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	Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington - The Great Summit: The Master Takes
	"High Peak"	2006-05-05
I write this as a Louis Armstrong fan. I respect Duke Ellington, but I haven't heard nearly as much of his output as I have of Louis Armstrong's. My judgment is more about Satchmo's performance here than about Ellington's. I consider this an example of Armstrong showing a musical colleague how much he cares about all music. At this point in Armstrong's career he had committed most of his repertoire to Long-Playing vinyl. It's easy to forget that, in 1961, many of the classic 78s of the jazz era had still not been transferred to LP, and it is easy to forget that such transfers were not necessarily cleaned up for playback. This is my roundabout way of saying that, in re-recording much of his own material, Armstrong, throughout the fifties, was playing music he'd played since the twenties. He and the All-Stars, his small combo founded in the forties, were well attuned to each other and waxed some of the greatest performances of Armstrong's career, live or in the studio. But Armstrong had only been recorded with Ellington very rarely previously. I am not certain, but I think there are literally a couple of songs he and Ellington played live on the air in the late 1930s, and I wouldn't be very surprised if they played once or twice without being recorded at other times. But they'd never really sat down and worked out a set until 1961, when they were both in New York at the same time and had the opportunity. The songs on this album were not songs Armstrong played in his stage shows and he didn't make records of them. But he was not caught short here. He knew this material, either because he learned it for this project or because he'd been listening to this music for years, and he understood it. The marvelous thing is he clearly cared for it. Armstrong sets aside his personality for THE GREAT SUMMIT, or, more to the point, he set aside everybody else's expectations and interprets the lyrics in all their somber beauty. His trumpet is earnest here. His trumpet is always full-bodied, but on this project, Louis Armstrong is not, if you will, playing the showman, but expressing, through his trumpet, the music of another genius. It may be the most giving performance of his career. And that's saying a lot, given that his career is full of high peaks. I sometimes put this CD on when I go to bed at night. It sounds like New York City. There's a breeze, some laughter in the air, and cameraderie. Two musical innovators commenting on what they see, for all to hear.
	John Lennon - Anthology
	"The Secure Lennon"	2003-01-28
John Lennon said in one or two interviews that the best performances the Beatles ever gave went unrecorded. By the same token, the outtakes, rehearsals and demos which make up most of the JOHN LENNON ANTHOLOGY are more to the point than almost any of the official solo recordings released during his lifetime. This four-disc powerhouse set demonstrates what John Lennon could do when he didn't have to polish his work. When he was laying down a rehearsal track or a demo he was singing for himself. The horn-section which drowns the ROCK 'N' ROLL album is not heard on the outtakes of "Bring It On Home To Me" and "Rip It Up." They rock, and that's something the finished ROCK 'N' ROLL album did not. "I'm Losing You," in its rehearsal stage, with guitars and drums tuned to a high temperature, blows away the timorous version which made it onto DOUBLE FANTASY. The JOHN LENNON ANTHOLOGY is not merely better than the so-called finished product; it's more sincere. The best moment might be a live performance of "Imagine" at the Apollo. It's with a guitar instead of a piano and it's in front of an audience Lennon couldn't help but respect. There's not a hint of disappointment in his voice. I think Lennon hated a finished product. In rehearsal he could be boisterous, humorous and impassioned. He could gauge a live audience instantly. He could be himself in rehearsal and he was in command in front of an audience. Because this boxed set is made up of live performances and unvarnished tracks, an unusually relaxed and confident Lennon is revealed.
	George Harrison - Brainwashed
	"The Real Deal"	2002-11-22
This recording is not just a farewell. It's an embrace. A sense of resolution informs every track. Here George is humorous, spiritual, ironic and confident. The songs are not "found" recordings. George was recording them at the end of his life and he wanted his son, Dhani, and his great friend Jeff Lynne to complete the album. I think this is very close to the way he wanted it to turn out. The George trademarks are here: A frolic into tin-pan alley with a cover of Harold Arlen's "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea;" a hint of Monty Python; a dip or two into the blues; and, throughout, spiritualism. The difference between this and the rest of his albums is that he does not overstate anything here. His wit is not forced. His spiritualism is not tortured. His musicianship, as good as ever, is at one with the songs themselves. This album is a gift to the living from a man who was leaving.
