During this past Thanksgiving, my dad gave me permission to take records from his collection in the basement, and I decided to do some short reviews of what I got. I plan to update this as I listen to more records. With no further adieu:
Mahalia Jackson's Silent Night: A lot of times you hear Christmas music, and it is dull, mediocre, and you forget why people even bother to play it other than tradition. Mahalia Jackson manages to make these cliche songs into something worth listening to again.
Koto Vivaldi: It is an interesting effort to bring something that normally played by a full orchestra to a quartet of koto, but it does highlight how sometimes you lose a certain quality in the conversion. For example, the presto of the Winter movement were made for a string instrument with a bow, and the koto just doesn't quite fit, as you can't really move your fingers in a way that matches the rapid succession that you can with a bowed instrument. It is a fun novelty, nevertheless, especially since on the back on the record it goes into the history of the koto, and the poems that Vivaldi may have wrote for the 4 seasons.
Pigs Eye Jass Fidelity First Vol. 2: The back of this record just describes sine waves, and the type of room they recorded in, and the only clue you have to what type of music the record has is that it lists the instrumentation of songs titled "mr. jelly lord." I thought it was going to be more experimental, but it is just a very solid jazz record. I should look Piges Eye Jass and see what their deal is, but good record overall.
Jean Miche Jarre Equinoxe: Such a classic electronica record. It
aged like fine wine. It is such a perfect encapsulation of what we thought the future and space were going to sound like.
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