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Motown part 3 (of 3): From the vaults

Thanks to the people behind the Complete Original Singles sets and single-artist compilations on the now defunct Hip-O Select label, the Motown catalogue has been scrupulously mined for many of its treasures. Not all of them, however. Under a deal with Universal, the current owners of the Motown masters, permission has been granted for Ace Records to issue previously unreleased material from the label. One Track Mind! More Motown Guys is the title of the latest CD to appear under this arrangement, and as usual some of these 24 rejected tracks remind you of the astonishing level of creative activity maintained at Hitsville USA during the 1960s.

It’s usually possible to guess the reason why these tracks didn’t make it past the weekly meetings of Berry Gordy Jr’s quality control committee, which functioned according to the founder’s famous question: “If you only had a dollar, would you buy this record or a sandwich?”  Maybe the song is not absolutely top-drawer, musically or lyrically, or maybe it’s too blatant an attempt to replicate the previous hits of the artist in question.

But you need no excuse to be swept away by Frank Wilson’s “I’ll Be Satisfied”, almost as fine a piece of Northern Soul heaven as his legendary “Do I Love You”, or the driving piano-and-strings instrumental backing track of Brenda Holloway’s “Think It Over (Before You Break My Heart)”, here credited to Earl Van Dyke and the Soul Brothers. There are other gems, such as Edwin Starr’s “The Girl From Crosstown”, a transitional funk record produced by Norman Whitfield and located somewhere between “Function at the Junction” and “Ball of Confusion”, which is hardly a bad place to be. Jimmy Ruffin’s cover of “The ‘In’ Crowd” is rather fine, and the Temptations’ “I’d Rather Forget” would be given a warm welcome at any ’60s dance party.

The two Marvin Gaye tracks, “The Touch of Venus” and “Do You Wanna Go With Me”, are a long way below par, and the Miracles’ “My Oh My What a Groove” and “I’ve Gotta Find Myself (a True Love)” add little to their distinguished discography. Popcorn Wylie’s “Goose Wobbling Time” is an instantly disposable novelty, but there are decent discoveries from such second-division Motown acts as the Spinners, the Monitors, the Fantastic Four and Singing’ Sammy Ward. And there’s another Earl Van Dyke track, called “Heart to Heart”, on which the leader displays the B-3 sound familiar from his classic “All For You”.

An interesting light is shed on the Motown’s history by the release of an expanded double-CD release of Motortown Revue in Paris, recorded at the Olympia music hall on the Boulevard des Capucines during the celebrated 1965 European tour. The Miracles, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas and Stevie Wonder are the featured attractions, backed by a six-piece band led by Van Dyke and including the great guitarist Robert White (the man who played the intro to the Tempts’ “My Girl”) and the percussionist Jack Ashford. A 19-year-old bass player, Tony Newton, and a drummer, Bob Cousar, who usually played trombone in Motown sessions, deputised for James Jamerson and Benny Benjamin, whose presence in the Detroit studio was presumably deemed too valuable to allow them to undertake the trip. The sixth member is the saxophonist Eli Fountain, who would reappear to memorable effect on Gaye’s What’s Going On five years later. Uncredited local brass and reeds players are also added on some of the songs, which I don’t think happened on any of the 21 UK dates that preceded the Paris concert.

What’s noticeable is how the artists are forced into a particular mould through the inclusion of standard songs. Gordy, still misunderstanding the nature of their popularity and his own success, wanted to prepare them for supper-club careers. Martha and the Vandellas get off the lightest, including a respectable version of “If I Had a Hammer” alongside “Heat Wave” and “Wild One”. Steve Wonder, a few weeks past his 15th birthday, sings “Make Someone Happy”, sounding surprisingly like Jimmy Scott. The Miracles deliver “Wives and Lovers”. More distressing is the performance of the Supremes, whose tooth-achingly winsome seven-song set features “People”, “Somewhere” and “You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You”. You can see exactly where Gordy was trying to aim his young stars, Diana Ross in particular, and you can only be grateful that, in this respect, he failed.

