Billie Holiday

The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music (Buddha);
Say It Loud!: A Celebration of Black Music in America (Rhino)
There have been plenty of projects that have sought to tell the African-American story through music -- from big projects like Ken Burns's Jazz series for PBS to more modest single-CD jazz and hip-hop compilations. But you'd be hard pressed to find a fancier (and more expensive) collection than the Harry Belafonte-endorsed Long Road to Freedom. Long it certainly is, with no fewer than 80 tracks on five CDs plus a DVD. And it aims "to accurately portray the music of Black Americans from the period of their earliest arrival in the 'New World' in the 17th century up through the spirituals, blues, and folk music that heralded the great cultural explosion of musical expression at the dawn of the 20th century." I couldn't have said it better. Pulling that off, however, isn't quite so easy, as Belafonte and his cohort discovered. But they've done a great job of collecting a wide range of material -- from Ashanti war chants from Ghana to Belafonte himself singing "Nobody's Business, Lord, But Mine" in 1968. The set comes with a 140-page hardcover book to help fill in the blanks between songs; I do wonder, though, whether this needed to be such an academic exercise given that much of this music was originally sung for the pure joy of it.

Rhino's version of a history of African-American music forgoes fancy packaging and long-winded liner notes in favor of lots and lots of music. Six full discs to be exact, with everyone from Scott Joplin to Run-DMC to Robert Johnson to John Coltrane. True, Say It Loud! pretty much starts at the dawn of the 20th century, and it doesn't try to tie its selections back to African-Americans' slave past. But the range of music and artists here might make you wonder whether America's other cultures had anything useful to contribute to music in the 20th century. Everything, even classic rock and roll, is here. And there are no study sessions -- it's here to be celebrated.
-- Matt Ashare

The Velvet Underground, Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes (Polydor)
The Velvet Underground: proto-punks or the Grateful Dead's lost cousins? The official recorded evidence used to come down heavily on the former side; VU bootleggers, on the other hand, have always concentrated on the group's long, dizzying, almost free-form live jams. The Velvets' label, Polydor, has finally gotten into that side of their repertoire with Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes -- a three-CD set of indistinct, previously unheard tapes recorded at nine 1969 shows by Robert Quine and built around three massive versions of "Sister Ray," one of them 38 minutes long.

The tone of the set is strangely relaxed; the band stretch out their songs, slow them down, noodle all over them, and then sometimes let drummer Maureen Tucker go feral. Lou Reed invents new lyrics on the spot, and they try out an open-ended dance number, "Follow the Leader," that never made it to a recording before this. Whether they were actually better live than in the studio, as they believed, is debatable, but they were definitely different, even night to night. Chalk one up for the Dead side. On the other hand, Quine (who went on to play with Reed in the early '80s) would make his name playing guitar in one of New York's greatest punk bands, Richard Hell & the Voidoids. So go figure.
-- Douglas Wolk

Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia (1933-1944)
These 230 tracks spread over 10 CDs in a deluxe fake lizard-skin box are the ultimate gift for the Billie Holiday lover. (For a list price of $169.98, they'd better be.) The opulence of the packaging aside, this Columbia set represents Billie at her purest -- not the social-protest tragedian of the anti-lynching "Strange Fruit," or the ravaged-voiced jazz martyr of the late recordings. Rather, it's the joyful Holiday of "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" and novelty trifles like "You Mother's Son-in-Law," in addition to scatterings from the "American Songbook" by Gershwin, Porter, Arlen, and others. She's Louis Armstrong's greatest immediate disciple on any instrument, reshaping rhythm and melody, haunting every lyric, trivial or profound, with that heady, hornlike voice.

These sides are significant for another reason: they're some of the finest small-group sessions in jazz, with Holiday playing off personnel assembled by producer John Hammond from the Basie, Ellington, and Goodman bands -- among them Teddy Wilson, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, Buck Clayton, Cootie Williams, Chu Berry, Harry Carney, and, above all, Lester Young. That floating, mournful tenor-sax tone is the perfect complement to Billie (in an odd way, Lester's relaxed lyricism plays the female to the male of Billie's Armstrong-like swing). If you need to economize, consider that Columbia has also released the set in an abbreviated, two-CD, 30-track set.
-- Jon Garelick

Kiss, Box Set (Mercury)
Kiss may have retired from the road last year, but members of the Kiss Army know better than to fret: the wave of merchandise, at least, will never end. Available in either a standard cigar box or a more elaborate guitar case, this five-disc set skimps on the fake blood but does include 30 unreleased tracks and an exhaustive 120-page color booklet. And it's all about the music (as much as anything Kiss can be, of course), from Paul and Gene's earliest solo demos to the band's New Year's Eve Y2K performance of "Rock and Roll All Nite."

