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SACD

Barry Manilow – A Christmas Gift Of Love (2002) [SACD / Columbia – CS 86976]

adminJuly 16, 2025 102 Views

Title: Barry Manilow – A Christmas Gift Of Love (2002)
Genre: Pop
Format: MCH SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Barry Manilow’s second seasonal collection, following 1990’s Because It’s Christmas, was released on Columbia Records, but that label berth appears to be a one-off for the singer, who followed his long tenure at Arista by signing to the jazz independent Concord for his last album, 2001’s Here at the Mayflower. Maybe Columbia offered a bigger budget, since Manilow is awash in strings on a set of holiday standards. Those strings are arranged festively, and Manilow is in an appropriately festive mood, really throwing himself into the proceedings; it’s his enthusiasm that makes this Christmas album a winner. There are songs actually written as Christmas carols, such as “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” but Manilow also expands the usual repertoire to take in a number of tunes that have become associated with the holiday season over the years, even if they were not intended to be originally, notably Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music and Joni Mitchell’s melancholy “River” from her Blue album, which is certainly set at Christmas time even if it doesn’t share the usual holiday sentiments. Inevitably, Manilow ends with his own new Christmas original, “A Gift of Love,” which is a good song even if it isn’t likely to join the ranks of the perennial copyrights. This is an enjoyable Christmas album in a traditional pop style likely to please both Manilow fans and others.

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2 min read

SACD

Barry Harris Trio – The Last Time I Saw Paris (2001) [Japan 2016] [SACD / Venus Records – VHGD-00133]

adminJuly 16, 2025 56 Views

Title: Barry Harris Trio – The Last Time I Saw Paris (2001) [Japan 2016]
Genre: Jazz
Format: SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

One of the major bop pianists of the last half of the 20th century, Barry Harris has long had the ability to sound very close to Bud Powell, yet he can also do convincing impressions of Thelonious Monk and has his own style within the bop idiom. He was an important part of the Detroit jazz scene of the 1950s, and has been a jazz educator since that era. Harris recorded his first set as a leader while in 1958, and moved to New York in 1960, where he spent a short period with Cannonball Adderley’s Quintet. He also recorded with Dexter Gordon, Illinois Jacquet, Yusef Lateef, and Hank Mobley, and was with Coleman Hawkins off and on throughout the decade (including Hawk’s declining years). In the 1970s, Harris was on two of Sonny Stitt’s finest records (Tune Up and Constellation), and made many recordings in a variety of settings for Xanadu. Barry Harris has mostly worked with his trio since the mid-’70s, and he has recorded as a leader for Argo (1958), Riverside, Prestige, MPS, Xanadu, and Red. This album have been recorded in 2000 for Japanese Venus Records.

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2 min read

SACD

Barney Wilen Quintet – Passione (1995) [Japan 2015] [SACD / Venus Records – VHGD-78]

adminJuly 16, 2025 52 Views

Title: Barney Wilen Quintet – Passione (1995) [Japan 2015]
Genre: Jazz
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

French saxophonist Barney Wilen is one of the most renowned European jazz musicians. Wilen performed with Miles Davis in 1957 on the Ascenseur pour l’echafaud soundtrack. He has also worked with Kenny Clarke and Thelonious Monk on other film soundtracks. During the last ten or so years of his life, Wilen has a career resurgence thanks in part to his releases on Venus Records. Passione, recorded in June 1995, was Wilen’s last recording as he passed away the following year at age 59. Not showing any indication of his illness, Passione displays Wilen in top form, sounding at ease, inspired, and powerful. One of Italy’s most well-known jazz musicians, trumpeter Enrico Rava, joins Wilen to create a very appealing front line.

Wilen is supported by a highly competent rhythm section. The quintet cheerfully swings on “Jitterbug Waltz” and Gerry Mulligan’s “Line for Lyons,” and displays strong emotion on the gorgeous “Estate” and the title track. The eclectic program also includes Latin and Italian songs. This exceptional album effectively captured Wilen’s final creative spark.

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1 min read

SACD

Barney Wilen Quartet – Le Ca: New York Romance (1994) [Japan 2000] [SACD / Venus Records – TKGV-1]

adminJuly 16, 2025 50 Views

Title: Barney Wilen Quartet – Le Ca: New York Romance (1994) [Japan 2000]
Genre: Jazz
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Barney Wilen had a style that wasn’t like anyone else. On this album he exhibits a cool smokey tone and plays these tunes straight ahead. For example, on Mack the Knife, there is no attitude of fake hipness to get in the way of the melody. It doesn’t sound like cliched versions of a 50’s hipster or someone trying too hard to make something new out of it.

Alternating between soprano, tenor and baritone saxes in this collection of straight-ahead jazz for the Japanese market, Barney Wilen refuses to be pinned down to a single tone quality or approach, even on the same instrument. Among other things, he mimics the lagging phrasing of Lady Day on “You’ve Changed” on soprano, “Blues Walk” bumps along agreeably on baritone while “Old Devil Moon” is sustained and humorous, and “Mack the Knife” is converted into a glacial smoky ballad with almost casual nonchalance. Throughout, Kenny Barron gets acres of well-turned solo space – it’s practically his gig, too – and Ira Coleman (bass) and Lewis Nash (drums) provide crisp underpinning. The further one goes in this collection, the more interesting and less predictable it sounds.

