Alice Smith

Alice Cooper wasted little time following up the breakthrough success of Love It to Death with another album released the same year, Killer. Again, producer Bob Ezrin was on board and helps the group solidify their heavy rock (yet wide-ranging) style even further. The band's stage show dealt with the macabre, and such disturbing tracks as "Dead Babies" and the title track fit in perfectly. Other songs were even more exceptional, such as the perennial barnstorming concert standard "Under My Wheels," the melodic yet gritty "Be My Lover," and the tribute to their fallen friend Jim Morrison, "Desperado."

The man (and the band) who first brought shock rock to the masses, Alice Cooper became one of the most successful and influential acts of the '70s with their gritty but anthemic hard rock and a live show that delivered a rock & roll chamber of horrors, thrilling fans and cultivating outrage from authority figures (which made fans love them all the more). The name Alice Cooper originally referred to both the band and its lead singer (born Vincent Furnier).

Andrew Cyrille’s title Lebroba is a contraction of Leland, Brooklyn and Baltimore, birthplaces of the protagonists of an album bringing together three of creative music’s independent thinkers. Each of them made his first ECM appearance long ago: drummer Andrew Cyrille on Marion Brown’s Afternoon of a Georgia Faun (1970), trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith on his own classic Divine Love (1978), and guitarist Bill Frisell on Eberhard Weber’s Fluid Rustle (1979); these are, of course, players of enduring influence. Frisell contributed to Cyrille’s previous ECM disc The Declaration of Musical Independence, but Lebroba marks a first-time meeting for the guitarist and Wadada Leo Smith. A generous leader, Cyrille gives plenty of room to his cohorts, and all three musicians bring in compositions, with “Turiya”, Wadada’s elegant dedication to Alice Coltrane, unfurling slowly over its 17-minute duration. In his own pieces, including the title track and the closing “Pretty Beauty”, Cyrille rarely puts the focus on the drums, preferring to play melodically and interactively, sensitive to pitch and to space.

Some things never change – the sky is blue, two plus two equals four, the sun rises in the east, and Alice Cooper will make albums where he sneers out spooky lyrics as long as he can draw breath. Cooper hadn't had anything resembling a hit since the mid-'90s, but the man clearly had no desire to retire, and though he was 69 years old when he released Paranormal in 2017, he still sounded admirably spry and hadn't lost his voice or his charisma. Paranormal was released not long after Cooper reunited with surviving members of the original Alice Cooper band for some surprise shows, and the advance word on the album had it that Cooper was going to write and record with them.

1969 was the year that Alice Cooper released their first album, Pretties For You. It was a strange album for the time, and is still quite strange by today's standards. Amidst gems that really showed what was to come from the group, such as "sing low, sweet cheerio", "fields of regret", and "changing arranging", were strange tidbit ideas of songs clocking in at 2 minutes or less, featuring odd vocal stylings, unexpected and frequent tempo changes and start-stop rhythms. This live album, recorded at the record's release party is a great window into the band's workings at the time. The quality far surpasses that of the much easier to find toronto rock'n'roll revival set from the same time period, and features a much more diverse setlist.

Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier; February 4, 1948) is an American singer, songwriter, and actor whose career spans over fifty years. With his distinctive raspy voice and a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, deadly snakes, baby dolls, and dueling swords, Cooper is considered by music journalists and peers alike to be "The Godfather of Shock Rock". He has drawn equally from horror films, vaudeville, and garage rock to pioneer a macabre and theatrical brand of rock designed to shock people…