MidwestRecord.com

AROGOLE/OBLIOSOUND
AYELET ROSE GOTTLEIB/Upto Here-From Here: Jazz vocalist that comes across like a later day Annie Ross by way of Rickie Lee Jones, delivering a load of hipsterisms and cool sounds, surrounds herself with some cool downtown cats that are into the neo-hipster vibe with equal aplomb. College kids, left of center tastes and free thinkers will gravitate to the well played proceedings here as cleverness abounds on all levels. Certainly fun stuff if you know how to not take jazz so seriously all the time.
70026

COLLECTORS CHOICE (www.ccmusic.com)
MOREY AMSTERDAM/The Next One Will Kill You: Henny Youngman was the king of the one liners, but Amsterdam was the human joke machine. This set was recorded during the golden age of the roll off project, when he was riding high playing Buddy on Dick Van Dyke. Basically, doing all the schtick he was doing in the Borscht Belt, when being a triple threat as an entertainer was required instead of something to be marveled at, even if you were a short funny looking guy that talked just this side of Buddy Hackett, this humor and tummling was in high fashion at the time, and it’s still a lot of fun today. Doing more of a family act than a blue act, the material holds up in a way that basic cable would admire today. Fun stuff for people looking for fun, not just old school style.
20122

CHER/3614 Jackson Highway: Not everybody is a Cher fan. In fact, if you’re not, you still like the disco album she made in the late 70’s where the cover shot has her pretty much naked and in chains and this little number that didn’t take her to other of her commercial heights but might well we the best album of her career. Recorded in Muscle Shoals just at the crest of it being clear there was something in the water there that made hit records a natch, hot on the heels of the Atlantic production teams victory with a different crew on “Dusty in Memphis”, this set might have played against all the prevailing commercial instincts at the time, but it’s one of the stone cold killer of that or any age. The Armenian got her southern country/soul groove on like you wouldn’t believe. If you don’t know about this album yet, it belongs in any well rounded, contemporary collection. Hot stuff.
20242

NED DOHENY: An L.A. trust fund baby that was one of the first signings to the then new Asylum Records, he already had rock cred under his belt writing hits for Dave Mason and hitting other high water marks, but this classic L.A. singer/songwriter set stalled out of the gate even with everything it had going for it on both sides of the glass. A dandy set that deserved to be rescued from obscurity, the early 70s L.A. pop will probably never fade away and some of it’s elements like this should be rediscovered.
20112

FREE ELECTRIC SOUND
MORGLBL/Jazz for the Deaf: So, if you’re a listener of a certain age, you didn’t dig it so much when Zappa careened off into his jazz excursions, but you dug the work of jazzbos that spun out of Roxy Music and Crimson. This French jazz/metal trio is like a collision of all three. Young thinkers, they know how to make noise for college kids that don’t really like noize but want something high minded AND irritating. This isn’t really irritating so much as it is an acquired taste. Not really meth freak buzz saw or anywhere close to it, this is mainly a Euro take on 70s Zappa jazz. They know their stuff and this is a natch for the young and open minded, as well as open eared.
4009

PEAK
JESSY J/True Love: Man, if this was ten years ago, J would have knocked off all the wannabes that were being groomed to take a shot at Diana Krall, and once she did that, we might have had one hell of a Texas smooth jazz death match as the piano and the sax carried out a fight to the finish. So it goes. Now all we have is Candy Dulfer looking over her shoulder and Mindi Abair thinking twice. But we also have some deliciously great jazz from a comer with that once in a decade got it all on the ball togetherness. A little smooth, a little world and all good vibes, J is the package. A solid set from start to finish, we get to enjoy this for a full month before you do. And we will! It might be mass market jazz, but with a practitioner like this behind it, it’s good to shake off that egg head vibe.

POSI-TONE
SEAN NOWELL/The Seeker: The Coltrane comparisons are a natch, but this Alabama boy plays a solid New York flavored sax and knows how to throw a burner right down the middle even when he’s leaning to the left. Simply a solid date for any jazzbo with a taste for classic sounding New York honking sax that’s here for the party. Certainly not a wine and cheese kind of player, Nowell hits hard, often and right on target. High octane stuff throughout.
8049

SUNNY PARK
MANOOGHI HI: Ok, we love nutty records. Britney Spears, Shakira et al are more fun to look at than they are to listen to for the most part. This record offers us a cure. A young hottie that’s doing alright for herself on the Mumbai indy scene migrates to Seattle for some new input. Like all soulful musical migrations of the past, the migrant might bring their own baggage with them but they don’t know the rules of where they are landing, so they don’t worry about them too much. Mehnaz and her new grunge pals don’t know any rules and offer a crazy multi culti gumbo that you’ve heard stuff like, you’ve heard stuff that aspires to this, but you’ve never heard this. The kind of stuff that suburban moms will steal from their college kid daughters to play at their yoga classes, this trippy set goes way beyond off beat world excursions suburban moms listen to in their secret lives to a place where the mixmaster just sucks you in. Nutty world beat based something that you have to hear to believe. Wonderful and totally out there.

VOICEPRINT
THEO TRAVIS/Double Talk: This dude’s prog chops and cred are impeccable, so if you are of that bent and pissed there’s nothing new under the sun to crank up and get lost in, bitch no more. A sax man, he plays in that divide where jazz and rock have an armistice and patrol each others borders looking for clues to pick up on. Straight ahead jazz as filtered through the soft machine, even his old pal Robert Fripp shows up to bang a Gong with him. Subtle yet powerful head music, as opposed to sitting down jazz, depending on your age, this will either take you back or bring you there for the first time. Killer stuff from the artistic side of the ledger.
457

Volume 32/Number 238
June 26, 2009
MIDWEST RECORD
830 W. Route 22 #144
Lake Zurich, IL., 60047
CHRIS SPECTOR, Editor and Publisher
©2009 Midwest Record

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