	The Thurber Carnival (Modern Library)
	"The Artistic Humorist"	2002-11-01
THE THURBER CARNIVAL is an excellent collection if only because it contains the complete MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES. In the early seventies, when my grandmother gave me a respectful and wonderfully brief biography called THE CLOCKS OF COLUMBUS, I became a THURBER fan. I was in Junior High and Thurber, dead more than ten years already, was enjoying something of a vogue. Most of his books were back in print. Today, we're down to about a third or less of what he wrote. The Library of America's collection looks fairly complete, but THE THURBER CARNIVAL was his own selection of greatest hits, if you will. In both cases I miss the separate volumes from which these stories and cartoons are culled. If there are concept albums, Thurber had concept collections. You don't get the sense of a Beatles album listening to bits from different albums. This is true with Thurber. You need all of LET YOUR MIND ALONE, which you can only get used now. You need all of THE MIDDLE-AGED MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE; his most representative collection. He tried writing a novel once or twice, but found he could only write short stories. This bothered him. The chief thing to remember as you read him is that he was deeply ashamed of being a humorist. His literary hero was Henry James. During Thurber's time at the New Yorker (and he arrived there about a year after its founding, staying until his death more than three decades later) the magazine was a showcase for humorists. Think of the original cast of Saturday Night Live and you'll have something of an idea of the atmosphere at the magazine in its first ten years or so. Competitive humorists travelled from all over the United States to work for THE NEW YORKER. The Algonquin Roundtable was largely a haven for NEW YORKER staffers. James Thurber learned from E. B. White and a few others and then outstripped them. If you read E. B. White's forays into humor, you'll see his clean prose shining, but you won't feel you know him. Thurber, on the other hand, leaves you with the impression that he wishes to God he never left Ohio. There is a sense of loss in Thurber's rhythms. He is as dated as a Studebaker. If you're not willing to put yourself back in time, Thurber's not for you. But, if you notice his pain, you might notice how mightily he strove against it. Thomas Wolfe once met him at a party. Someone said, "This is James Thurber, the New Yorker writer." Wolfe shook his hand and said, "You call those little, tiny things writing?" All Thurber had was his writing. He was a mess otherwise. Even when his writing practically barks its bitter sentiment, Thurber turns a phrase as if he owns it. The actual content of the stories is immaterial. He should be read outloud, because he was essentially a poet.
	John Lennon - Rock 'n' Roll
	"Horns, Horns, Horns!"	2002-10-28
Released in 1975, John Lennon's album, ROCK 'N' ROLL demonstrates that the problem with records from the seventies can be summed up in one word: "Horns." In an effort to make these tracks sound as if recorded in the fifties, Phil Spector turned on the echo machine, making John's vocals indistinct. Then, in an effort to put his trademarked wall-of-sound on the album, he stuck about nine-million horns on it. I have a vinyl copy released in Britain, and it says that four cuts are produced by Phil Spector and John and that the rest is produced only by John. I do notice a difference. "Stand By Me," for example, is not produced with Phil Spector. John's vocal is not given much echo on this song, horns are absent and the instruments played are distinguishable from one another. John produced "Peggy Sue" as well and the sound is clear. John does add horns to some of the other ones he himself produced, and they are overly manic, but at least there's some drive. The tracks Lennon and Spector co-produced ("You Can't Catch Me," "Sweet Little Sixteen," "Bony Moronie" and "Just Because") are distant-sounding. The album cover is great, though; a photograph of John as a teen in the doorway of an old brick building. Other reviewers here have noted that the LENNON ANTHOLOGY has some outtakes from ROCK 'N' ROLL and I agree with them that these sound great. There are no horns on those. If the horns on ROCK 'N' ROLL could be erased, I'd love the sound of most of it. That would be like colorizing a movie, though. It wouldn't be as it was intended. Lennon's a lot like Orson Welles. Both of them have unfinished works which keep cropping up and finished works needing clearing up. But, where does restoration end and tinkering begin? As is, ROCK 'N' ROLL is worthwhile for "Stand By Me," "Peggy Sue" and "Ain't That a Shame." The rest of it is pretty depressing. (Fans take note: Cheap Trick has always said that their version of "Ain't That a Shame" is based on John's version.)
	Why Orwell Matters
	"Why Hitchens Writes"	2002-10-04
Having been encouraged from about the age of twelve to read the essays of George Orwell I read Christopher Hitchens' recent meditation on him with a sense of gratitude. I haven't read any other work on Orwell which so perfectly conveys his inexhaustibility. Hitchens' real achievement here is a mastery of Orwell's tone. Orwell's essays keep a reader up until dawn and WHY ORWELL MATTERS did the same to this reader. I can't say I agree with everything in the book, and have to say that sometimes I didn't grasp Hitchens' arguments. But, the book is brief, and we know what Shakespeare said about brevity. The chief pleasure of this book is its style; learned from one of the greatest defenders of expressed thought.
