A.j. Cook

After a quick listen to Balls, it's hard to imagine why Warner Brothers dropped Elizabeth Cook after only one album. Could she have sounded too traditional for country radio? Did they want her to tone down her in-your-face delivery? The mysteries of major labels are many and unfathomable, so suffice it to say that Cook is a major talent and will undoubtedly wind up with another major-label deal. Balls has the same power and charm evident on her earlier outings and the bonus of Rodney Crowell's sharp production talents…

Continuing to go her own way on Gospel Plow, Elizabeth Cook is another artist who's too rock for country and too country for rock, although in the music business climate of 2012 she may be too country for country, too. As you might expect from the title of this mini-album, Gospel Plow is a record of sacred music, although it's marked by Cook's own inimitable mix of styles and features at least one track that will surprise almost any country fan, not matter how alt. The songs are mostly familiar, although the arrangements are anything but…

Junior Cook - Senior Cookin' (1979-81) {32 Jazz 32095 rel 1998}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 500 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 170 Mb
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© 1979-81, 1998 Muse / 32 Jazz | 32095
Jazz / Hard Bop / Post Bop / Saxophone

Except for one other recording, tenor saxophonist Junior Cook's two Muse albums were his only opportunities to lead his own record dates during the 1962-1987 period. 1979's Good Cookin' (played by a septet including trombonist Slide Hampton, trumpeter Bill Hardman, baritonist Mario Rivera, pianist Albert Dailey, bassist Walter Booker, and drummer Leroy Williams) and 1981's Somethin's Cookin' (a high-quality quartet showcase for Cook with pianist Cedar Walton, bassist Buster Williams, and drummer Billy Higgins) are reissued in full on this single CD, except for four alternate takes from the latter date that were included on Muse's original CD reissue.

Harpsichordist Martha Cook here records Bach's Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080 (The Art of the Fugue), with a specific interpretive framework in mind. The work, Cook believes, was devotional and intimate in intent; it is, she writes, a "musical prayer," and it embodies the parables and exhortation found in the biblical Book of Luke, 14:27-35. Interested readers are invited to consult the booklet for more details. Making the supposition work involves discarding the version of the work published after Bach's death by C.P.E. Bach and others, and it also involves some of the numerology that so often seems to crop up in connection with Bach's larger works. There's some justification in earlier German music for regarding Bach's instrumental music in this programmatic way; Bach would have known the Biblische Historien keyboard sonatas of 1700 by one of his key predecessors, Johann Kuhnau. But what's missing is any evidence of why Bach, by the end of his life a revered figure, might have wanted to embed secret messages in Die Kunst der Fuge. The unalloyed good news is that you can disregard the stated method of interpretation and listen to the performance in the abstract. It's very powerful.