On the brighter side, Martha and the Vandellas deliver piledriving versions of “Nowhere to Run” and “Dancing in the Street”, and the Miracles’ “Ooo Baby Baby” features Smokey Robinson at his most spellbinding. Wonder blows up a storm on harmonica on “Fingertips” and shares the lead vocal on “Funny (How Time Slips Away)” with Clarence Paul, his mentor and producer. Van Dyke introduces each of the two halves of the programme with three band instrumentals. All of these are clearly enjoyed by a capacity crowd at the Olympia, reminding me that in the days before pirate radio you could tune into Salut les Copains on France’s Europe 1 station any weekday evening in the mid-’60s and enjoy Motown records that were never heard on the BBC.

* The photograph, from the collection of Gilles Pétard, appears in the booklet accompanying Motortown Revue in Paris. Backstage photos from the UK concerts are included in the book Motown: The Sound of Young America, the subject of the previous post.

Tales of Woodstock

It’s 30 years today since Richard Manuel took his own life in his room at the Quality Inn motel, Winter Park, Florida, a few hours after a gig. Born 42 years earlier in Stratford, Ontario, Manuel was both the owner of one of the most emotionally direct and affecting voices in the history of rock and roll and a member of what had been, by common agreement of most of the people I know, its finest band.

Last night a crowd of people gathered at Rough Trade East in Brick Lane to celebrate the publication of Small Town Talk, Barney Hoskyns’ new book about Woodstock’s musical history. Graham Parker, long a resident of upstate New York, and Sid Griffin talked and played. The atmosphere was warm and the anecdotes amusing, but there was no disguising the fact that the lives of a lot of the people we were hearing about had ended prematurely.

In one of his earlier books, Across the Great Divide, Barney told the story of the incarnation of five men — Manuel, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson — first as the Hawks and then as the Band; it remains, in my opinion, the finest single account of what compelled young white boys in the 1950s and ’60s to adopt the musical language of black people as their own, with world-altering consequences. It is also the story of a slow-motion tragedy.

There was a lot about Manuel in that first book, of course, and the new one — which is fascinating, and ranges far and wide — contains plenty of reminders of how brightly the fire burned before it began to consume him. His last gig was with Danko, Helm and Hudson in the reformed version of the Band at Winter Park’s Cheek-to-Cheek Lounge, quite a fall from places such as the Royal Albert Hall and the Academy of Music, where the full five of them had played to such unforgettable effect in their heyday.

Back in 1967/68 Richard co-wrote “Tears of Rage” and “I Shall be Released” with Bob Dylan and sang them on Music from Big Pink. He also wrote that album’s “In a Station”, “We Can Talk” and “Lonesome Suzie”.  On its successor, The Band, he co-wrote “When You Awake”, “Whispering Pines” and “Jawbone” with Robertson. There were two co-writes on Stage Fright (“Sleeping” and “Just Another Whistle Stop”), and no compositional contribution at all to Cahoots, the fourth album. And that, in miniature, is the story of the Band: the slow disintegration of a sense of communal purpose, eroded by distractions and asymmetrical ambitions.

Eric Clapton once wrote this about Richard: “I wanted so much to be like him, to be able to express with such power and frailty.” Beneath the party-animal exterior, Clapton had spotted “an incredible vulnerability”.

I’m listening to an album called Whispering Pines: Live at the Getaway, Saugerties, NY, recorded on October 12, 1985, five months before Richard’s death. By that time he had ended an unhappy stay in Malibu and relocated to the more familiar and congenial surroundings of Woodstock. “I love it here,” he said in this interview conducted by Ruth Albert Spencer in March 1985. “I love the season changes. I love to see all that. California is just like one season with the weather changing.”

It’s an informal club session and he sings Band songs and a handful of standards: “Grow Too Old”, “You Don’t Know Me”, “Georgia on My Mind” (which the Band had recorded and released as a single to support Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign) and “Miss Otis Regrets”, plus J.J. Cale’s “Crazy Mama” and Ray Charles’s “Hard Times”. The album was not released until 2002, three years after the passing of Danko, who joins his old friend on four of the 17 songs. Those two voices, seriously ravaged now by comparison with their youth (and “struggling”, as Hoskyns puts it, with heroin habits), nevertheless combine on “Tears of Rage” to summon an echo of that old heart-piercing impact, the sound of two gifted, wayward boys who never quite grew up.

