Was (not Was)

Closing in on 20 years since their last album, the whole gang is here, pretty much – the core of Don and David Was and Sir Harry Bowens and Sweet Pea Atkinson, along with Was (Not Was) vets Luis Resto, David McMurray, Wayne Kramer, Donald Ray Mitchell, and Randy Jacobs, as well as roughly a couple dozen additional accomplices, from Booker T. Jones to (of course) Kris Kristofferson. Mixing and matching funk, rock, and soul with a little jazz and blues, and enhanced on occasion by some seamlessly incorporated electronics, Boo! delivers robust party material with plenty of straight-faced, sidesplitting/head-scratching humor…precisely what you'd expect from them, then. They've remained ageless all along, balancing their adolescent pranksterism with sharp social observations and deliriously random humor, deploying it all over sturdy grooves that roam unselfconsciously across the history of R&B.

On this album, Was (Not Was) explores various blends of funk, rock, dance and pop styles with delightful results. There is much quirky humour in a song like I Feel Better Than James Brown, an addictive tune with a hypnotic beat that pays tribute to James Brown's masterpiece I Feel Good. The lyrics are just priceless! Unusually for Was (Not Was), they also explore the dark side of life in Maria Novarro, a powerful song with a nervous beat and disturbing lyrics about domestic violence: "In the city of Angels, there's no mercy and there's no tomorrow for Maria Novarro …". Adding to the charms of this multifaceted album is Leonard Cohen who contributes the main vocal on Elvis' Rolls Royce over a jazzy background. The next track Dressed To Be Killed is a jerky rap number with lovely sax infusions, whilst Just Another Couple Broken Hearts is a mellow ballad.

In 1981 and 1982 ZE Records published its own Christmas album under the supervision of Michael Zilkha. All the American artists on ZE answered the call and came up with a Christmas track. Cristina, with the two Was false brothers, went to Detroit to record « Things fall Apart », David & Don Was also recorded « Christmas Time in Motor City » with their band WAS (NOT WAS). August Darnell drew inspiration from New York for his « Christmas in River Side Drive ». Chris Butler composed a piece for his band THE WAITRESSES entitled « Christmas Wrapping », which became their biggest Hit (later covered by SPICE GIRLS).

Gene Chandler's second LP for Brunswick suffers from comparisons to its predecessor, but consider how difficult it must have been to top an album padded with several tracks previously released as Constellation singles. The two singles here, "Those Were the Good Old Days" and "There Was a Time," are as good as anything he'd recorded for the label. Though the titles evoke similar themes, they're radically different songs. The first is (as expected) a good-time nostalgia tune with a sweet female chorus, but the second is a torrid horn-driven salute to the best dances of recent years; one looks back to the heady Chicago soul of the Impressions, while the other looks ahead to the increasingly intense urban funk of Curtis Mayfield. Chandler again displays an amazing mastery of voice control, adding brilliant tossed-off vocals between lines on the choruses…

For years, Led Zeppelin fans complained that there was one missing item in the group's catalog: a good live album. It's not that there weren't live albums to be had. The Song Remains the Same, of course, was a soundtrack of a live performance, but it was a choppy, uneven performance, lacking the majesty of the group at its peak. BBC Sessions was an excellent, comprehensive double-disc set of their live radio sessions, necessary for any Zeppelin collection (particularly because it contained three songs, all covers, never recorded anywhere else), but some carped that the music suffered from not being taped in front of a large audience, which is how they built their legacy – or, in the parlance of this triple-disc collection of previously unreleased live recordings compiled by Jimmy Page, How the West Was Won…

Why Not Here is not the title of this disc, although from a casual glance it might look like it is so. The device "Why not here" is actually the name of the duo formed by gambists Hille Perl and Friederike Heumann; they are joined on many pieces by lutenists Lee Santana and Michael Freimuth, and the latter pair even have several pieces to themselves. The "lyra viol" is not a special instrument like a viola da braccio, but refers to a specific way of playing the viol, as an instrument capable of harmony and melody rather than melody only, or used in a purely basso context.