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2 min read

SACD

Barney Wilen – Inside Nitty = Gritty (1993) [Japan 2016] [SACD / Venus Records – VHGD-147]

adminJuly 16, 2025 37 Views

Title: Barney Wilen – Inside Nitty = Gritty (1993) [Japan 2016]
Genre: Jazz
Format: SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Barney Wilen says he was convinced to become a musician by his mother’s friend, the poet Blaise Cendrars. As a teenager he started a youth jazz club in Nice, where he played often. He moved to Paris in the mid-’50s and worked with such American musicians as Bud Powell, Benny Golson, Miles Davis, and J.J. Johnson at the Club St. Germain. His emerging reputation received a boost in 1957 when he played with Davis on the soundtrack to the Louis Malle film “Lift to the Scaffold.” Two years later, he performed with Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk on the soundtrack to Roger Vadim’s “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” (1960). Wilen began working in a rock-influenced style during the ’60s, recording an album titled Dear Professor Leary in 1968. This release have been recorded in France for Japanese Venus Records.

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1 min read

SACD

Barney Kessel – Supreme Jazz (2006) [SACD / Supreme Jazz – 223263-207]

adminJuly 16, 2025 58 Views

Title: Barney Kessel – Supreme Jazz (2006)
Genre: Jazz
Format: MCH SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

One of the finest guitarists to emerge after the death of Charlie Christian, Barney Kessel was a reliable bop soloist throughout his career. He played with a big band fronted by Chico Marx (1943), was fortunate enough to appear in the classic jazz short Jammin’ the Blues (1944), and then worked with the big bands of Charlie Barnet (1944-1945) and Artie Shaw (1945); he also recorded with Shaw’s Gramercy Five. Kessel became a busy studio musician in Los Angeles, but was always in demand for jazz records. From the mid-40s until the early 90s he was one of the most in-demand guitarists in jazz.

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1 min read

SACD

Barbra Streisand – The Movie Album (2003) [SACD / Columbia – CH 90748]

adminJuly 16, 2025 63 Views

Title: Barbra Streisand – The Movie Album (2003)
Genre: Pop
Format: MCH SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

It’s a given that Barbra Streisand loves being a movie star. But this collection of pop songs culled from 60+ years of Hollywood history displays a love and understanding of movie songcraft whose depth is surprising, even coming from the legendary diva.

The idea of Barbra Streisand making an album of movie songs is a no-brainer; as annotators Jay Landers and Richard Jay-Alexander point out, she has already recorded over 50 songs written for motion pictures on her 59 previous albums. In fact, the only real challenge may be a marketing one for Columbia Records, since potential customers simply may assume this is a compilation of some of her previous performances. It is not. Rather, it is a newly recorded collection of songs chosen and arranged in Streisand’s inimitable style. In keeping with the movie theme, she has thought big, using a 75-piece orchestra of the kind usually only found on a studio back-lot for a soundtrack. But all that firepower is used for support, not for its own sake. The key word here is “lush,” not lavish. Streisand’s immediately identifiable voice floats over the music, never challenged by it, so she is able to achieve her usual close-up, detailed performance, alternately intimate and expansive. At 61, she retains remarkable purity and range in her voice, though she is less interested in demanding effects. This is a smooth, conversational vocal album. Streisand’s song collection is characteristic of her. As usual, she isn’t much interested in the Great American Songbook of the interwar period. Only two songs, 1935’s “I’m in the Mood for Love” and 1936’s “Smile,” date from before her birth, with most songs coming from the ’50s and ’60s. And, as usual, the songs as written sometimes don’t satisfy her, so she has prevailed on the composers to change them. Johnny Mandel willingly wrote a new verse to her specifications for “Emily,” and Bob Telson did the same for the obscure “Calling You” from Bagdad Café. Streisand’s age is reflected in her choices, too. She frequently goes for lyrics about mature love such as “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” and “The Second Time Around,” and she sounds more convincing singing them, giving the words more emphasis than she does, for instance, when she just tosses off the line “You’re life itself!” in “Wild Is the Wind.” As she herself notes, “You’re Gonna Hear from Me,” which closes the album, is reminiscent of the assertive songs she sang in her youth, such as “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” and that makes it all the more notable that she sings it in such a mellow way, as a fond memory rather than an upstart declaration. It makes a fitting closer. If The Movie Album is not the sort of revelation that Streisand’s 1985 masterpiece, The Broadway Album, was, it nevertheless gives the listener some superior new takes on standards the singer has not addressed previously and uncovers a gem or two that had been overlooked till now.

