The Fantastic Shadows

Amazon review by Runmentionable
This is a comprehensive, well-selected and obviously well-informed collection of late 40s jazz and R&B (in the old sense) of the type you might expect to hear in nightclub scenes in films noir. Appropriately enough, both discs are bookended by the theme music from classics of the genre. Some of the selections are very familiar - Monk's original recording of Round Midnight - while others are drawn from deeper wells, like Leo Parker's exquisite Solitude. The key point is - they're all excellent representations of their genres. After that, it's down to personal tastes. I prefer Billie Holiday in more sprightly mode, but lots of people love the tracks here which I find a bit too self-pitying, and the difference of opinion don't signify when it comes to assessing this excellent compilation.

Camelot, Jennifer Castle’s extraordinary, moving chronicle of the artist in early middle age, charts a realer place than the legendary Camelot of the British Early Middle Ages, but it too is a space more psychic than physical. In Castle’s Camelot, the fantastic interpenetrates the mundane, and the Grail, if there is one, distills everyday experience into art and art into faith, subliming terrestrial concerns into sublime celestial prayers to Mother Nature, and to the unfolding process of perfecting imperfection in one’s own nature: “Back in Camelot / I really learned a lot / circles in the crops and / sky-high geometry …” Camelot, the legendary seat of King Arthur’s court in Early Middle Ages Britain, was probably not a real place. A corruption of the name of a real Romano-Briton city, the word “Camelot” accumulated symbolic, mythic resonances over centuries, until achieving its present usage as a near-synonym of “utopia.” In the mid-20th century alone, Camelot inspired an explosion of representations and appropriations, among them the violent, affectless Arthurian court of Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot du Lac and the absurdist iteration of Monty Python’s 1975 Holy Grail, both of which feature armored knights erupting into fountains of blood; the mystical Welsh world of novelist John Cowper Powys’s profoundly weird 1951 novel Porius, with its Roman cults, wizards and witches, and wanton giants; and the nationalist nostalgia of President John F. Kennedy’s White House. Unsurprisingly there are fewer Camelots in more recent memory.

Amazon review by Runmentionable
This is a comprehensive, well-selected and obviously well-informed collection of late 40s jazz and R&B (in the old sense) of the type you might expect to hear in nightclub scenes in films noir. Appropriately enough, both discs are bookended by the theme music from classics of the genre. Some of the selections are very familiar - Monk's original recording of Round Midnight - while others are drawn from deeper wells, like Leo Parker's exquisite Solitude. The key point is - they're all excellent representations of their genres. After that, it's down to personal tastes. I prefer Billie Holiday in more sprightly mode, but lots of people love the tracks here which I find a bit too self-pitying, and the difference of opinion don't signify when it comes to assessing this excellent compilation.

Camelot, Jennifer Castle’s extraordinary, moving chronicle of the artist in early middle age, charts a realer place than the legendary Camelot of the British Early Middle Ages, but it too is a space more psychic than physical. In Castle’s Camelot, the fantastic interpenetrates the mundane, and the Grail, if there is one, distills everyday experience into art and art into faith, subliming terrestrial concerns into sublime celestial prayers to Mother Nature, and to the unfolding process of perfecting imperfection in one’s own nature: “Back in Camelot / I really learned a lot / circles in the crops and / sky-high geometry …” Camelot, the legendary seat of King Arthur’s court in Early Middle Ages Britain, was probably not a real place. A corruption of the name of a real Romano-Briton city, the word “Camelot” accumulated symbolic, mythic resonances over centuries, until achieving its present usage as a near-synonym of “utopia.” In the mid-20th century alone, Camelot inspired an explosion of representations and appropriations, among them the violent, affectless Arthurian court of Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot du Lac and the absurdist iteration of Monty Python’s 1975 Holy Grail, both of which feature armored knights erupting into fountains of blood; the mystical Welsh world of novelist John Cowper Powys’s profoundly weird 1951 novel Porius, with its Roman cults, wizards and witches, and wanton giants; and the nationalist nostalgia of President John F. Kennedy’s White House. Unsurprisingly there are fewer Camelots in more recent memory.

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