Donald Keogh

Kamakiriad is the second solo album by Steely Dan artist Donald Fagen, released in 1993. It was his first collaboration with Steely Dan partner Walter Becker since 1986, on Rosie Vela's album Zazu. Becker played guitar and bass and produced the album. The album is a futuristic, optimistic eight-song cycle about the journey of the narrator in his high-tech car, the Kamakiri (Japanese for praying mantis). It was nominated for a Grammy Award for Album of the Year 1994.

Trumpeter Donald Byrd and baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams worked together on several recordings between 1958 and 1961, and The Cat Walk (released on LP in 1962) is among the best. A quintet setting, with pianist Duke Pearson (another longtime Byrd collaborator), bassist Laymon Jackson, and a lively Philly Joe Jones on drums joining the front line of Byrd and Adams, the sessions for The Cat Walk benefited from the writing and arrangement skills of Pearson, who contributes three compositions here, the impressive opener "Say You're Mine," "Duke's Mixture," and "Hello Bright Sunflower," which borrows its melodic structure from the opening bars of "Lullaby of Broadway" and features Byrd using a muted trumpet…

Byrd's third and last album for Orrin Keepnews' Landmark label – Part Three of his mainstream comeback – is another mostly straightahead affair with a sextet, sounding a few high-minded themes and taking a few unusual twists. Twice, Art Blakey is memorialized with drummer Carl Allen's sturdy application of the Blakey shuffle ("King Arthur," "Byrd Song"), but his drumming also salutes the M-Base brigade on the concluding "Not Necessarily the Blues." "A City Called Heaven," the spiritual-turned-title track with an nearly operatic vocal by mezzo-soprano Lorice Stevens, gets a moving extended modal treatment where Byrd has some rapid flurries that usually, but not always, hit their mark.

A companion album to Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live, Donald Fagen's The Nightfly Live captures a 2019 performance of the 1982 album by Steely Dan (or the Steely Dan Band, as Fagen chooses to call them in the years following Walter Becker's 2017 death). Original producer Gary Katz is on board to capture all the sonic intricacies of this concert, helping the live album to sound remarkably similar to its studio predecessor. There are differences, to be sure: the digital punch of the 1982 record has been warmed, the beats swing a bit more, Fagen's voice is thin and wispy, the backup singers take the lead on "Maxine," and there's a bit more emphasis on R&B rhythms – all elements that make this feel like a concert despite the precision of the production and performances. It's enough to keep Donald Fagen's The Nightfly Live fleet on its feet, which is enough to keep this record fun.

A portrait of the artist as a young man, The Nightfly is a wonderfully evocative reminiscence of Kennedy-era American life; in the liner notes, Donald Fagen describes the songs as representative of the kinds of fantasies he entertained as an adolescent during the late '50s/early '60s, and he conveys the tenor of the times with some of his most personal and least obtuse material to date. Continuing in the smooth pop-jazz mode favored on the final Steely Dan records, The Nightfly is lush and shimmering, produced with cinematic flair by Gary Katz; romanticized but never sentimental, the songs are slices of suburbanite soap opera, tales of space-age hopes (the hit "I.G.Y.") and Cold War fears (the wonderful "The New Frontier," a memoir of fallout-shelter love) crafted with impeccable style and sophistication.

For one of Bellini's less popular works, I Capuleti has seen a remarkable number of recordings, with some of the starriest stars in the operatic firmament taking part. A self-recommending and self-damning bastardized version from the 1960s in which the role of Romeo was transposed from mezzo to tenor (by Claudio Abbado) can still be found with Giacomo Aragall as Romeo, Renata Scotto (or Margarita Rinaldi, in another pirate) as Giulietta, and Luciano Pavarotti as Tebaldo. Muti's set with Gruberova and Baltsa manages to be both exciting and sterile at the same time, a couple of other entries have come and gone (where is the Sills?), and the only competition for this current release is RCA's with the marvelous, expressive Vesalina Kasarova as Romeo and the pretty, fragile Giulietta of Eva Mei. But for my ears, this one, handsomely led by Donald Runnicles, takes the lead.

This album explores music by three father-and-son generations of the Tcherepnin family of composers: Nikolai, Alexander and Ivan. Although each wrote a wide range of scores, from solo pieces to operas and ballets, this recording focuses on their chamber music, presenting pieces spanning 95 years. Nikolai’s works for violin and piano reveal a late-Romantic, post-Tchaikovskian sensibility, whereas those of Alexander have a more modern, twentieth-century touch, closer to the style of his friend Sergei Prokofiev (a student of Nikolai Tcherepnin). Ivan is represented by two works — early and late – for flute, clarinet and piano, which have an improvisatory and playful quality.