“Was there ever a more paradoxical band than the Minutemen? Comprising Dennes D. Boon, Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley, all natives of working class seaport San Pedro.
Forever jocular and unpretentious to a fault, the Minutemen were alt-rock's blue-collar, union heavies of the 80s underground while also profoundly avant-garde. This was the age of Reagan, ripe for tearing apart and kicking the crap out of, but rather than get lost in a verbal revolt and a street riot, the Minutemen made their own...

This 1976 release is one of Joni’s very greatest of great works. She’s in her full exploratory period here, using jazz influences and crazy tunings and a relatively small number of musicians, all of whom turn in stunning, restrained performances which are perfectly subservient to the needs of the songs. Even Jaco Pastorious, one of the most tragically talented musicians ever, and who never met a performance need that he couldn’t over-play on, is simply perfect on here.

“Joni Mitchell's Hejira is...

“Throughout the 70s, Joni Mitchell established herself as one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time, with albums such as Blue, Court And Spark and The Hissing Of Summer Lawns pushing the boundaries of what was expected of the “singer-songwriter”.
Moving to a new label, Geffen, at the start of the 80s, and embarking on yet more wide-ranging excursions that took in the burgeoning synth-pop sound, Mitchell staged the Refuge tour of 1983, in support of her then latest album, Wild Things Run...

I stumbled on this one by chance and it’s strange and strangely alluring! Alexander Hawkins and Evan Parker appear here, among a number of others. Sparse, but also nicely orchestrated. Recommended.

“A meandering blend of bucolic folk, experimental jazz, and psych-tinged indie rock, Modern Nature is a project led by British musician Jack Cooper. They made a strong critical impression with their 2019 debut How to Live, which introduced the amorphous musical style that has become their calling card..

The good: This presents Monk and his post Coltrane quartet of Charlie Rouse, Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Roy Haynes in a performance from the Five Spot in 1958, several years before he was so well documented. Additionally, you get to hear Baroness Nica's voice introducing him.

The bad: These recordings were made with a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, utilizing a single microphone. There is background noise and table chatter. It's all audible, but hardly 'hi-fi'.

Thelonious Monk-piano
Ray Copeland-trumpet
Clark Terry-trumpet
Jimmy Cleveland-trombone
Phil Woods-alto sax
Charlie Rouse-tenor sax
Johnny Griffin-tenor sax
Larry Gales-bass
Ben Riley-drums

This excellent recording of a show from 11/3/67 has been released a zillion ways, but it’s a very rare chance to hear Monk with a larger group in front of an audience.

“Pianist/composer Thelonious Monk led a quartet throughout the 1960s but on a European tour in

“Thelonious Monk (piano/arranger) began his illustrious relationship with Riverside Records on the pair of July 21 and 27, 1955, dates needed to complete the eight sides for Plays Duke Ellington (1955).
Monk commands a trio that also presents the talents of Oscar Pettiford (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums) on all the tracks sans "Solitude," which appropriately enough features an unaccompanied piano. The delicacy and inherently intricate melodies that Duke Ellington is best known for are perfectly....

This is the demo tape from late 1965 that got them their Polydor contract and led to their early 1966 album, as well as including their 1964 pre-Monks single.
It’s a little less primal and unhinged, but it’s also six months earlier! It’s still shocking to believe that anything even remotely like this existed in 1965
The Monks were a crazy, pre-punk reductionist rock band made up of five US soldiers stationed in Germany, who stayed in Germany after their discharge from the service and who...

“The best-realized of their classic albums, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour was also the last of the group's albums for almost a decade to be done under reasonably happy and satisfying circumstances -- for the last time with this lineup, they went into the studio with a reasonably full song bag and a lot of ambition and brought both as far as time would allow, across close to four months (interrupted by a tour of the United States right in the middle). Virtually everywhere you listen on this record, the...

Moondog was a mostly self-taught blind composer who was a fixture on streetcorners in Manhattan from the 1940's through the early 1970's, playing his compositions for whatever passersby would give him and also selling printed music. He befriended Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman among others, and my wife remembers cutting out of high school, hitch-hiking to NYC and seeing him on the street corner.
He belongs to that rare and wonderful American maverick composer school that produced Charles Ives and...

Released in 1984, this was the final recording the made as "A. More / Anthony More" (and his last solo album), this was his last 'indie rock' release of the late 70s/early 80s.
Moore was a classical composer, doing very avant garde/minimal music ala John Cage, etc in the very early 1970s, and then somehow he fell into the sphere of Faust and Peter Blegvad and Dagmar Krause, and formed Slapp Happy with Krause and Blegvad and collaborated with all of them. Then onto Henry Cow, then onto a solo career...

Take a bunch of old, traditional English ballads, a young man who loves them but also loves electronica and this is what you get. Not for traditionalists, but then again, neither was Fairport Convention...until one day it was! Conditionally recommended!

"This is just folk music from the point of view of someone that has heard hip-hop and The Smiths and Radiohead and S-Club"-Jim Moray

"This the lowdown on Moray: the man is only 21 and has un undying love for old, traditional English folk...

