November 30, 2003
PLAYLISTThe Year in Boxes: CD's and DVD's Learn to Share
or the 21st-century boxed set, music isn't always enough. It's a multimedia music business now, and as video-era bands amass box-worthy archives, DVD's with video clips are beginning to take their place alongside hits, outtakes, rarities and live cuts. Here, the pop music critics of The New York Times review this year's boxed sets of three discs or more that include previously unreleased material. Sets that have already been reviewed in The Times, including Led Zeppelin's "How the West Was Won" and Miles Davis's "In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk Complete," are not included. Prices are suggested retail.
'COUNT BASIE AND HIS ORCHESTRA: AMERICA'S NO. 1 BAND! (THE COLUMBIA YEARS)' (Columbia Legacy, four CD's, $45) What can you say at this point about the band that set the high-water mark for jazz rhythm — a powerful model for all that came after it, from the Modern Jazz Quartet to the less temperate beboppers and on through the present day? How's this: you need the sly, ecstatic music collected here more than you know. The soloists are as spectacular as the guitar-bass-drums engine room: the saxophonist Lester Young at his laconic best; the trombonist Dickie Wells; Jimmy Rushing shouting the blues; and the trumpeter Buck Clayton. The records are from all over, under various names and for various occasions (a few backing up Billie Holiday), all from 1936 to 1951. But it's what's called "old testament" Basie, in which hard swing and group dynamics were of paramount importance.
BEN RATLIFF
BJORK: 'LIVEBOX' (One Little Indian, four CD's and one DVD, $58.98) Bjork can command the attention of a rock festival audience without deviating from her avant-garde vision — a talent that has induced twinges of envy in many onlooking musicians. These chronologically arranged live CD's testify to her songwriting, performing and arranging brilliance, particularly the discs from her later "Homogenic" and "Vespertine" tours. Though the five-song DVD seems perfunctory at first glance, it offers helpful visuals like Bjork singing "Aurora" while backed by an Inuit choir, Zeena Parkins on harp and MC Schmidt of Matmos providing percussion by walking in a box of rock salt. But for those new to Bjork's music, it's better to start with her DVD "Volumen"; for dedicated fans, more than half of this material is available elsewhere.
NEIL STRAUSS
DAVID BOWIE: 'SOUND + VISION' (EMI/Virgin, four CD's, $69.98) Now that Mr. Bowie has embraced his 80's work, his out-of-print boxed set "Sound and Vision" has been updated and redesigned. Twenty-three songs have been added, mostly from his 80's and early 90's work (though it stops short of one his best recent songs, "Little Wonder"). The result is an alternative history of one of rock's greatest brainiacs, depicting not the best of Bowie but the breadth of Bowie. The CD's mix Bowie hits, alternate takes, live performances, German-language versions, soundtrack cuts and even songs from his band Tin Machine. No single CD here is great from front to back, but they all offer an unexpected element of Bowie's oeuvre to be reevaluated.
NEIL STRAUSS
'MUST I PAINT YOU A PICTURE? THE ESSENTIAL BILLY BRAGG' (Elektra/Rhino, three CD's, $26.98) It's telling that this celebration of Mr. Bragg's 20-year career is named after one of his love songs. Mr. Bragg is best known for protest-minded songs, from his early hit "Between the Wars" to his timeless settings of Woody Guthrie lyrics with Wilco to his monarchy-smashing "Take Down the Union Jack." But on this strong collection of his raw, thickly accented folk and rock, it becomes clear that Mr. Bragg is at his best when blending political consciousness with romantic self-absorption. For him, both subjects revolve around the same emotion: compassion. A bonus CD includes versions of songs by Love and John Cale, in addition to a collaboration with the soul-blues singer Ted Hawkins.