Pop scholars will get the biggest kick out of the three tracks from the legendary unreleased major-label album by Paul and Gene's pre-Kiss band, Wicked Lester, who rock an early version of "She" marred only by a bizarre Jethro Tull-sounding flute part. The making of the masterpiece Destroyer is meticulously outlined with a series of demos, including a "God of Thunder" prototype with Paul instead of Gene on lead vocals. The band's pop-metal '80s output is as much fun as anything else from that period; they sound relatively uninspired in the '90s until Ace and Peter return to kick out the oldies. By the end of the set, it's clear that you didn't always get the best from Kiss on record -- but you did get a brand new mess of good-time-sex anthems pretty much every year, with more than a few flashes of brilliance.
-- Sean Richardson

The Fela Anikulapo-Kuti reissue series on MCA
The joke used to be that if you wanted to find most of the albums by the late Afrobeat king Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, you had to go to the record store at the main bus station in Lagos, Nigeria. Between the early '70s and his 1992 retirement from recording, Fela and his groups Africa 70 and Egypt 80 banged out a new album every few months: fiery rants and news reports on Nigerian politics and African culture, set to a swaggering, horn-driven groove. (In the earlier years, "album" generally meant one 15-minute song on one side, one on the other; later, it meant one half-hour song split across two sides.) Most were never made available in America, but over the last two years, MCA has reissued almost the entire Fela catalogue on 25 discs, with two original albums on almost every CD.

They're not all good, but some of this year's batch are spectacular. Upside Down is one of the funkiest riffs Fela ever wrote, with vocals by his political mentor Sandra Isodore, and it's paired with Music of Many Colours, a collaboration with American jazz vibraphonist Roy Ayers. Open & Close/Afrodisiac collects two deliriously groove-intensive early albums. And even veteran Fela fans may be surprised by Koola Lobitos, which documents his '60s evolution from high-life entertainer to James Brown devotee and political agitator.
-- Douglas Wolk

Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond 1964-1969 (Rhino)
As the authors of mid-'60s Technicolor explosions like "Making Time" and "Biff! Bang! Pow!", the Creation once described their brand of tumultuous power pop as "red with purple flashes." Although that description is as vivid and as accurate as anything that's been said about the UK outfit then, it could as easily have applied to the exciting music being made by Creation contemporaries like the Action, Move, and Small Faces, as well as lesser-known peacocks the Smoke, the Birds, and a host of others.

That's why even to those already familiar with some or all of the above, Rhino's four-CD sequel to its landmark 1998 Nuggets reissue-and-then-some box set is a revelation -- 109 of them, in fact. Spanning countries as far flung as Brazil, Japan, Sweden, and Germany, the material here -- garage psych, Mod-ified Tamla soul, freakbeat pop -- is an embarrassment of long-buried riches newly unearthed and bathed in feedback, melody, and delirium. There's the Eyes' quaking masterstroke "When the Night Falls," the stealth bomb of Fire's "Father's Name Was Dad," the gonzo psych of the Mickey Finn's "Garden of My Mind." And that's just the first disc.

On '98's Nuggets, you could hear the sonic sneer and garage-blues leer of the early Stones reverberating through the loins of American kids starting bands in basements. Here it's the auto-destruct pop-art heart of the early Who that detonates and drives the music. Looming alongside these twin totems in spirit is rock historian Lenny Kaye. Who could have predicted that when the future Patti Smith guitarist decided to give a gang of obscure longhairs and proto-punks their due on the original Nuggets double LP, in 1972, it would trigger an ongoing excavation that's still yielding treasures 30 years later?
-- Jonathan Perry

Joy Division, Heartandsoul (Rhino)
Given the abundance of live and compilation Joy Division albums available, it's sometimes hard to believe that the influential post-punk melancholics released only one full-length -- Unknown Pleasures -- in their time together. A stark debut filled with rumbling bass lines, mechanical drill drumming, and doomed vocals and lyrics is just one of the goodies included on the box set Heartandsoul, which has been available since 1998 in the UK but only now is getting domestic release. The four-disc tour de force includes JD's posthumous Pleasures follow-up, Closer, along with alternate versions of tracks, rarities, and an entire disc devoted to unreleased live tracks.

