Overviews

My recent [2000] recommendation of Sandra Collins's Tranceport 3 CD may have been a mistake.  Oh, I'm still enjoying the disc's cutting edge creativity, but as a result of my positive comments, I've started getting in the mail large packs of CDs full of trance, techno, house, and other assorted genres.

As a rule, my favorite recording is the one I'm listening to at any given moment. But here are a few that entered my collection in the past year [2000] no matter when they might have been issued and spent a lot of time on my turntable or in my CD player. They're listed in no particular order.

Each of this pair of Prestige reissue CDs rescues two LPs from back catalog oblivion.  Creek Bank opens up with ten excellent tracks from Young Man Mose and follows with ten more from the Creek Bank LP.  Mose Allison recorded both for Prestige in 1958.The music on Clark Terry's Mellow Moods CD originally came out in the early '60s as two LPs on Prestige's Moodsville subsidiary.  The first was the unforgettable Everything's Mellow and the second was not so memorable All American.

This [1993] is Vee-Jay Records' fortieth anniversary year, but for nearly half of those years the company has been in fitful hibernation. Internal management disputes, poorly handled expansion, and legal entanglements brought the company to bankruptcy court and liquidation in 1966.

Contradictions and conflicting reactions dogged trumpeter Chet Baker throughout his career. An undervalued and overpublicized jazz musician, he was caught between critics who sniffed at his apparent technical limitations and fans who reacted more to his mystique than to his music.