|
|||
JAZZ PROMO SERVICES
MARCUS GOLDHABER/Take Me Anywhere: If you’re going to set yourself up as being the tradition of Frank Sinatra, et al, you better be able to deliver the goods or suffer the slings and arrows. There’s only going to be one Chairman ever, but there’s always room for more Tony Bennetts. Goldhaber has the passion and the smarts to pick the right songs from the era to grab the gold ring. As good as it gets from a young ‘un of today, he does the Sinatra style without killing it with wannabe moves. He’s his own man, he’s got his own sound and there’s no shame in trying to pattern yourself after the best. Contemporary jazz vocal fans have a new rallying point with this cat.
(Fallen Apple)
KARI ON PRODUCTIONS
LUA HADAR: A sexy lady from New York that swings it internationally like she’s really a foreigner trying to cut through here. It’s a high octane release in a different way. It’s loaded with energy but not that driving, in your face, recent kind of stuff that blows you away because you never get a chance to catch your breath. Hadar confounds turning familiar faves like “All I Want” or “Under Paris Skies” into something new and unexpected making them up close and personal. The musical moves on display here are the ones you want to encounter at an up market piano bar that has a real entertainment policy. A special, spunky date that adult tastes will crave.
1931 (Bellalua)
MUNICH
AMINA FIGAROVA/Above the Clouds: A lot of new jazz is drawing it’s inspiration from the classic Blue Note/Verve axis. Figarova has learned her Blue Note lessons well, but the mannered moves of Creed Taylor as lost on her and she pulls the rest of her inspiration from the freer fields of Prestige and the stuff coming out on RCA when it looked like no one was looking. Funky and flavorful, this is a throwback the Rudy Van Gelder New Jersey vision of west coast cool that your parents were into, and you grooved to, but it seemed like none of the rest of the dopes in your suburb were hip to. A contemporary post card from a distant time zone, jazzbos will have a gasser here.
503
TWO FOR THE SHOW MEDIA
ASAF SIRKIS TRIO/The Monk: An ex-patriot Israeli drummer that has found the equivalent of Billyberg in London unleashes his progressive jazz assault with stops along the way in fusion from the jazz side in and from the rock side in as well as interspersing a few delicate moments. Certainly a knowledgeable cat that has left his mark with a lot of first call and front line acts, this is a veritable throwback to the early Billy Cobham solo sets that first opened your ears to the possibilities that lie ahead in drummer led crews. Tasty.
9015 (Sam)
DVD SUPPLEMENT
MGM HOME VIDEO
THE FIRST BATCH OF JAMES BOND IN BLU RAY: Dr. No (111669); From Russia With Love (111673); Thunderball (111677); Live and Let Die 9111675); For Your Eyes Only (111671); Die Another Day (111667): Ok, let’s come clean, when you first started watching the really old Bond pics, were you asking who in hell Felix Leiter was and why he was different in each episode. Ah, the vagarities of the cold war era! Dr. No is so old that Sean Connery doesn’t’ even look like anything we know him to look like. Even Jane Seymour doesn’t look anything like she did in the 70’s. These are just wonderful time capsules. Apparently coming at us in groups of 6 to a release, we now have the migration of Bond from VHS to DVD to Blu Ray. For those of us that joined the series already in progress, taking it back to the beginning was a startling moment. The suave 007 of the early 60s just didn’t cut it with 80s sensibilities. Sure, the pics were still loaded with babes, gadgets and exotic locations, as well as villains that set the standard for baddies to come like Dr. Evil, but, damn, did those puppies look like some cheap ass shit. When your source material is sub par, it’s hard to come from behind. Of course, with modern technology, we can finally get rid of that pane of glass that separated Indiana Jones from the snakes in his first outing, so what can’t be made better these days with a nip and tuck? Ursula Andress’ white bikini really pops nicely in 1080 dpi and the rest of the restoration follows suit. There’s plenty of on board extras for the real Bond geek which should help to keep AICN readers off the street unless they have portable Blu Ray players. Betcha technological reasons are driving the order these pics are re-released in . Blu Ray and Bond are a nice match up as anything that was washed out in past releases is now fully washed back in and the tech improvements really go a long way toward making these more enjoyable to watch, ala “The Godfather” restoration. At the end of the day, these are something delightfully consistent in an inconsistent world and they really set the standard for escapist entertainment in a world that really was a world away from where we are now. As we look at things in their third home incarnation, we still have to say that this is a series where you have to collect them all once you get started. Now go get shaken, not stirred.
SHOUT! FACTORY
MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 20TH Anniversary Edition: Admit it, when you first stumbled across this show on the tube, you wondered how these stoners got the job and you didn’t. You and your pals talk back to the crummy pics on the set. Were these guys really that much funnier than you and your posse? Ah, life just ain’t fair. But after powering up another doob, you just sat back and enjoyed the fun. Your parents were probably right about you, but who cares? Four new slabs of slacker fun, complete with footage from the 2008 SD Comic-con reunion (women can leave the room now–if they can find their way through the smoke). A wildly over ground underground phenomenon, MST3K has the kind of loyalty you can only find in the Three Stooges or The Big Lebowski. Where else can you find 4 stupid pics that turn themselves over to slackadelic fun? Fans, start your engines.
11072
Volume 31/Number 352
October 17, 2008
MIDWEST RECORD
830 W. Route 22 #144
Lake Zurich, IL., 60047
CHRIS SPECTOR, Editor and Publisher
©2008 Midwest Record
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI