Shopping List: The New and the Notable
Dave Brubeck, Indian Summer (Telarc)
The eighty-six-year-old jazz pianist takes a solo journey through the past on this unadorned and dry-eyed remembrance of standards and originals past. It begins with "You'll Never Know," recalled from his army days, and concludes with the title tune he first recorded a half-century ago.
Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead/Santana, A Night at the Family Dog (Eagle Vision DVD)
Each band plays two songs prior to their guitarists blending together into a sludgy fifteen-minute "super jam" on this excellently produced slice of psychedelia recorded in February 1970. Jefferson Airplane is the astounding standout, with Grace Slick lurking saintlike among her gnarlier bandmates. The Grateful Dead never really get into it, although watching Pigpen belt out Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle" is a treat. Cute young women provide undulating ambience.
Bob Marley & the Wailers, Roots, Rock, Remixed (Quango Fontana)
It's always risky to mess with perfection. Yet the bubbling warmth and soul of Bob Marley and the Wailers originals like "Small Axe" and "Sun Is Shining" are never overshadowed by the trancey dancefloor effects added to them on Roots, Rock, Remixed, the first Marley remix album blessed and endorsed by the reggae icon's survivors.
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, This Is Somewhere (Hollywood)
"She'll bake you cookies, then she'll burn your town," warns Grace Potter in "Ah, Mary," the ambivalent ode to America that kicks off This Is Somewhere. The twenty-four-year-old keyboardist's third album with the Nocturnals is a neoclassic-rock winner by a barn-burning band that lives on the road and sounds like it.
Soulive, No Place Like Soul (Stax)
Soulive used to be an instrumental trio in the venerable funk vein pioneered by Booker T. and the MGs. But new vocalist Toussaint has brings emotional depth and a reggae lilt to the group, which has found a perfect home on the rejuvenated Stax label.