VIA PRESS RELEASE | Yusuf/Cat Stevens has announced his long-awaited memoir, Cat On The Road To Findout. Launching in the UK through Constable on September 18 and in North America on October 7 through Genesis Publications, the new autobiography is an extraordinary soul-baring journey through the triumphs, trials, and transcendental quest of one of music’s most enigmatic figures of our time.

More than a memoir, the Yusuf/Cat Stevens story is a backstage pass to the mind of a man who has lived a thousand lives. From his folk troubadour beginnings, to the glamorous chaos of ‘60s pop stardom, to his ‘70s reign as a generational voice, his songs formed a musical odyssey that intricately recorded the journey to self-discovery. Then came his unexpected departure from superstardom, embracing Islam and leaving fans heartbroken.

Missing from the public narrative has been the intimate story of his deeply emotive transformation—until now. Cat On The Road To Findout finally reveals the curious complexity and intellectual reasoning behind his navigation through life—a voyage that has now culminated in his return to music and art, to share his lessons of life with those seekers, dreamers, and believers who still love and admire him. He remains true to the optimistic message of his melodic peace train.

Yusuf/Cat Stevens says: “I’ve been on an amazing journey, which began in the narrow streets of London, and led me through the most iconic cities, to perform upon the great stage of Western culture, ascending the dizzying heights of wealth, recognition and artistic pinnacles; freely exploring vast ranges of religions and philosophies, wandering through churches, temples, all the way to the Holy abode in Jerusalem—ignoring myths and warnings—and crossing the foreboded, desert heartlands, to arrive at the House of One God in Abrahamic Arabia. What finally elevated my perspective was a luminous Book that perfectly alchemized my thoughts, beliefs, with human nature. It taught me Oneness, and my place and purpose within the universe.”

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Celebrating Robert Fripp, born on this date in 1946. —Ed.

What a great album! The songs are brilliant! The entire cast of musicians, which include Daryll Hall, Tony Levin, and Terri Roche defy the laws of talent! Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins also make guest appearances! And Mary Lou Green does hair! And does a bang-up job of it I’m sure!

On 1979’s Exposure—the first of his four solo albums—Robert Fripp condescends to the conventional, or as close as the dyed-in-the-wool avant gardist would get to making an album for progressive rock haters. Fripp has spent his long and illustrious career on the experimental end of the rock party; he co-founded and played guitar for King Crimson on all thirteen of the albums they released between 1969 and 2003.

He also kept himself busy during those years by recording two LPs with Giles, Giles & Fripp, two with the League of Gentleman, and collaborating with the likes of Brian Eno and David Sylvian. He also fell in with the crowd attracted to the work of Russian spiritualist George Gurdjieff and went off to a ten-month course at Gloucestershire, where he achieved so much deep spiritual wisdom he would later say, “I was pretty suicidal.” I’m thinking of signing up myself.

On Exposure Fripp enlisted the usual array of prog-rock musicians, including Brian Eno, Tony Levin, Peter Gabriel, and Peter Hammill of Van der Graaf Generator fame. But his real genius lay in enlisting Hall and Oates’ Daryl Hall in the project. Hall was not as surprising a choice as, say, John Denver, but many wondered why Fripp engaged a top notch pop songwriter and blue-eyed soul singer to participate in a project that—with the noticeable exception of “North Star”—made so little of Hall’s perceived musical strengths.

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On this episode of Radar, I spoke with Jon King, co-founder and lead singer of Gang of Four, about his new memoir, To Hell with Poverty! A Class Act: Inside the Gang of Four. The book offers an account of his journey from a working-class upbringing in South London to international success with the band.

We discuss Jon’s early days in the slums of London, his passion for reading, art, and the political and social themes that influenced their music. King discusses what brought him to make music and the broader cultural landscape that shaped their work.

This conversation coincides with Gang of Four’s “The Long Goodbye” tour, marking the band’s final performances. The current lineup includes King, original drummer Hugo Burnham, bassist Gail Greenwood, and guitarist Ted Leo.

Radar features discussions with artists and industry leaders who are creators and devotees of music and is produced by Dylan Hundley and The Vinyl District. Dylan Hundley is an artist and performer, and the co-creator and lead singer of Lulu Lewis and all things at Darling Black. She co-curates and hosts Salon Lulu which is a New York based multidisciplinary performance series. She is also a cast member of the iconic New York film Metropolitan.

Street Hassle is a hassle indeed—this 1978 part live, part studio LP is a hot mess, and after listening to it for days, I still can’t tell you whether it’s a good album or not. It’s certainly an interesting album, and Lou sounds committed to doing whatever it is he’s doing, and in all I find myself drawn to it despite the fact that I’ve booked enough reservations about it to fill a commercial airliner headed for Perth, Western Australia, which is as far from “street poet” Lou’s muse, New York City, as you can get on this planet.