There is, as you'd expect, some song duplication (four versions of "She's Lost Control" is a bit much), but great care has been taken to ensure that JD completists don't have their previous collections rendered obsolete. The extensive and exhaustive photos, lyrics, and first-hand stories/interviews in the liner notes are beautifully presented. And disc three, which is filled with unreleased outtakes and alternate versions of classics highlighted by a touchingly hopeful early version of "Atmosphere," demonstrates the remarkably fast transition JD made from raw-riffed punk-charged rockers to subtler purveyors of nuanced keyboards and melodic gloom. Although vocalist Ian Curtis's 1980 suicide and the subsequent formation of New Order at times overshadow the group's legacy, this excellent collection proves that Joy Division can stand on their own.
-- Annie Zaleski

Charley Patton: Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues (Revenant)
No musician's collected works have ever fallen into such adoring hands, for Charley Patton has been honored by a lavish and gloriously obsessive presentation. The box is designed as a deluxe 78-album package, each CD affixed to a cardboard replica of an old shellac and housed in a separate sleeve. Long and learned notes precede the music, the seventh disc offers oral histories, and performances by related artists are sprinkled throughout. It is all exquisitely designed.

But . . . Charley who?

Well, Charley Patton (1887-1934) was a locally famous and influential subsistence bluesman in Mississippi. He hardly fits among the blues names of popular imagination -- certainly he's not as storied as Robert Johnson, or Blind Willie Johnson, or even his contemporary Tommy Johnson. The late guitarist John Fahey, who co-founded Revenant, wrote an entire book about Patton (it's reprinted among the trophies in this set), and blues scholars are struck by the unique sound of his vocals (which survived in Howlin' Wolf) and the percussive attack of his guitar. Those attuned to digital precision will find Patton's recordings difficult. His dialect, his diction, and the relatively primitive equipment used to record him conspire to make words and phrases obscure even to musicologists. Although this box is clearly for those who already know and adore Patton, it also makes a useful case that he is worth knowing. And it is beautiful to behold.
-- Grant Alden

Elvis Costello

The Elvis Costello reissue series on Rhino
There's no better proof that Elvis Costello is the best songwriter to emerge from the punk and new-wave era -- and no better way to satisfy fans of classic pop -- than this foursome of a compilation (The Very Best of Elvis Costello) and three albums (My Aim Is True, All This Useless Beauty, Spike) from various points in his career. There are enough demos and rarities tacked onto the original albums' song line-ups to thrill all the diehard collectors who already have everything on bootlegs. The Very Best offers a whopping 42 tracks embracing Elvis's angry-young-man years, his honky-tonking, his classic crooning late-period pure pop, and more.

There's never been a better debut than the bitter and sweet My Aim Is True, where "Alison," "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes," "Less Than Zero," and "Watching the Detectives" proclaimed Costello's talent as a guitarist, singer, and writer. Spike became his best-selling CD thanks to "Veronica," the 1989 single he authored with Paul McCartney. And All This Useless Beauty is his overlooked masterpiece. Costello recorded some of his most unabashedly romantic and adventurous material on that album even while breaking up with his long-time musical partners the Attractions. Tie all these titles up in paper and a bow and they're the best do-it-yourself box set of the year.
-- Ted Drozdowski

The Miles Davis reissues on Legacy
At long last, Columbia/Legacy has declared a moratorium on its Miles Davis reissue campaign, which it initiated in 1997 and which has, by now, seen re-released, or released for the first time on CD, almost everything the Master recorded for the label. The last burst includes five titles featuring John Coltrane ('Round About Midnight, Milestones, Miles Davis at Newport 1958, Jazz at the Plaza, and Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Best of the Complete Columbia Recordings); a previously unreleased two-CD live recording, Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970): It's About That Time; and The Complete "In a Silent Way" Sessions, the fifth volume in the sequence of Columbia's Miles box sets.

