A to Z
BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB
Buena Vista Social Club WORLD CIRCUIT/BMG
10/10
Expanded 25th-anniversary edition of Grammy-winning Cuban classic
The combination of Ry Cooder’s meticulous and dynamic production, a cast of veteran musicians who seemed to have emerged from a land that time forgot, a clutch of classic songs from the pre-revolutionary golden age of Cuban music and a suitably nostalgic feature film by Wim Wenders served to make Buena Vista Social Club the best-selling world music album of all time. Many of the ageing musicians involved have since passed on, but as you would expect with such timeless music, everything still sounds as beguilingly evocative a quarter of a century later, whether it’s the smoky atmospherics of Compay Segundo’s “Chan Chan”, the sweetly soulful bolero singing of Ibrahim Ferrer or the exquisite Latin jazz piano playing of Rubén González.
Extras: 9/10. A generous 11 new songs not included on the original album, alternative takes of eight more tracks and a 40-page book, updating and expanding this reviewer’s 1996 liner notes. NIGEL WILLIAMSON
JOHN COLTRANE
Another Side Of John Coltrane CRAFT
8/10
Early sideman steps, mostly with Miles and Monk
John Coltrane’s journeyman mid-’50s has been examined before, but this collection focuses on audible growth under Miles and then Monk. He’s in Miles’ quintet on “’Round Midnight”, briskly busy next to the trumpeter’s shadow-streaked, romantic weariness, and bulling through already hurtling music elsewhere. Then Miles sacked him, and Monk became his finishing school in a transformative, unrecorded residency at New York’s Five Spot. Studio evidence includes “Monk’s Mood”, with the pianist in his world of slanting angles and stride survivals, and Coltrane imbibing his sense of time and space in a slow, dreamy duet. “Epistrophy” is tense and nervous ensemble playing, Monk meets Munch. Coltrane’s challengingly dense streams on “Trinkle, Tinkle” would soon be termed “sheets of sound”. By 1961, back with Miles, he’s firmly on his own path after a strenuous discipleship, and six years from death. There’s a lot of great music here.
Extras: 6/10. Liner notes, two extra tracks on optionally coloured vinyl. NICK HASTED
BILLY FURY
Three Saturdays With Billy TOP SOUNDS
7/10
Archive radio sessions recalling past glories