"A mistaken but widely-held view of Japanese music is that it consists of two completely separate and non-communicating areas: on one hand the disposable J-pop music scene based on Western models, on the other the traditional classical music world with...

“With the brilliant 'Tupelo Honey' due for release the following month, Van Morrison performed this remarkable set in San Francisco on September 5th 1971 for broadcast on KSAN-FM. Featuring a crack band, it finds him playing a variety of gems, including material from 'Astral Weeks', 'Moondance' and 'His Band & The Street Choir' as well as classic covers. A stunning overview of his solo career to date, this remastered concert is presented here in a six panel digipak together with 8 page booklet containing...

Mick Avery (piano)
Quentin Bryar (saxophone)
John Grimaldi (guitar)
Mark Pasterfield (drums, percussion)
Ian Wilson (vocals, flute)

As it says below, this is NOT a great recording, but it isn’t SO bad. The music can easily be heard through the low/mid-fi murk.

“Darkly gnarled King Crimson style intensity issued in 1973 in 99 copies, the original recording was made by hanging a microphone with string from the ceiling, and is thus gorgeously terribly lo-fi, but those poo

Mountain was a New York trio of hard rockers who formed during the first generation of proto-metal and featured a dense, blues-based sound mixed with more classical and progressive elements. The group was Leslie West (guitar & vocals), Felix Pappalardi (bass & vocals - who, although he was a musician first, had made his name as the producer of Cream) and Corky Laing (drums).

"Following the success of Climbing! and appearances at Woodstock and other outdoor festivals of the day, Mountain recorded...

“The content of this 75 minute CD covers live performances by Muddy at Montreux across five years, from 1972 to 1977. He's in powerful voice and he and his band are in superb form across all of it -- and the recording quality is absolutely killer. There's no shortage of live Muddy Waters out there, especially from late in his career, but this one stands out among them all.”-Bruce Eder

“Gerry Mulligan was and is – because of his immortal recordings - a one-of-a-kind musician. Just try to hold a baritone saxophone, not even try to blow a tune in one, and you'll appreciate the effort that supposes playing one for an even short period of time. In this live recording you can hear the baritone saxophone the way this extraordinary virtuoso consistently made it sound: from sultry mellow to top-of-its-register staccatos; and always swinging!
Surrounded by master musicians like Clark Terry..

Maurizio Opalio-cosmic guitar, mini xylophone, meteor percussion and Roberto Opalio-astral guitar, piano, extraterrestrial electronics, harmonica, planetary percussion, voice.

“Each album or performance by My Cat Is An Alien is an invitation to leave on a cosmic journey, without resorting to the numerous clichés of the space music genre. Think instead of a synth-less Ash Ra Tempel coming across the quiet improvisation current. Think of stripped-down music made of looped droning guitars, caressed...

If creating an unmistakable group sound is the ultimate goal of a jazz ensemble, the Spanish trio Naima is well on its way to securing a spot as one of the leading combos on the contemporary European scene. Featuring Enrique Ruiz on piano and synths, Luis Torregrosa on drums, and Rafael Ramos Sania on double bass, the Valencia-based electro-acoustic band has honed a dramatic, darkly romantic sound marked by astringent textures, arresting melodies, and tightly coiled rhythms....

Lelo was the keyboardist for Grupo Um, a very good Brasilian fusion band and he also has played with Hermeto Pascoal. This is his fifth album and features typically enticing Brazilian-style jazz-rock fusion mixed with Afro-Brazilian forms and rhythms. This features "special performances by guest artists Felipe Ávila (Sexo dos Anjos, Percussônica) and Teco Cardoso (Pé Ante Pé, Pau Brasil)."

"This is the 13th release from Australian maverick trio The Necks, now approaching their 20th Anniversary, and still occupying a genre-group of one. Their slow, gripping, development of a single idea over the length of a whole CD, while somehow obvious, has proved un-copyable, mostly because it so much depends on the unique musical personalities and extreme virtuosity of these three, profoundly different, musicians.
Having established their theme, The Necks, with Chemist, break the habit of a...

Anders Hallberg (vocals)
Magnus Könberg (drums)
Johan Luyckx (electric guitar)
Markus Mannberg (bass guitar)
Ana Marega (vocals, theremin)
Tobias Petterson (electric guitar)

Very amusingly named Swedish psych band featuring personnel from Agus and Yuri Gargarin!

"Imagine Charles Manson and Anton LaVey teaming up with a band of fake Hare Krishna cult members speeding towards Kathmandu in a run down VW bus along the dusty Hippie Trail in 1966. That may give you the

Larry Coryell (guitars), Pete Jacobsen (keyboards), Ted Emmett (trumpet), Steve Clarke (drums), Wolfgang Schmidt, Chris Lawrence, Laurence Cottle, Jack Bruce (bass)

"The New Alchemy is all about Swedish artists Per Svensson and Ebbot Lundberg making dark, intricate, swirling rock psychedelia. Ebbot Lundberg and Per Svensson had started their careers as artists at the legendary Radium 226.05 in Gothenburg during the swinging 1980s. Per was releasing sound art and poetry and Ebbot was the lead singer of Union Carbide Productions at that time. During the following decades, both guys have been developing their art; Per continuing on as a solo artist and Ebbot as....