Finally, here’s a sweet, sad thing you might not know: a modest and tender version of “Country Boy” that Richard also recorded in October 1985 and which turned up, elaborately arranged in post-production, on the Band’s 1993 album, Jericho. His final time in a studio, I’d guess.

* The illustration of Richard Manuel is by Jack Dutieux and is taken from the cover of Whispering Pines, as is the quote from Eric Clapton’s sleeve note. Small Town Talk is published by Faber & Faber.

Down Applewood Road

Applewood Road, a trio of female singer-songwriters, recorded their first album around a single microphone. Last night they went one better, clustering around an upright piano at the side of the stage in the Exmouth Market Centre to perform their encore with no amplification whatever.

Recorded direct to two-track quarter-inch tape, with no edits or overdubs, Applewood Road has the kind of intimacy you might expect. Released by Gearbox Records, specialists in vinyl, it’s a record of great warmth and charm.

Those qualities were certainly on view at the launch gig, part of a short UK tour. Emily Barker, Amber Rubarth and Amy Speace met in a Nashville coffee shop in late 2014, with the intention of seeing if they could write songs together. “Applewood Road”, written the next day, was their first effort; the album otherwise consists of songs they wrote separately, or with other partners.

“Applewood Road” is a harmony song, and when I first heard them sing it together, at Gearbox’s offices a few months ago, the sound gave me chills. Barker (who I’ve written about before, here) is from Australia, Rubarth grew up in California and Speace is from Baltimore, but at times they can sound as if they spent their childhoods singing together around a family hearth in the Appalachians. The best work they do together — like their spellbinding cover of “Losing My Religion”, or “To the Stars”, which Rubarth wrote with Adam Levy, or “I’m Not Afraid Any More”, by Barker with Robby Hecht — mostly involves the three of them as equal contributors to the vocal blend.

There are other musicians on the album, just a handful, but last night the singers provided their own accompaniment, switching between banjos, an acoustic resonator bass guitar, harmonica, and Emily’s vintage Gibson acoustic guitar. Each of them also performed a song at the stageside piano during the three short solo sets that made up the first half of the evening.

Speace, who has made six solo albums since 2002 and had a song, “Way of the World” recorded by Judy Collins in 2010, exudes a calm authority that the other two have yet to attain. She was once an actress, describes herself as a folk singer, and has a voice somewhere between Joan Baez and Mary Chapin Carpenter, with the poise of the former, the emotional richness of the latter, and a soul of her own. Her individual set started with a fine song called “The Sea and the Shore”. As a member of the trio, there’s a presence about her that gives depth and focus to the whole group.

* The photograph (from left: Speace, Rubarth, Barker) was taken at Exmouth Market Centre by Andy Barnes.

Maurice White 1941-2016

When Maurice White told me that he’d deputised for the absent Elvin Jones with the John Coltrane Quartet at a Chicago jazz club called McKie’s in the early 1960s, I was as impressed as I’d been by anything Earth, Wind & Fire had played at the OMNI arena in Atlanta the previous night.

It had been quite a gig, however, full of smoke and mirrors — the musicians materialising in transparent perspex tubes which had descended from above, and dematerialising as they made their departure, and the bass-guitarist (Verdine White, Maurice’s brother) levitating during his solo spot — with costumes from ancient Egypt, as well as red-hot playing. This was February 1978, and EW&F were the happening thing, to the extent that a bunch of journalists had been flown from Europe to witness their show.

Maurice hadn’t touched a drum throughout the set, but during the interview at their hotel the next morning that’s what I got him talking about. I knew that he’d succeeded Al Duncan, who kept the backbeat snapping on Jimmy Reed’s “Shame Shame Shame” and devised those lovely fills on the Impressions’ “It’s All Right”, as the leading studio drummer for R&B and soul sessions by Chicago labels such as Chess and Vee-Jay.