Consumer guide: think of Live at the Fillmore East as the live version of Bitches Brew, the pathbreaking jazz-funk album that had yet to be released when this concert took place. The two recorded sets anticipate Bitches Brew material ("Miles Runs the Voodoo Down," "Spanish Key," etc.), but the live recording quality is rougher, hotter, with levels sometimes pushing into distortion. Still, it's a great band (Miles, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, and Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira), and notable for, among other things, Corea's rhythmic, Ra-like, guitar-ish squawk and sprawl and Shorter's presence (his last date with the band). In a Silent Way represents the "cooler," pristine, more accessible studio version of the electric outfit that preceded Bitches Brew, with wonderful non-electrified Miles trumpet and laid-back funk. The three-CD set is compact, with an aural unity, and beautifully packaged -- it looks like a Christmas gift. As for Miles and Coltrane, you're on your own -- you can go for last year's "complete" Miles/Coltrane box or, my own preference, the previously abbreviated Miles Davis at Newport 1958, if only to hear impresario George Wein off stage yelling at the band not to touch the mikes.
-- Jon Garelick

The Wild Pitch reissues on JCOR
During the latter half of the '90s, while Wild Pitch Records founder Stu Fine waited out an ill-fated distribution deal with EMI, DJs and fans paid through the nose for original copies of seminal Wild Pitch releases. Fine began repressing old Wild Pitch stuff on vinyl in 2000; this year, JCOR snapped up his catalogue and launched a full-fledged reissue campaign. When grizzled hip-hop partisans wax nostalgic for the genre's middle-school period (a phase of absurd creative surplus in rap, post-Run-DMC, pre-Biggie), they're talking about records like these.

The label sampler Wild Pitch Classics compiles the highlights: early Gang Starr, O.C.'s furious "Time's Up," the Main Source cut ("Live at the Barbecue") that launched Nas's career. But the real gems of the series are the full-lengths. The Ultramagnetic MCs' underrated The Four Horsemen. Lord Finesse & DJ Mike Smooth's The Funky Technician, featuring beats by future members of the Diggin in the Crates production team and rhymes about Luther Vandross and Farrakhan back when they were still, y'know, fresh. The Coup's Genocide and Juice, which twisted gangsta rap's seductive bump to politically radical ends. Time after time, Wild Pitch artists yoked lyrical nuance and humor to sonic innovation. Sure, in light of the underground hip-hop it inspired, some of this stuff sounds elementary now -- but c'mon, are you really going to throw on Aesop Rock at your New Year's party?
-- Alex Pappademas

The Dead Kennedys reissues on Manifesto and the X reissues on Rhino
Anyone who's been keeping tabs on Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra's trials and tribulations knows that the re-release of five Dead Kennedys titles on Manifesto marks the beginning of the end of the label that Biafra founded to release all this music. In essence, Biafra has lost the rights to most of the Alternative Tentacles back catalogue -- and that's a shame. Still, the fact that classic American punk albums like Bedtime for Democracy, Frankenchrist, and Plastic Surgery Disasters (also the In God We Trust, Inc. EP) plus the live album Mutiny on the Bay and the compilation Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death are now available in listenable remastered form is worth celebrating. The Dead Kennedys made some of the smartest, nastiest, most on-target political punk of their era. And they did so with surprising musical sophistication. The proof is here for anyone to enjoy. Now all we need is a remastered reissue of their classic of classics, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.

And sure, it was great when Elektra decided to anthologize the great LA punk band X a few years ago on the two-disc Beyond and Back: The X Anthology. Unfortunately, too much of that collection was taken up by the subpar work the band did after they left Slash for Elektra. Thanks to Rhino, we now have remastered reissues of their first three albums complete with bonus cuts (demos, live tracks, and the like). And this is the real X -- the gritty, romantic, hard-hitting, guitar-powered confessional rock of Los Angeles, Wild Gift, and Under the Big Black Sun. If you never hear any other X albums, you won't have missed much.
-- Matt Ashare

Issue Date: December 21 - 27, 2001