NEIL STRAUSS
'BRIGHT EYES VINYL BOX SET' (Saddle Creek, seven vinyl LP's, $39.98) This isn't the exhaustive collection that Conor Oberst fanatics have been waiting for, but it does include five rare tracks alongside vinyl versions of early releases. Mr. Oberst began recording as Bright Eyes when he was 15, in 1995, and every year brings a new batch of songs, each more ambitious and more fully realized than the last. The most recent recordings, from 2001, are passionate and wildly original, full of shifting meanings and inventive arrangements (for this last improvement, thank the producer Mike Mogis). Mr. Oberst's busted-up voice suggests not hopelessness but its exhausting opposite, and his lyrics chronicle a world in which something is always about to happen: "Each time a faucet opens, words are spoken, the water runs away/ And I hear your name. No, nothing has changed." The only problem here is the lack of a booklet: no listener should have to navigate this forest without the guidance of a lyric sheet, a biography and recording notes.
KELEFA SANNEH
BUZZCOCKS: 'INVENTORY' (EMI, 14 CD singles, $50.98) Punk may have (briefly) been anti-materialistic, but record collectors never were. "Inventory" reissues the 14 singles (33 tracks) that Buzzcocks released from 1977 to 1981, reproducing all the sleeves (though not the labels). Buzzcocks brought moments of art-punk angularity to its blueprint for pop-punk, compressing post-adolescent cynicism and heartbreak into buoyant three-minute sneers. But all the music would have fit onto two CD's; 24 songs are on the 2001 reissue of "Singles Going Steady." This package is for obsessive collectors, offering all the inconvenience of vinyl with little of the charm.
JON PARELES
JOHNNY CASH: 'UNEARTHED' (American/Lost Highway, five CD's, $79.98) The 64 unreleased recordings on "Unearthed," all cut in the last 10 years of Cash's life during his collaboration with the producer Rick Rubin, are too good just to lump together in a boxed set. Listening to the spare, moving reflections on life and mortality here — particularly "Singer of Songs," "The Caretaker" and duets with Joe Strummer, Nick Cave and Fiona Apple — one wishes that the label had pulled a Tupac and let the material trickle out one CD at a time. Of course, there are 50 more unreleased songs in the can. And if they are anywhere near as good as the material on this set (which also includes a single-CD best-of culled from his previous four CD's with Mr. Rubin), then one can only come to the conclusion that Cash, at 71, was taken in his prime.
NEIL STRAUSS
'MOSAIC SELECT: PAUL CHAMBERS' (Mosaic, three CD's, $39) John Coltrane presented some early examples of his composing on a Paul Chambers album from 1956 called "Whims of Chambers," made when they were bandmates in Miles Davis's quintet and preserved here. There's promise in the writing, but even better is the sense of familiarity, since the drummer Philly Joe Jones, another member of the Davis quintet, was on the session, too. Chambers was a remarkable bassist; his strong pizzicato functioned both within a groove and as a surface detail. So it made sense for him to make music with the bass as a frontline instrument, as he did with "Bass on Top," another of the five albums included here, on which he also used the guitarist Kenny Burrell and the pianist Hank Jones.
BEN RATLIFF
RHYS CHATHAM: 'AN ANGEL MOVES TOO FAST TO SEE' (Table of the Elements, three CD's, $65.98) Overtones mean everything to Rhys Chatham, a composer who loves to let complex sustained sounds hover, accumulate and collide in midair for vertiginous psychoacoustic effects. When he decided in 1977 to use the overtones created by loud retuned electric guitars and a rock rhythm section, and to perform at CBGB as well as art spaces, he unleashed the New York noise-rock that lives on in bands like Sonic Youth. This retrospective includes "Two Gongs" from 1971, an hour of eerie, oceanic overtones from Chinese gongs; pioneering noise-rock that turns one chord into a maelstrom; pieces for brass band and drums; and his 1989 "An Angel Moves Too Fast to See" for 100 electric guitars, which uses them not as an army but as a swarm.
JON PARELES
'NAT KING COLE: THE CLASSIC SINGLES' (Capitol, four CD's, $69.98) One hundred singles by Cole, in every pose it took to have a radio hit between 1941 and 1964: elegant jazz-trio swing, Spanish-language ballads, light-classical piano and orchestral sounds as designed by Les Baxter; hard-nosed, swanky big-band backing arranged by Billy May and Nelson Riddle; and, of course, "Mona Lisa" and "The Christmas Song." They provide a valuable way to understand Cole, who belongs to the history of the radio at least as much as to the history of the LP. Each disc is tremendously long, and they grow increasingly commercial; you'll probably find the one you like and stick with it.