“When I came out of school, he was THE drummer locally,” Maurice said of Duncan. “But he had a drinking problem, so I started getting dates. And I was ‘young blood’. Of course, I learnt a lot from being around him.”

Having taken Duncan’s place, he played on Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me”, Ramsey Lewis’s “Wade in the Water”, Billy Stewart’s wild recasting of “Summertime”, and almost certainly the Dells’ widescreen classics of 1968-69, the remakes of “Oh What a Night” and “Stay in My Corner” and the fabulous “The Love We Had (Stays on My Mind)”, co-written by Terry Callier.

He had grown up in the 1950s, he said, in the Chicago jazz scene with a generation of musicians who would turn out to be significant, including the pianist-composer Muhal Richard Abrams, the saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre and the drummer Steve McCall, who was a particularly close friend. “At the time I simply wanted to be the world’s greatest drummer,” Maurice said.

It was meeting Charles Stepney that broadened his horizons. A pianist and arranger who began by idolising Bud Powell (“I think Eddie Harris turned him on to that”) and Burt Bacharach, Stepney worked as a staff arranger and producer at Chess, on the Dells’ records and those of his own creation, the Rotary Connection. Their bond lasted until Stepney’s death in 1976. White admired Stepney’s musical ambition: “He also listened to classical composers, and he evolved through jazz.”

White joined the Ramsey Lewis Trio in 1966, but left in 1970 to move to LA, where he formed the first version of EW&F. It was with the second incarnation of the band, signed by Clive Davis to Columbia Records in 1975, that the hits started coming.

In Atlanta, even in the midst of all the space-age vaudeville presentation, which drove an  almost entirely African American audience of 15,000 crazy with delight, I was impressed by the precision and inventiveness of the band, particularly the Phenix Horns, among whom the saxophonist Andrew Woolfolk stood out. The music may have been glittered up for the disco generation, but the role of the musicians was no different from that of their predecessors in Percy Mayfield’s, Ray Charles’s or James Brown’s bands: they were jazz musicians adapting their skills to the popular blues-based dance music of the day.

When I asked Maurice afterwards about the lavish presentation, with its Nubian gong-bashers and its Tutankhamun masks, he told me he’d been studying Egyptology for three or four years. But I was suddenly struck by a thought. Who had done this sort of thing before — and not only that, but in the Chicago jazz scene in the 1950s, when the young drummer was coming up? So I asked him about it.

“Sun Ra?” Maurice replied. “Yes, I saw him in Chicago. He had a light on top of his head. I thought he was crazy.”

* Maurice White died this week, aged 74. Here is the New York Times obituary.

Reconsidering the Paris Sisters

So now we know that Veronica Bennett was not the first lead singer of a female vocal trio to whom Phil Spector proposed marriage. That would be Priscilla Paris, according to the testimony of her sister Sherrell in the sleeve notes to Always Heavenly, the first proper retrospective of the Paris Sisters’ intriguing career, put together by the Ace label from the group’s recordings for several labels between 1961 and 1968.

The youngest of the Filtzer sisters (as they were born) had a voice to which the adjectives “breathy” and “seductive” hardly did justice. If the lusty, gospel-trained Darlene Love existed at one end of the girl-group spectrum, Priscilla defined the other, establishing a template for Shelley Fabares (“Johnny Angel”), Louise Cordet (“I’m Just a Baby”), and many others. The sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me”, a high-school pop ballad in which Spector lightly updated the formula of the Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him Is to Love Him”, was one of the big hits of 1961, and it is remarkable that they never got close to matching its success.

Alec Palao, the erudite and assiduous compiler of this new anthology, demonstrates that the Paris Sisters’ career amounted to more than one hit and one approach. The 25 songs selected here include productions by Terry Melcher, Jack Nitzsche, Nik Venet and Mike Curb as well as Spector, with composer credits that include Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Doc Pomus, P.F. Sloan, David Gates and Jackie DeShannon.

