The new Christian McBride album is due out this Friday, October 26th. The one track currently available on TIDAL, “The Middle Man,” sounds great.
By the way, I looked up the term, “jawn.” According to Mr. McBride’s record label, Mack Avenue “jawn” is Philadelphia-area slang for a person, place or thing with “a certain hip cachet, a heavy dose of soul, and a generous helping of what in the City of Brotherly Love is known as ‘attytood.’”
New on Qobuz are two ‘complete works’ of Francois Couperin’s harpsichord music. I suspect that Cerasi has a better interpretation, but I prefer the Boulay because the instrument, to use a highly technical term, is more ‘tinkly’!
The Spin Doctors, “If the River Was Whiskey” (2013). I used to catch the Spin Doctors live in NYC in their early 1990’s jam-band heyday, including a great New Year’s Eve concert at the Beacon Theatre on 12/31/92. Original guitarist Eric Schenkman left the band in September 1994 by walking offstage during a concert in Berkeley, California due to musical and personal differences, and being weary of the road. At that point, I stopped following the group. I discovered recently that the original four-person lineup, including Schenkman, reformed and released the all-blues “If the River Was Whiskey” in 2013. Sounds pretty good, and Schenkman can still tear it up on guitar (see, e.g., track #s 5 and 6, “Scotch and Water Blues” and “About a Train”)!
Recorded live at the Jazzatelier, Ulrichsberg, Austria on April 29, 1989. If you can get past the cheesy cover art, the mediocre sonics and occasional crowd noise (this is from an audience tape), and the novelty concept, you get some pretty great music. As the AllMusic review states, Second Star to the Right “goes way beyond novelty. Novelties are hardly this entertaining or enduring.”
