Hindsight Poo Reun So Geum (2011)

Houston Person is a very versatile veteran tenor saxophonist who tends to get overlooked in critics' polls, yet his extensive musical resumé is ample proof that he is a jazz master. This 2011 session ranges from a duet to septet, with everyone playing compact solos, keeping all but one under the six-minute mark, a lost art in modern jazz. The rhythm section includes pianist John Di Martino (who regularly works with the leader), bassist Ray Drummond, and drummer Lewis Nash (whose respective resumés are likely as long as Person's), seven-string guitarist Howard Alden, plus cornetist Warren Vaché and trombonist Mark Patterson. Two less familiar jazz works stand out. The disc opens with the full septet playing a snappy rendition of Shirley Scott's "Blues Everywhere," with Person, Vaché, Patterson, Alden, and Di Martino all featured…

Sometimes dreams, visions, fantasy worlds, stars and galaxies seem closer than the human reality… This is the main idea of the composition "So Far And So Near", and it has become the central idea of the Eternal Wanderers' album of the same name. The album contains 8 art/progressive/psychedelic rock compositions with total time 64 minutes. Many of them include the orchestral elements. Within the central idea of the album the compositions touch such topics as the beginning of the World ("And The World Will Be"), beauty lost in wars of all times and sadness that remains ("Mounds"), thoughts about the Man and Fate ("Thread Of Love"), hardly amenable to reason energy of light ("Energy Of Light"). The idea determines the mood of the music - from purely sad "And I Will Follow", solemn "And The World Will Be" to expressive "Energy Of Light" and "As You Wish, I Care Not".

Although it ironically coincided with the compact disc format's slow but inexorable march toward likely extinction, the third millennium's first decade witnessed an incredible boom in CD reissues of obscure ‘70s hard rock bands; bands whose careers quickly floundered or never even took off due to any number of reasons, like the subject of this review, London's Steel Mill. Like many of these commercially failed entities, Steel Mill made the fatal mistake of attempting to partake in the relatively isolated worlds of both progressive and heavy rock, instead of committing to just one or the other, and so their sole LP, 1972's Green Eyed God, fell through the cracks of consumer tastes and wasn't even released in the U.K. until 1975, three years after the group's demise. Be that as it may, few heavy prog bands favored such a dramatic clash between their artier musical pretensions and more visceral instrumental instincts than this London quintet, resulting in fascinatingly schizophrenic numbers boasting as much inner city grime and bluster as they do pastoral purity and whimsy…

The son of Bad Company is what this debut by the band Sharks resembles, lead vocalist Snips sounding like he gargled with Kim Carnes and Paul Rodgers' mouthwash, that gravel voice Rod Stewart made the most of accompanied here by guitar great Chris Spedding, drummer Marty Simon, and bassist Andy Fraser from the group Free. This self-titled debut doesn't have the groove of their 1974 release, Jab It in Yore Eye, despite four of the nine songs written by Fraser (replaced by Busta Cherry Jones on the follow-up), including "Doctor Love," a song Leslie West covered for his The Great Fatsby album, generating some early validation for this work.

As with the other volumes in Blank & Jones' 12"-oriented So80s series, the selections here are mostly from the first half of the '80s, and they balance major pop hits with relatively deeper cuts as a way to catch the interest of a wide listening base. This fourth volume includes extended mixes of Gang of Four's "Is It Love," the Cure's "Close to Me," and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's "Telegraph," as well as alternate mixes of ABC's "King Without a Crown," Propaganda's "Dr. Mabuse," and Act's "Snobbery and Decay." The CD edition contains a DJ mix from the German duo, while tracks are provided unmixed on discs two and three.