I agree that this date sounds very good. And it’s good music. I have so many ohter Basie dates however and find myself listening to Basie from the 'thirties through the 'fifties far more often than any from the Pablo era.
Right now
The 75th Anniversary SHM-CD from Japan
If your a John Haitt, James McMurtry type give this a try
Always has been a great sounding CD, but really sounds amazing on the DS
Blu-Spec 2 CD
The CTI Supreme Blu-Spec 2 CD version.
Surprising, beautiful album. EXQUISITELY recorded.
I’m going through a bit of a Charles Lloyd phase - been listening to his recordings a lot lately. I own four of his albums and they are all fantastic, but my favorite would be Sangam.
Back to this one. Makes my system shine, and such great music-making.
The EXCELLENT performance of the Firebird Suite from this great box set.
Right now the rocking mandolin on this new reissue.
lonson said Surprising, beautiful album. EXQUISITELY recorded.
Revisited “Shadows in the Night” yesterday. There are two reasons why this album speaks to me so.
One is the songs. I don’t know these from Sinatra at all, but I know these songs and they’ve spoken to me just as I know they’ve spoken to Bob. He has stripped them down to basics and given his version of them, and what he sings is not exactly what I would (if I could sing!) but it is clear to me how his feelings are generating the singing. I’m an emotional person and emotions well-communicated reach me. I’ve also spent the last few years with my guitars and basses doing the same thing to the best of my own ability with other songs as far as stripping them down to what I feel is their heartbeat and playing around with the melodic heart with countermelodies and rhythmic bits and I find that the process brings out the emotions in me in reaction to the song and sound. So I get the process and I feel the results.
Also. . . the mood, that mood of looking back and melancholia. I’m just coming out of that sort of a phase now, so that mood, that aura, is very “visible” to me and familiar and I can inhabit it. Having lost my wife, now mother, having left behind my adult home and my friends, having said goodbye to a woman I adored and loved deeply just because we had responsibilities that kept us across the country from each other. . . I swam, I lived in that mood for too long. And the mood and the feelings themselves have shaped my life. It’s moved me further away from the hip and the pop, from the new and the raw. Makes my obessions over sound and collections of recordings shrink in importance. Having the right people in your life is far more nourishing and important than a treated room or the perfect reproduction of high res material or the hottest act in the performance venues. These songs have communicated this to me via Bob. . . and this album invokes that melancholy and nostalgia and climb to hope for the new. And I think it will have real staying power for me in the way that Blood on the tracks does in Dylan albums.
And it’s also comfortable for me to listen to this NOW as I’ve been able to release myself from the control of the mood and I’ve found the next phase of my life through the blessed intervention of providence that has brought my fiancee and I back in contact and brought our love to flower. I can let Bob inform me of the feelings and mood and relate to them and not have to turn around and inhabit them again right now. THAT is also an appeal to this recording, being touched and moved. . . and able to walk away.
So really this is an album that has fascinated me in a way that many others the last few years haven’t. And I bet it has staying power in my library.
