It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five… more »
There's really no debating that 2007 will be remembered, first and foremost, as the year Radiohead gleefully suicide-bombed those last stubborn fragments of the old music industry and swept the smoldering remnants into the new millennium. That story has already been told several thousand times over, though, so let's instead turn our attention to its polar opposite: Daptone Records, a tiny time-capsule studio and label in Brooklyn which channels the decades-gone glory days of R&B… more »
The Ponderosa Stomp, which is organized essentially by record collectors and takes place in New Orleans mid-week between the two Jazzfest weekends, is an eMusic.com kind of event. It's a two-night, marathon (6 PM to 4 AM) celebration of the unsung heroes and one-hit wonders of American music, including early rock 'n'roll, rockabilly, swamp pop, blues, soul, funk and garage bands. Needless to say, many of them record for independent labels. So many, in fact,… more »
This is not a bad start, at least as far as single-disc representations of Isaac Hayes’ Stax years are considered. The Very Best of Isaac Hayes contains many of the necessities — his reinventions of “Walk on By,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and “Never Can Say Goodbye,” alongside originals like “Theme from Shaft,” “Do Your Thing,” and “Joy, Pt. 1″ — but since it contains a total of 18 tracks, there’s no room left for the original full-length album versions, so you get the single edits. Ultimate Isaac Hayes: Can You Dig It?, a two-disc/one-DVD set released in 2005 by Stax, is easier to recommend because it is more expansive, allowing enough room for all 12 minutes of “Walk on By” and a few essential cuts that couldn’t fit here — such as “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” and “I Stand Accused.” – Andy Kellman