Beyond Entrepreneurship Collins 1992

Domenico Scarlatti is a great composer disguised as a mediocre one. Part of the disguise is that he’s a formulaic miniaturist. It’s easy to dismiss his sonatas with the airy notion that if you’ve heard a few of them, you’ve heard them all. So pianists usually dispatch them as twee appetizers, played with a wink and a smirk, setting the table for meatier fare. But such dismissal dissolves under the sheer inventiveness of the sonatas. Like the protagonist in Ilse Aichinger’s “The Bound Man,” Scarlatti finds endless possibilities within his self-imposed confines.

Produced by Hooker's slide guitarist Roy Rogers–who knows what's right for him–this is Hooker's best 1990s effort. Rogers guides him through arrangements that recapture his past glories ("Boom Boom," with guest Jimmie Vaughan), sets him up for a giddy jam with the late Telecaster master Albert Collins ("Boogie at Russian Hill"), and teams him with Charlie Musselwhite for the guitar-voice-harmonica duet "Thought I Heard"–a performance as sad and eerie as disembodied moans in a Delta graveyard. There's also Hooker's first recorded performance on National steel guitar, the solo "Hittin' the Bottle Again". This album gets right to the heart of Hooker's music and stays there. A blues-lover's delight.

Like no other electric blues guitarist of his generation, Albert Collins illuminated a stage with incandescent energy whenever he plugged his lethat Telecaster into an amp and let fly with his frigid, minor-key-laced licks. The Texas-born Collins, whose seminal early recorded output included the icy instrumentals "Defrost", "Sno-Cone", and his signature workout "Frosty", had a bone-cutting sound that was immediately identifiable as his alone.

The flute playing of Patrick Gallois epitomizes several of the prime virtues of the French flute tradition; fine-spun liquidity of tone, delectable phrasing and exemplary breath control, and, when required, the ability to project and capture the attention of the listener, even across full blown orchestral tuttis. But these qualities aside, Gallois is an artist of evident distinction and innate musicality, and I have no hesitation in commending this new recording of works by Rodrigo and Khachaturian to any collector, who, like myself, may have only a limited appetite for the flute!

This double-disc set from Trojan includes classic ska, rocksteady and reggae tracks from Desmond Dekker & the Aces, Jimmy Cliff, Lee Perry & the Upsetters, the Melodians, Toots & the Maytals, Bob Marley & the Wailers, Ken Boothe, John Holt and many others. Though there are quite a few Jamaican classics missing from this history of the music, all the tracks included are quite solid.