And I’m not alone. Critical opinions of Street Hassle are wildly divergent, with some calling it brilliant (“the best solo album Lou Reed has ever done” said Rolling Stone’s Tom Carson) and others calling it, well, let’s just say it was Tim Lott of the Record Mirror’s opinion that “Lou Reed has been a musical corpse for years now. Street Hassle is a creative nadir.” Me, I can only say that the fact that I can’t stop listening to it is proof that there’s something there—Lou Reed put out a whole slew of albums I’ve only listened to once, because listening to them twice would have made me a masochist.

Street Hassle is a true conundrum and act of polymorphous perversity—on the live tracks (although it’s hard to tell some are live because the crowd noise has been eliminated, and mucho overdubbing has been done) he does irreparable harm to one old Velvet Underground chestnut, does a bizarre but amusing riff on another one, tosses off some half-baked ditties (one of which I swear is a Bad Company ripoff), tosses in a joke of a song about how he wants to be black because then he’d be able to “shoot twenty feet of jism,” and centers the mess around one of the most brilliant and complex songs he would ever write as a solo artist.

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Celebrating Brian Eno, born on this day in 1948. —Ed.

What a divine creature: In the first half of the 1970s the pre-ambient Brian Eno flitted about England’s glitter rock scene in fantastical glam attire, making an indelible mark on Roxy Music’s first two LPs with his VCS3 synthesizer and “tape effects” before moving on to create two utterly idiosyncratic art rock masterpieces with Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, both released in 1974.

On the former album, Eno utilized a boldly original approach to recording that placed a high premium on happy accidents that were not really accidental; Eno very deliberately lined up a cast of studio musicians he felt would be incompatible with one another just to see what would happen. In his own words he organized the situation “with the knowledge that there might be accidents, accidents which will be more interesting than what I had intended.” He then doubled down on the oddness by “treating” instruments and doing a lot of heavy condensing and mixing of the recorded tracks, some of which ended up sounding nothing like what the musicians played in the studio.

In short Eno puts chance in charge, and like any good gambler chance works in his favor. Marcel Duchamp abandoned art to play chess; if Eno were to retire, he would no doubt take up craps. Not enough random variables in the game of kings.

Art Rock with a sense of humor and none of the grandiosity, Here Come the Warm Jets is a collection of beautifully textured songs filled with staggering performances by the slew of stellar performers Eno gathered together because he thought they didn’t belong together. All of Roxy Music (excepting Bryan Ferry) were on hand, as were guitar aces Chris Spedding and Robert Fripp; other players included members of King Crimson, Hawkwind, Pink Fairies, and Matching Mole. They don’t seem like such an incongruous bunch to me–Spedding excepted, there’s a decided tilt towards art- and prog-rock–but if Eno considered ‘em an Odd Bunch, well, he’s the guys with the ears.

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LOS ANGELES, CA | Rockaway Records has done it again, unveiling a stunning acquisition that’s got music collectors and Beatles fans buzzing. The world-renowned music memorabilia hotspot has secured not one, not two, but three of the rarest Beatles “White Albums” in existence. Numbered 007, 008, and 009, this pristine trio of 1968 pressings is valued at a jaw-dropping $250,000, making it one of the most significant finds in Beatles collecting history.

For those in the know, low-numbered White Albums are the holy grail of Beatles memorabilia. These three-digit gems were part of a test run for the number stamper at Bert-Co in Los Angeles, making them a piece of music production lore. Numbers below 100 are virtually non-existent, and anything sub-10? Forget it. These don’t just pop up on eBay.

To underscore their rarity, consider this: Ringo Starr’s personal UK mono pressing No. 0000001 fetched nearly $800,000 in 2015. While the White Albums at Rockaway don’t have Ringo’s fingerprints on them, they do hold the distinction of being the lowest US-numbered trifecta to hit the market. That’s history you can spin on your turntable. And when was the last time you could say that?

“In our nearly 50 years in business we have had countless amazing Beatles artifacts, but never a White Album with such a low number, let alone 3 consecutive low numbers,” Wayne Johnson, the co-founder Rockaway Records told me last week.

But it’s not just Beatles collectors who are digging deep into their pockets. Nirvana memorabilia is blazing hot in the collector’s world right now too, with items like original concert flyers, rare vinyl pressings, and even Cobain’s personal artifacts fetching record-breaking prices at auction. The demand for grunge-era nostalgia only seems to grow, breathing new life into ’90s music history.