BEN RATLIFF
MILES DAVIS: 'THE COMPLETE JACK JOHNSON SESSIONS' (Columbia Legacy, five CD's, $69.98) Miles Davis was fascinated by Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone and searching for his own way to rock when he made "A Tribute to Jack Johnson" in 1970. His main strategy was to set up unswerving bass and drum foundations below volatile, aggressive, even vicious guitar and trumpet, sometimes adding unearthly keyboard sounds. Davis had his musicians vamp though one-chord shuffles, 12-bar blues and three-chord rock until the music began to seethe and snap. Then his producer, Teo Macero, cut and pasted the two long tracks of the original album, which complete the fifth disc. There's some wheel-spinning in this lengthy set. But the sessions reveal how grooves evolved from metronomic to funky, and they compel new admiration for the resourceful drumming of Billy Cobham and Jack DeJohnette and for John McLaughlin, who kept finding new ways to make his guitar slink around the rhythm or claw and shriek right through it.
JON PARELES
NEIL DIAMOND: 'STAGES: PERFORMANCES 1970-2002' (Columbia, five CD's and one DVD, $59.98) A new live set from Mr. Diamond is hardly a rarity, but "Stages" is a well-conceived addition to the canon. Great care has been taken to avoid overlap with Mr. Diamond's other albums, yet the discs capture all the romantic crescendos, glitter-encrusted folk and modest jokes of a classic Neil Diamond show. Two of the discs document a Las Vegas concert from 2002; two others span his career, including covers of songs by Bob Dylan, Elton John and the Beach Boys; and the fifth CD — the only excruciating one here — consists entirely of Christmas songs. Finally, the DVD includes footage from a recent Dublin show and a loving documentary of his band's madcap antics on the road, like playing golf.
NEIL STRAUSS
'GOODBYE, BABYLON' (Dust-to-Digital, six CD's, $109.95) Perhaps the season's most astonishing boxed set: six discs of gospel music and sermons from the first half of the 20th century, plus a 200-page book (including a history and transcription of every song), packaged with cotton balls in a cedar box. (Available online at www.dust-digital.com.) Many of the great American singers turn up, from Mahalia Jackson to the Carter Family, but even more impressive are the scores of relatively unknown performers who set up shop at the crossroads of the sacred and the secular. The sixth disc compiles sermons, including "That White Mule of Sin" (1929) by the Rev. George Jones, a confounding mishmash of prayer and parody. The so-called reverend sounds more than a little like Captain Beefheart, and he ascends to absurd heights of incomprehensibility ("Saddle up the road every whichaway and every whichabout," he declaims) while Sister Jones offers an updated version of the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father, who art in heaven/ The white man owed me 10 dollars, and I didn't get but seven/ Thy kingdom come, thy will be done/ I took that or I wouldn't have got none/ Amen."
KELEFA SANNEH
'MOSAIC SELECT: BENNIE GREEN' (Mosaic, three CD's, $39) A trombonist from Chicago, Green came up through the famous early-40's edition of the Earl Hines band, which included the primary architects of bebop, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. He went on to play with Charlie Ventura and Duke Ellington, but always as a trombonist in a big band, until he began making these charming records under his own name in the late 50's and early 60's. Green's style wasn't bebop, though: it suggested a throwback to the swing trombonists Trummy Young and J. C. Higginbotham — rhythmically clear and unhurried, with a slight New Orleans shout around the edges. Surrounding him were some of the great hard-bop players of the day (including Sonny Clark, Elvin Jones and Charlie Rouse), and the intersection of cool and hot styles makes these five records, little heard and long out of print, priceless.