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3 min read

SACD

Barb Jungr – Waterloo Sunset (2003) [Reissue 2005] [SACD / Linn Records – AKD 222]

adminJuly 14, 2025 79 Views

Title: Barb Jungr – Waterloo Sunset (2003) [Reissue 2005]
Genre: Jazz
Format: MCH SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

Barb Jungr expresses her passionate artistry with this new collection of classic and original material. With the most original voice since Nina Simone or Edith Piaf, Barb carves a unique path through many genres of popular music. This “world-class female vocalist” (Daily Telegraph) has written three original songs for her new album. ‘Do You Play Guitar’, the album’s elegaic opening track, ‘Written Down In The Dark Again’, a disturbing exploration of sex, and ‘Lipstick Lips Lament’, a wonderful evocation of classic American song-writing.

With her previous three albums, Barb Jungr had already proved herself one of Britain’s most engrossing cabaret singers and one of the most adroit song interpreters in modern vocal pop, and Waterloo Sunset does nothing to alter or diminish that assessment. It does feel like a small step backward in terms of content after the all-Bob Dylan program of Every Grain of Sand, but it is certainly not a step down in quality and intelligence of performance. In fact, it is a return to the interpretive eclecticism of Bare, with its dramatic overhauls of pop tunes (in effect, similar to her contemporary Cassandra Wilson, if not in style) by the Everly Brothers, Leon Russell, and Richard Thompson (a masterful, almost art song “The Great Valerio”), among others, intermingled with a few of Jungr’s own delightful originals. It might even be thought of as a dressed-up version of that album, nowhere more evident than in the Ray Davies-penned title tune. The stripped-down take from Bare is damaged, lonely, movingly reflective; the reimagined version of “Waterloo Sunset” is wistful, sure, but also bluesy, impregnable, rounding the corner toward sanguinity. That this Brit Invasion song sounds perfectly fluent and fluid coming after the Tin Pan Alley jazz chestnut “Laugh Clowns Laugh” says much about the caliber of the writing, of course, but also about how Jungr is able to locate and explore the je ne sais quoi of a composition, what is both ageless and new, unknown, what connects even as it perplexes. The album sustains this inquisitive mood, plowing into emotions that lurk beneath façades, like the enigmatic clowns and jesters that dance through the lyrics, and finally bubbling over on the marvelous concluding rehabilitation of Steve Miller’s “The Joker,” in which a crass come-on is transformed into an effusive flirtation. It’s something to behold. Jungr had not quite gotten Mr. Zimmerman out of her blood either, so fans of Every Grain of Sand have a couple more Dylan treats in store with versions of the classic “Like a Rolling Stone” and the more recent Love and Theft track “High Water (For Charley Patton).” Calum Malcolm again produces beautifully, employing a carnival of colors and textures; the entirely new backing band is crackerjack throughout, breezing through music hall, cocktail jazz, bossa nova, and Western swing with the equal panache.

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3 min read

SACD

Barb Jungr – Walking In The Sun (2006) [SACD / Linn Records – AKD 283]

adminJuly 14, 2025 89 Views

Title: Barb Jungr – Walking In The Sun (2006)
Genre: Jazz
Format: MCH SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

“Walking in the Sun” heralds a new direction for one of Europe’s finest voices. Drawing on influences from a wide range of musical traditions, including gospel and the blues, the album also includes some exciting new self-penned material. Music lovers will appreciate lyrics by Jimmy Reed, Carole King and Randy Newman as well as a new song by Eric Bibb.

Barb Jungr is a very well known singer in her native England, where she’s had a lengthy career of performances and collaborations with numerous artists; most recently, she participated in the “Girl Talk” sessions with Claire Martin and Mari Wilson. She’s also become quite something of a musicologist, with a very keen interest in world music and she’s lectured extensively about singing and vocal performance. Her repertory is quite broad, encompassing diverse styles ranging from French chansons to cabaret, folk, gospel and blues. This superb disc from Linn Records features an eclectic mix of gospel and blues, as well as songs from artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Randy Newman and Carole King, and includes a couple of self-penned tunes as well. The resulting album has a very spiritual feel to it, and Barb Jungr finds a way to make just about every song in this stunning assortment her own. Barb’s smoky-sweet alto is perfect here; on the disc’s opening track Who Do You Love (popularized by George Thorogood’s raunch-n-roll version) she lends a very light vocal touch (almost a whisper), which theoretically seems totally wrong for this song, but she makes it just oh-so-right. The next track, Bob Dylan’s Trouble In Mind opens with a sensationally smooth upright bass and finger-snapping intro, and segues into Barb’s spot-on vocal – this woman really knows how to sing the blues, and she can really belt it out as required. Jessica Lauren lends a lightly-played organ accompaniment that’s sheer perfection – one thing that’s evident from the start is how the vocal and instrumental textures are so perfectly arranged throughout this excellent disc. There are a few weak spots – I’m not particularly enamoured with Barb’s delivery of the Jimmy Cliff classic Many Rivers To Cross, but then I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve hit the replay button on her soulful delivery of Brownie McGhee’s Rainy Day. It’s one of those magical moments where everything worked perfectly, and the resulting sounds are irresistible. The sound quality of this multichannel hybrid SACD is superb. All of my listening was done in the multichannel mode, and the instruments and voices are expertly placed in the recorded soundfield – this is a textbook example of how surround sound should be done right. Highly recommended.

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3 min read

SACD