Shopping List: The New and the Notable
David Buchbinder, "Odessa/Havana" (Tzadik)
Pianist-composer Hilario Durán's Cuban rhythms ignite trumpeter-composer David Buchbinder's Jewish jazz in this project echoing Miles Davis's "Sketches of Spain," Dizzie Gillespie and Machito's "Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods," and "Fiddler on the Roof." Minor-key klezmer freylechs evolve into blazing mambos in the hands of Buchbinder's top-notch Canadian tentet.
Bob Dylan, "The Other Side of the Mirror: Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965" (CMV/Legacy DVD)
Context is everything. Although Bob Dylan played only two electric songs ("Maggie's Farm" and "Like a Rolling Stone") at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the event's subsequent mythologizing would suggest a substantially more radical assault on the folkies' delicate sensibilities. More than forty years after the fact, we can finally see what all the fuss was actually about. Murray Lerner filmed three Newport festivals' worth of Dylan performances, which, viewed together, depict an artist on such a rapid ascent, from shy folkie to brash rock star, that even his folk tunes, protest music, and surreal love songs (never mind the brief electric interlude) resonate with larger-than-life confidence and authority. Captured in no-frills black-and-white, Dylan was busy being born indeed.
Marvin Gaye, "Here, My Dear" (Hip-O Select)
"Somebody tell me please, tell me please," croons one of the twentieth century's most talented and tragic voices, "Why do I have to pay attorney fees?" We'll never know exactly how many albums have been released solely to fulfill divorce settlements, but this one was. Released in 1978, Marvin Gaye's autobiographical double-vinyl album remains a deeply personal and ambivalent musical account of his marriage to, and divorce from, Anna Gordy Gaye, to whom all its profits were rendered. A commercial failure at the time, "Here, My Dear" now stands as something of a masterpiece. Gaye's rich, detailed, and deeply personal epic encompasses everything from the sultry confusion of its thrice-repeated centerpiece, "When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You," to the psychedelic soul of "Anger" and "A Funky Space Reincarnation." A bonus disc includes demos and alternate versions of what could well turn out to be the best album of 2008.