BEN RATLIFF
GUIDED BY VOICES: 'HARDCORE UFO'S: REVELATIONS, EPIPHANIES AND FAST FOOD IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE' (Matador, five CD's and one DVD, $65.98) In the future, boxed sets will be an anachronism, replaced by single-CD collections of an act's entire oeuvre as compressed computer files. When that happens, however, Robert Pollard will still need a boxed set for the thousand-plus songs he has written or recorded, an impressive sum for a singer few people know. "Hardcore UFO's" is his third boxed set (a fourth is already in the works), and features both the best and worst of the stream-of-consciousness classic-rock of his band Guided by Voices. One CD collects greatest hits, attesting to the band's catchy low-fidelity genius; three other discs compile unreleased songs, live tracks and out-of-print singles, which range from spectacular to torturous. Also included are the band's rare and uncomfortably coherent 1986 debut album and a DVD with the documentary "Watch Me Jumpstart."
NEIL STRAUSS
'KENTUCKY MOUNTAIN MUSIC' (Yazoo, seven CD's, $89.98) Did the entire population of Kentucky once play fiddle? Everyone except the banjo players. Or so it seems on this exhaustive set of commercial and Library of Congress recordings from the 1920's and 1930's, a trove of Appalachian music: square-dance music, Americanized Celtic ballads, gospel songs, banjo breakdowns. Remarkable sonic reclamation has been done to digitize this music, which faces down hard work and sad times — from heartbreak to mining disasters — with stoic voices and flying fingers.
JON PARELES
'MJQ: THE COMPLETE MODERN JAZZ QUARTET PRESTIGE AND PABLO RECORDINGS' (Fantasy, four CD's, $66.97) The set begins at the dawning of the great, long-running jazz group, with tracks from 1952 and 1955, previously issued on 78's, and the entirety of the LP's "Django" and "Concorde," as well as an album with the young and rhythmically astute Sonny Rollins as sideman. Then it leaps ahead to the 1980's, when John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath and Connie Kay had become gray eminences but still played with perfectly equal application of energy, almost without need of microphones. The band had become a jewel, mixing unusual concision with deep blues and beautiful swing, outliving initial suspicions about its tendency toward baroque structure and nonjazz dynamics. The live reunions preserved here, and the two studio albums, show a band that had lost nothing despite age and even a seven-year hiatus.
BEN RATLIFF
'THE COMPLETE VERVE GERRY MULLIGAN CONCERT BAND SESSIONS' (Mosaic, four CDs, $68) Here are all five albums by Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band, each a major accomplishment. This music — both studio and live (including the exciting "At the Village Vanguard") comes from the early 60's, when Mulligan decided he wanted a large ensemble for art's sake, not for dancing. What resulted had plenty of brains and subtlety. It's smart, intense music, and Mulligan was breathtaking back then. But this set should also strengthen the reputation of the trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, the band's principal arranger and practical boss, whose grainy solos, full of bright, slangy ideas and harmonic acuity, have stayed potent.
BEN RATLIFF
'MUZIK CITY: THE STORY OF TROJAN' (Trojan Records/Sanctuary, four CD's, $49.98) A brief history of reggae's early years, compiled by the label that helped put Jamaican music on the British pop charts. The first two discs compile hits from the late 1960's and 1970's, including Bob Marley's "Duppy Conqueror" and Big Youth's proto-rap classic "S.90 Skank," which begins with the snarl of a motorcycle. The other two discs add rarities and novelties from both sides of the Atlantic; smooth ballads sit side by side with Lee Perry's "Bush Tea," which is more or less three minutes of hiccupping and heavy breathing over a bone-dry beat.
KELEFA SANNEH
'NO DOUBT BOOM BOX' (Interscope, two CD's and two DVD's, $39.99) A collection that tracks this California band's decade-long evolution from irritating to irresistible. One CD compiles the singles, from the ridiculous ("Trapped in a Box," 1992) to the sublime ("Hella Good," 2001). Another CD, which gathers remixes and outtakes, is mainly disappointing. The DVD of a 1997 concert captures the band's exuberance, but can't overcome weak songs and mannered singing. Luckily, both have improved over time, and you can watch the development on a second DVD, which collects the band's always-impressive music videos: in "Underneath It All" (2002), Ms. Stefani stars in a fashion show and wins a psychedelic bicycle race, all the while singing a graceful reggae love song.