Spector had prefaced the come-hither formula of “I Love How You Love Me” with “Be My Boy” and tried to replicate it with “He Knows I Love Him Too Much”. The later producers — Melcher and Nitzsche in particular — moved the sisters towards the more assertive approach of the Crystals and the Ronettes, and several of these tracks belong among the many homages to Spector’s mature style. This Nitzsche-produced version of Mann and Weil’s epically atmospheric “See That Boy” allows Priscilla to open up and show genuine vocal power and flexibility, the result of a full Gold Star echo-chamber treatment rivalling the original by the Righteous Brothers (who did it as “See That Girl”). Venet’s baion-beat restyling of Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover” is another delightful example. Others, such as the lilting “When I’m Alone With You”, written by Sloan and Steve Barri, and Gates’s “Greener Days”, edge towards a poppish folk-rock.

Most intriguing of all are Priscilla’s own compositions: always accomplished, demonstrating a real sense of drama, and sometimes venturing beyond the merely idiomatic. While “My Good Friend” is done up by Nitzsche as a very successful Spector pastiche, “I Came a Long Way to Nowhere”, “Why Do I Take It From You” and “I’m Me” show a greater range and contain strong hints of authorial soul-searching. They give the composer a chance to show that she could move beyond the doe-eyed mode to show an impressive strength and an interesting vulnerability.

The strangest track is the Sisters’ last recording with Priscilla, “Stand Naked Clown”, composed by Hal Blair (who wrote songs for Elvis’s movies) and Dean Kay (who co-wrote the Sinatra favourite “That’s Life”). Recorded in 1968, produced by Clancy Grass, the group’s manager (later married to Albeth) and the Wrecking Crew guitarist Don Peake (Priscilla’s boyfriend after the break-up of her marriage), it resembles something that Jacques Brel might have written for the Shangri-Las, with a semi-recitative intro against a bowed bass, abrupt switches between bolero rhythms and rubato passages, sudden crescendos, and a wonderfully melodramatic vocal.

There seems to have been a lot more to Priscilla than most of us could ever have suspected from that first and only hit, recorded when she was 16. She left the group in 1968 to pursue a solo career, first in Los Angeles, then in London, and finally in Paris, where she died after a fall in 2004, aged 59. Ace have a compilation of her solo work that I must now investigate. Albeth, the eldest of the sisters, retired to raise a family and died in 2014; she and Sherrell helped Palao in the assembly of this absorbing, hugely enjoyable and often surprising collection.

* The photograph of (left to right) Priscilla, Sherrell and Albeth Paris was taken at Sunset Sound studio in 1966. It appears in the booklet accompanying Always Heavenly.

★★★★★

For many years I dismissed David Bowie as a shallow opportunist. What was he doing that Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, conceptually and musically, hadn’t done with more wit and originality? I saw him at the Greyhound in Croydon in the summer of 1972, supported by Roxy Music in a pub room that can’t have held more than 200 people. He did the Ziggy Stardust thing, he and the band in full costume, and I didn’t care for it much.

Those particular songs still don’t do anything for me, but time sometimes dissolves prejudices and now I can see that what I took to be shallowness and opportunism were aspects of what we call the pop process: the way things evolve through mimesis and metamorphosis, adapting to their time. And the response to the sudden news of his death leaves no doubt of the profound impact he had on people whose lives were then in the process of being formed.

It wasn’t until the time of the Berlin trilogy that I started to take him seriously, but then he lost me again. I went to see him again at Wembley Arena in the early ’80s, and he looked to me like a man who’d run dry. But I liked the records he made with Nile Rodgers — if you’ve seen Frances Ha, you’ll know the wonderful sequence in which Greta Gerwig’s character skips through the streets of New York to the sound of “Modern Love” and the whole cinema seems to lift about a foot off the ground.

This morning I found myself going into Soho to buy his new album, queuing behind a bunch of people doing exactly the same thing. I could tell you that I was going to buy it today in any case, and it would be true: the idea of Bowie working with jazz musicians sounded intriguing, if not necessarily guaranteed to work.