	The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
	"Three-Dimensional"	2001-04-30
Dorothy Parker once said this about the Marx Brothers: "They've never made a movie as wonderful as they are." So, I'll paraphrase her: "The Beatles never made an album as wonderful as they were." Modern audiences see the Marx Brothers' "A Night at the Opera" and wonder why this movie was so much bigger than their other ones when it was released. By the same token, many wonder why "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was considered for so long, by so many people, the best Beatles album. "The White Album" and "Revolver" seem to speak to the average rock fan more than "Sgt. Pepper" does. I think something has to be said for a band making a mark in its own day. While this album absolutely screams "1967," it is one of the things we notice when looking for 1967. As great as the Beach Boys "Pet Sounds" is, the listener doesn't automatically think, "Aah, 1966," when hearing it. "Sgt. Pepper's" symbolizes the year in which it was recorded. There is also something to be said for packaging. The famous cover photo works extremely well with the music. The listener hears the crowd as the orchestra warms up at the album's opening. This audience laughs at various points on the album. I imagine many listeners associate the crowd shown on the cover with the crowd heard on the album. Because the packaging is as closely tied to the music as it is, "Sgt. Pepper" is an ultimate example of Pop-Art. Why shouldn't it be? Pop-Art was at a peak in 1967. For all the sound effects, it is the work of a band, and, true to the album's title, there is a theme: Loneliness. What could be more lonely than the death of the driver at the beginning of "A Day in the Life?" In "Good Morning, Good Morning," the narrator is being driven mad by his crashingly boring routine. He feels at home not when he has tea and meets the wife but only briefly ("watching the skirts you start to flirt now you feel cool.")The narrator's stuck with a wife and he's not connecting with her. "When I'm Sixty-Four," with its Irving Berlin-style melancholy, does ask a serious question: Is somebody going to be around when I'm old?""Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite" is only partly about the circus. It's mostly about death. It's final notes echo the music played, most famously, by Lon Chaney's phantom. "She's Leaving Home" has three lonely ccharacters (four if you count the faceless "man from the motor trade") with a little horror thrown in. Who is this guy the daughter's fled with? Perhaps the Beatles' least ambiguous of sad lyrics is in this song: "Picks up the letter that's lying there/standing alone at the top of the stair/She breaks down and cries to her husband/'Daddy, our baby's gone.'" That's not saccharine. As hallucinogenic as "Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds" is, it's got a lonely wanderer as well. He's too out of it to respond to the dream he's experiencing. ("Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly.") It's not as happy as we're supposed to think it is at first. Finally (to bring my mostly backwards tour to an end) the song "With a Little Help From My Friends" has what only seems to be a flippant question: "What would you do if I sang out of key, would you stand up and walk out on me?" I think that's essentially the reason most people walk out on other people. It occurs to me that a tone of loneliness runs through most of the Beatles music. On "Sgt. Pepper's" they took that loneliness and dressed it in party-colored confetti. Brush a little of it away and you'll see the lonely hearts.
	The Beatles - The Beatles (The White Album)
	"Sides 1 and 2 = A Side;Sides 3 and 4 = B Side"	2001-04-24
Paul McCartney has said somewhere that the last few songs on any given album tend to be a little weaker than those which open the album. Given that the Beatles came from the age of the LP, when emphasis was given to Side One of something which had to be flipped on its back in order to be heard in its entirety,it makes sense that the first disc of the only double-LP they made while still a group is more concentrated than the second disc. George Harrison says he thinks of it as two distinct albums. My theory is that it's like a giant 45. The A-side is meant to be the hit; the B-side is more obscure. Sides One and Two of "The Beatles" have a punch which means business; Sides Three and Four are loose. Lennon once called it "Son of Sgt. Pepper." It's the one recording the Beatles did which reached further than they'd intended. Nobody is indifferent to this one.
	Barabbas (Vintage International)
	"A Naturalistic Novel"	2001-04-05
While this novel delivers, as the title suggests, the story of the convict in the New Testament who is freed instead of Jesus, it is unlike most novels set in biblical times. The author has no interest in dazzling us with detail. It is a short novel and an understated one. Written just after World War Two, it is clearly about modern man, but the author doesn't trumpet this. Because it's so uncluttered, it sticks in your mind. It's an archetypal example of naturalism. A cinematic equivalent would be Ingmar Bergmann's THE SEVENTH SEAL.
	Ireland: A Concise History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day
	"A Clear Portrait of Irish History"	2001-03-18
This is an eminently readable, informative history of Ireland from the twelfth century up to the late 1970's. Unlike many histories, it is not a list of statistics. Nor is it an appeal to our sensibilities. It is swift, yet comprehensive.