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Born in Barcelona, Spain and based in New York City since 2012, pianist, composer, and improvisor Eva Novoa has recorded as a leader in a variety of configurations, and with particular emphasis on the trio. On May 16, 577 Records is releasing the second volume of her stimulating interactions with bassist Masatoshi Kamaguchi and drummer Gerald Cleaver. The three-way dialogue is enriching throughout as Novoa plays acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes, bangs a Chinese gong, and even whistles a bit. Like the previous installment, Novoa / Kamaguchi / Cleaver Trio, Vol. 2 is out on vinyl (shipping around June 9), compact disc, and digital. Copies of Vol. 1 are also still available in all formats.

The majority of Eva Novoa’s prior work has been issued by the Fresh Sound New Talent label, including her first record leading a trio, an eponymous recording featuring Masa Kamaguchi on bass and Marc Lohr on drums. Two years later came a quartet album, also eponymous, followed by two more by her Ditmas Quartet, one a studio set released in 2016 (Butterflies and Zebras) and the other a live date that came out in ’18 (Live at IBeam). Satellite Quartet was issued in 2020.

In this decade, Novoa’s focus has shifted back to the trio, at least on recordings, all on 577 Records, with the first documentation of this triumvirate with Kamaguchi and Cleaver emerging in 2023. In March of 2024 came Novoa / Gress / Gray Trio, Volume 1 with Drew Gress on bass and modular synth and Devin Gray on drums, followed by Novoa / Carter / Mela Trio, Vol. 1 with Daniel Carter on an array of horns and Francisco Mela on drums and vocals.

Novoa can conjure up some clamor on the keys with an underlying sense of control, but she gets there gradually on Vol. 1, as the conversations value space and an atmosphere of calm that’s appreciated in our current environment. With “Modus Vivendi,” Vol. 2 offers an immediate contrast with an angular variation on a compositional structure that can be traced back to the classic piano trio model.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “Diamond in the rough” doesn’t begin to describe the number of carats this long-lost jazz treasure wields, nor the depths of its humble origins. Originally released in 1982 on the budget Everest label, Jazz Patterns was all-too-carelessly assembled collection of 1970 live recordings from saxophonist Joe Henderson’s Quintet, re-titled to give trumpeter Woody Shaw co-billing to capitalize on his subsequent commercial success.

A few copies were made, sold for under 5 bucks each, and that was that. But, as Skip Heller’s liner notes (which we’ve added) reveal, what this shoddy little package (it didn’t even have the correct song titles for two of the tracks and misspelled the one it got right) actually contained was, get this, previously unreleased performances from the same September 24–26, 1970 stand at The Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach that yielded Henderson’s revered 1970 release If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Problem!

Turns out Milestone label head Orrin Keepnews had turned around and sold these 2-track reference mixes (recorded by Bernie Grundman!) to Everest owner Bernie Solomon, who went ahead and did his usual down-market, take the money and run thing. That’s George Cables on electric piano, Ron McClure on bass, and Lenny White (using a bass drum fashioned from an oil can) on drums, by the way.

We’re reissuing this fantastic post-bop find for the first time ever, complete with the aforementioned liner notes, the correct song titles, and a new remastering job by Kevin Chubirka that sounds about a hundred times better than the original.

The following albums are four recent audiophile vinyl jazz reissues from the Acoustic Sounds Series.

The New Stan Getz Quartet featuring Astrid Gilberto, Getz Au Go Go It’s hard to explain to pop music fans today how much of a phenomenon the Brazilian music craze of the early-to-mid-’60s was at that time. Not even the explosion of The Beatles and the British Invasion could slow down the musical juggernaut.

While there were many people involved in popularizing the sound, perhaps the four most important figures were Brazilian artists Antonio Carlos Jobim, husband and wife Joao and Astrid Gilberto, and American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz. The albums that launched and solidified the popularity of the sound were those that Getz recorded on Verve, that included the Gilbertos and others in various combinations.

These studio albums, particularly Getz/Gilberto, released in 1964, often receive the audiophile treatment, but the live album that was part of the series, Getz Au Go Go, hasn’t until now. It was produced by Creed Taylor and primarily recorded at the long-shuttered and legendary music venue that featured a wide variety of music during its heyday in the 1960s, the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. The tiny club was the perfect venue for the gentle and sultry intimacy of this music.

What makes this album featuring Getz and Astrid Gilberto even more than a live celebration of the bossa nova craze was the addition of the rest of the band, bassist Gene Cherico, drummer Joe Hunt, bassist Chuck Israels, drummer Helcio Milton, and Kenny Burrell on guitar on four tracks. But the real bonus to all those great players was the addition of Gary Burton on vibes. While Antonio Carlos Jobim did sit in with the band during its long run at the club, he is not on the album.

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