I’m listening to blackstar now, and it’s hard to escape the feeling that Bowie knew exactly what he was doing when he scheduled its release. It sounds like the supremely elegant farewell of an artist standing squarely on the platform of his past achievements in order to reach still further, one last time. It’s worthy of the famous line from Macbeth: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.”

It isn’t jazz, of course, or anything like it. The skills of the musicians are put to a different purpose. In the mesh of textures created from the available palette, in the brilliant settings of his allusive lyrics, in the masterful sense of pacing (listen to the closing of “Lazarus”), in the aching poignancy of “Dollar Days” (“If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to/It’s nothing to me/It’s nothing to see”), in the purposeful channeling of energy and the constant sense of newness from start to finish, this sounds like Bowie music at its most fully realised and powerfully affecting. What a way to say goodbye.

Her royal majesty

In case you’re among the very few people who haven’t already seen it, here is Aretha Franklin serenading the annual Kennedy Centre Honors ceremony in Washington DC earlier this month. She’s there to sing “(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman” to Carole King, who wrote the song with her then-husband, the lyricist Gerry Goffin, in 1967.

King was one of five honorees (the others were George Lucas, Rita Moreno, Cicely Tyson and Seiji Ozawa). She was also serenaded by James Taylor  with “Up on the Roof” and Janelle Monae with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “One Fine Day”. But, as you can see, Aretha blew the roof off the place with a performance that works on more levels than I can count.

To see her once again accompanying herself at the piano is simply wonderful. I think it was the late Jerry Wexler, the producer of her Atlantic sessions, who observed that the relationship between Aretha’s voice and her piano-playing was the foundation of her great recordings (it was also Wexler who offered Goffin and King the phrase “natural woman” as an idea for a song). Just listen to the way she delays and phrases the second half of the line “When my soul was in the lost-and-found…” And when she stands up, drops her coat and lets rip, for a few seconds this 73-year-old woman is once again that prodigy, barely into her teens, who regularly brought the congregation at her father’s Baptist church in Detroit a little closer to heaven.

Try keeping a dry eye. Barack Obama couldn’t. He may have his faults, but he’ll be missed when he’s gone. This is one of the moments for which his presidency — and the reign of the Queen of Soul — will be remembered.

2015: The best bits

Bitter Lake, a documentary directed by Adam Curtis and available all year on BBC iPlayer, spends two and a half hours examining the half-hidden history of the last 70 years and offers a profoundly troubling catalogue of epic miscalculations, very few of them committed in innocence. Assembling a mosaic of footage from many sources, and using music — from Messaien to This Mortal Coil — quite brilliantly to counterpoint his chosen images, Curtis examines the deep causes of recent events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. The film’s existence, and its availability, makes a conclusive argument on behalf of independent public service broadcasting. If you haven’t seen it, here it is: http://bbc.in/1zbQoGX

LIVE MUSIC

1. Steve Lehman Octet (Bimhuis, Amsterdam, February)

2. Matana Roberts (OSLO, Hackney, October)

3. The Necks (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin, November)

4. Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet (Pizza Express, July)

5. Giovanni Guidi Trio (Rosenfeld Porcini Gallery, April)

6. Bob Dylan (Royal Albert Hall, October)

7. Discreet + Oblique: The Music of Brian Eno (Barbican, September)

8. Sophie Agnel/John Edwards/Steve Noble (Vortex, March)

9. Jason Pierce/Wm Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (Barbican, July)

10. Julia Holter (Islington Assembly Hall, November)

11. Annette Peacock (Cafe Oto, November)

12. Nik Bärtsch’s Rhythm Clan (Kings Place, November).

13. Alexander Hawkins Trio (Cafe Oto, April)

14. Yazz Ahmed (Canary Wharf Jazz Festival, August)

15. Paal Nilssen-Love’s Large Unit (Cafe Oto, May)

16. Selvhenter (A l’Arme Festival, Berlin, August)

17. Binker & Moses (Foyle’s, September)

18. Amok Amor (Vortex, November)

19. Cécile McLorin Salvant (Ronnie Scott’s, June)

20. Björn Lücker’s Aquarian Jazz Ensemble (Jazzahead, Bremen, April)

NEW ALBUMS

1. Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (Aftermath/Interscope)