KELEFA SANNEH
'NO THANKS!: THE 70'S PUNK REBELLION' (Rhino, four CD's, $64.98) In its early years, punk was an uprising and a throwback, a movement and a fad, a novelty and a new paradigm, an art statement and a kick in the head. "No Thanks!" is an all-but-comprehensive selection from a time that's too often simplified in hindsight. The album embraces punk precursors, punk and early new wave, and it touches on jams (Television), glamour (Blondie), goth (Siouxsie and the Banshees), pop (Joe Jackson), discord (Pere Ubu) and unsprung anarchy (the Fall), placing major-label releases alongside do-it-yourself singles. The Sex Pistols are absent, the chronology gets scrambled and a New Yorker could complain about a slight bias toward Los Angeles and London, but the mix of hall-of-famers and nearly forgotten one-shots sums up an era.
JON PARELES
'MOSAIC SELECT: JOHN PATTON' (Mosaic, three CD's, $39) The organist (Big) John Patton, who died last year, made a number of deep-soul, organ-and-tenor albums for Blue Note through the 1960's and resurfaced in the 80's through John Zorn's advocacy. Those five albums — excluding "Let 'Em Roll" and "Got a Good Thing Goin,' " both available as single CD's — hadlong been out of print, until now. Saxophonists (Harold Vick, Fred Jackson, Junior Cook, Harold Alexander) come and go through the records, and the guitarist Grant Green plays his signature licks on cue, but it's the connection between Patton and his drummer, Ben Dixon, that counts. Dixon plays light, dancing rhythms, as if his drum set were a giant tambourine; they complement Patton's bouncing figures perfectly.
BEN RATLIFF
'THE ESSENTIAL BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN' (Columbia, three CD's, $24.98) One could gripe about the handful of essential Springsteen songs missing from this collection (two CD's of hits and a bonus disc of rarities), but taken on their own these discs are undeniably great, far surpassing his 1995 "Greatest Hits" CD. The best-of CD's sample a few tracks off each of his albums, up to "American Skin (41 Shots)" from "Live in New York City." But the real lures here are a few of the rarities. So if you don't want to buy the same Springsteen songs all over again, at the very least go to iTunes and download his sweat-drenched live version of the Jimmy Cliff song "Trapped" from the bonus disc.
NEIL STRAUSS
TALKING HEADS: 'ONCE IN A LIFETIME' (Rhino, three CD's and one DVD, $59.98) Talking Heads' music was always as exuberantly nutty and heartfelt as it was conceptual. As usual, the package is self-consciously arty: this time, an awkward 16 3/8-inch by 5 1/4-inch book with paintings by Russian representatives to the 2003 Venice Biennale. The three CD's overlap and expand on the two-CD collection "Popular Favorites 1976-1992: Sand in the Vaseline," tracing the band's path from lean, quizzical rock to enigmatic funk to straightforward rock with Afro-Caribbean touches. David Byrne's voice gradually descends from yelp to tenor as he keeps pondering the oddities of human behavior and the craving for meaning and home; new alternate takes show that the band opted, wisely, for cooler vocals over worked-up ones. The DVD adds three songs to the 1988 "Storytelling Giant" collection, which (arty again) interspersed people's reminiscences with the clips. But there's only one live song in the whole collection, leaving a concept for another boxed set.
JON PARELES
'CHROME, SMOKE AND BBQ: THE ZZ TOP BOX' (Warner Brothers, four CD's, $49.99 or $63.99) When ZZ Top was founded in Texas, in 1969, the elements quickly congealed: Billy Gibbons's thick-as-gravy guitar lines fit with the rhythm section of the bassist Dusty Hill and the drummer Frank Beard, who slyly nudged the bluesy songs toward funk. The 1970's classics sound great (especially the thunderous groove of "Just Got Paid" and the unexpected rhythmic breaks in "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide") and the synthesizer-embellished hits from the 1980's have held up surprisingly well. A fourth disc includes novelties: a Spanish-language version of "Francene," a wild dance version of "Give It Up." And for a few extra bucks, you can get a version packaged to look like a roadside smokehouse.
KELEFA SANNEH