Out of my Head Parks

Adventures in cutting-edge ideas about consciousness, from bestselling non-fiction writer Tim Parks.

Join Snufkin in this musical adventure about restoring harmony and balance to Moominvalley, protecting it from the industrious Park Keeper.

Drummer and composer Kendrick Scott kicked off his Blue Note contract four years ago with We Are the Drum. Expertly produced by Derrick Hodge, Scott’s creative confidant and musical brother, and featuring a stunning guest performance by vocalist Lizz Wright, it earned rave reviews and reiterated how Oracle, Scott’s long-running working group, is one of the most thoughtfully powerful jazz bands of its generation.

My Name Is Buddy: Another Record by Ry Cooder is the thirteenth studio album by Ry Cooder. It is the second social-political concept album by Ry Cooder. Cooder has described it as the second in a trilogy that began with Chávez Ravine and concluded with I, Flathead. The album is packaged in a small booklet that includes a brief story and drawing to accompany each song. Both the songs and the stories relate tales from the viewpoint of the characters, Buddy Red Cat, Lefty Mouse, and Reverend Tom Toad. The liner notes ask listeners/readers to join them as they "Journey through time and space in days of labor, big bosses, farm failures, strikes, company cops, sundown towns, hobos, and trains… the America of yesteryear".

Unlike other labels subjected to exhaustive multi-disc retrospectives like this whopping ten-disc Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records – The First Fifty Years, Warner Brothers never embodied a scene or sound: they've always embodied what a major label should be – a dominant force that chronicles and dictates the sound of the mainstream. Coming out at the tail-end of 2008, when the influence of major labels is on a slow steady decline, Revolutions in Sound can be seen as a portrait of a time that's beginning to recede into the past: a time when there was such a thing as mass entertainment, when the pop audience all shared a common bond of hit records they either loved or rallied against. Perhaps the greatest things about this monumental box set is that it captures that colossus while also illustrating that for a while, majors did take risks. Of course, Warner was the riskiest of all the majors, never held back by an anti-rock & roll sourpuss like Mitch Miller, who struggled to keep CBS out of the tumult of the '60s (this with no less than Bob Dylan as the label's flagship rock artist). Instead, Warner embraced the underground, recording some of the strangest to shake out of the '60s, and that adventure fits a label that turned to rock & roll to help establish themselves as a real player at the turn of the '60s.

rigid Mae Power’s music never quite settles on solid ground. The Irish singer-songwriter flits between past and present; between traditional and modern forms; between the heaven in her voice and the earthbound epiphanies of her words. Her last album was called The Two Worlds. I’d say she inhabits a few more than that.