2. Charles Lloyd: Wild Man Dance (Blue Note)

3. The Weather Station: Loyalty (Paradise of Bachelors/Outside Music)

4. Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Three: River Run Thee (Constellation)

5. Mette Henriette: Trio/Ensemble (ECM)

6. Bob Dylan: Shadows in the Night (Columbia)

7. Kronos Quartet: Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector: Music of Terry Riley (Nonesuch)

8. Eddie Prevost etc: 3 Nights at Cafe Oto (Matchless)

9. Myra Melford: Snowy Egret (ENJA/Yellow Bird)

10. Julia Holter: Have You in My Wilderness (Domino)

11. Georgie Fame: Swan Songs (Three Line Whip)

12. Don Henley: Cass County (Virgin)

13. Tyshawn Sorey: Alloy (Pi)

14. Mural: Tempo (Sofa Music)

15. The Henrys: Quiet Industry (own label)

16. Ryan Truesdell/Gil Evans Project: Lines of Color/Live at Jazz Standard (ArtistShare)

17. The Pop Group: Citizen Zombie (Freaks R Us)

18. Tore Brunborg: Slow Snow (ACT)

19. Drifter: Flow (Edition)

20. Eyebrow: Garden City (Ninety&Nine)

REISSUE/ARCHIVE

1. The Staple Singers: Faith & Grace: A Family Journey 1953-1976 (Stax)

2. Bob Dylan: Bootleg Series Vol 12 / The Cutting Edge (Sony Legacy)

3. Georgie Fame: The Whole World’s Shaking 1963-66 (Polydor)

4. Miles Davis: Miles at Newport 1955-1975 (Columbia Legacy)

5. Don Cherry: Modern Art/Stockholm 1977 (Mellotronen)

6. Various: Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955-83 (Soul Jazz)

7. Various: Jon Savage’s 1966 (Ace)

8. Graham Bond: Live at the BBC and Other Stories (BBC)

9. John Coltrane: So Many Things (Acrobat)

10. The Velvet Underground: Loaded (Atlantic)

FEATURE FILMS (NEW)

1. Marshlands (dir. Alberto Rodríguez)

2. Timbuktu (dir. Abderrahmane Sissako)

3. Eden (dir. Mia Hansson-Love)

4. Straight Outta Compton (dir. F. Gary Gray)

5. Love & Mercy (dir. Bill Pohlad)

FEATURE FILMS (REVIVED)

1. Hou Hsiao Hsien season (BFI)

2. L’Eclisse (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

DOCUMENTARIES

1. Amy (dir. Asif Kapadia)

2. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution (dir. Stanley Nelson)

3. Sinatra: All or Nothing at All (dir. Alex Gibney)

4. The Wrecking Crew (dir. Danny Tedesco)

5. Atomic (dir. Mark Cousins)

THEATRE & DANCE

1. Oresteia (Almeida, July)

2. Robert Wilson in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (Barbican, June)

3. Richard Alston Dance Company: Overdrive (The Place, June)

EXHIBITIONS

1. Agnes Martin (Tate Modern)

2. William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance (Marian Goodman)

3. David Jones: Vision and Memory (Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)

4. Richard Diebenkorn (Royal Academy)

4. Robert Gumpert: The Bridge (Menier Gallery)

5. Peter Lanyon: Gliding Paintings (Courtauld Institute)

NOVELS

1. Everything by Patrick Modiano, including The Search Warrant, Honeymoon, Out of the Dark and Suspended Sentences

MUSIC BOOKS

1. Barbara Frenz (tr. J. Bradford Robinson): Music to Silence to Music: A Biography of Henry Grimes (Northway)

2. Richard Goldstein: Another Little Piece of My Heart (Bloomsbury)

3. Jon Savage: 1966 (Faber & Faber)

4. Simon Spillett: The Long Shadow of the Little Giant: The Life, Work and Legacy of Tubby Hayes (Equinox)

5. Tom Jones (w/Giles Smith): Over the Top and Back (Michael Joseph)