is that nobody saw it coming. Scaggs was a journeyman with a long pedigree dating back to the mid-sixties and stints with the Other Side, the Steve Miller Band, and Mother Earth, and his solo career wasn’t exactly the stuff of which legends are made—his highest charting solo LP before Silk Degrees coughed and died at #81 on the Billboard Charts, and it was a smash hit compared to the five that came before it. I doubt many industry folks were betting their Andrew Gold royalty checks on Scaggs delivering an LP that would go five times platinum.

But after much tinkering with the formula Scaggs finally got it right on Silk Degrees, which veers from Little Feat-school boogie to deep-dish soul to pseudo-disco to lithesome funk without breaking a sweat or seeming to overreach. Boz does it all on this one, and while I prefer the upbeat material to the pair of ballads, he (mostly) pulls them off as well. I don’t know what he was snorting at the two studios in Hollywood where this baby was recorded, but he somehow managed to utilize El Lay studio talent—including three of the members of benighted Toto—to produce an LP that doesn’t sound like yet another example of sterile El Lay studio product.

Even the big production on such numbers as the very pop “What Do You Want the Girl To Do” and the discofied “What Can I Say” works; the former because Boz infuses his every last word with soul, and the latter because, well, Boz infuses his every last word with soul. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that the arrangements are every bit as likeable as the melodies on both songs. If you hate pop and you hate disco you’re likely to hate both of them, but if you hate pop and you hate disco I can only worry about the state of your immortal soul.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Sacred Bones announces an archival release from Canadian-born electronic pioneer and composer, Mort Garson, titled Journey to the Moon and Beyond, to be released July 21, 2023. With the news, comes “Moon Journey,” the soundtrack to the live broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, as first heard on CBS News. Nearly in tandem with the release date, July 20th will mark Garson’s 99th birthday, and the anniversary of the moon landing.

Garson is best known for his albums in the 1960s and 1970s that were among the first to feature Moog synthesizers. His best-known album is Mother Earth’s Plantasia, a 1976 Moog album designed to be played “for plants and the people who love them.”

It’s hard not to use plant terminology when discussing the long, strange career—and subsequent renaissance—of Mort Garson. Like a seed buried deep and left to germinate for months (or in this instance, decades), his great body of work was scattered in record bins and tape closets and all but forgotten in pop culture. A classically trained musician and electronic researcher with a tireless work ethos that led to nearly over a thousand writing and arranging credits, Mort Garson’s music got buried in the topsoil of time.

When Sacred Bones first began their Mort Garson reissue project in 2019 with a proper reissue of Plantasia, the Garson-naissance began in earnest. Soon after, you could hear Mort Garson and his Moogs bubbling up on TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, hip-hop tracks, or anywhere else, the man a cultural phenomenon once more. (And naturally, just playing the vinyl reissue of Plantasia at home made every single plant in your house thrive.)

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Children of the Forest, an archival release of 1976 recordings featuring Milford Graves on drums, Arthur Doyle on saxophone and fife, and Hugh Glover on klaxon and the vaccine (a Haitian one-note trumpet) sits amongst the most breathtaking musical discoveries of 2023. It offers free jazz unfettered by any constraints, thundering and soaring and skronking with passion that tips over into sheer ferocity. It’s out now on 2LP through the Black Editions Archive in a tip-on gatefold jacket with pigment ink foil stamping and photographs by the great free jazz historian Valerie Wilmer, plus an insert with a new interview with Hugh Glover by Jake Meginsky. As serious as your life? Oh hell yes!

Along with Sunny Murray, Milford Graves was the primary catalyst liberating jazz drumming from its timekeeping role. A Professor Emeritus of Music, a sculptor and a visual artist in addition to drummer-percussionist, Graves played on a lot of records (as is the jazz norm), with the majority as a sideman (Albert Ayler, Sonny Sharrock, Paul Bley, Giuseppi Logan), co-leader (Nommo with Don Pullen, Dialogue of the Drums with Andrew Cyrille, Beyond Quantum with Anthony Braxton and William Parker) or as a member of an ensemble or collective (New York Art Quartet, Jazz Composer’s Orchestra).

Graves’ leadership shelf is a lot slimmer. His debut Milford Graves Percussion Ensemble with Sonny Morgan (a duo record) came out on ESP-Disk in 1966, and on the other end of the spectrum, there are two CDs issued on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Grand Unification (1998) and Stories (2000), both solo. In the middle, both released in 1977, is Meditation Among Us with a Japanese band including the sax scorcher Kaoru Abe, and Bäbi, which was recorded live on March 20, 1976 at the WBAI FM Free Music Store with the contributors to Children of the Forest, Doyle and Glover, credited with reeds.

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Remembering Tony McPhee. —Ed.

Only two things in this world have the capacity to immediately cause my eyes to glaze over; the first is talk about politics, and the second is the phrase “British blues group.” The momentous impact that the introduction of American blues had on British musicians cannot be overestimated; John Lee Hooker and company instantly transformed a generation of skiffle-mad Brits into blues zombies, fanatical acolytes and slavish imitators of Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and company. Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, Long John Baldry, Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, and countless other bands arose to preach the blues, and there was no way to stop their spreading like kudzu.

I’ve never been a blues aficionado, but Mayall, Baldry, and their like have always haunted and taunted me, goading me into giving them a fair chance, always to my disappointment. Their chief function, so far as I can tell, was as finishing schools for a very long laundry list of future rock greats. Why, Baldry alone is responsible for fostering such neophytes as Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Julie Driscoll, Elton John, and others. There is one British blues group, however, that I actually find intriguing, and that’s the Groundhogs. Theirs is a most inauspicious name, and I can’t say I expected much after a friend recommended I give their 1970 LP Thank Christ for the Bomb a listen. But I’ll be damned if the LP isn’t excellent, combining great musicianship with intriguing originals that frequently deviate from your basic blues template.

The Groundhogs were formed in 1963 by titular leader Tony McPhee, the band’s guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter, who borrowed the band name from the title of a John Lee Hooker tune. The band’s history gets a bit twisted, so suffice it to say they briefly changed their name to Herbal Mixture (reefer turn-on alert!) before changing it back to the Groundhogs, and that Thank Christ for the Bomb was the band’s third studio LP, and fourth album overall if you count the 1968 LP they recorded with John Lee Hooker. The Groundhogs were playing as a trio at the time Thank Christ for the Bomb was released, with Peter Cruickshank and Ken Pustelnik joining McPhee on drums and bass, respectively.

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