29 January 2006

One Down, One Up


I got a couple gift cards to Borders for Christmas. We have a small apartment, and not a lot of room for books, so I thought it'd be better to use them to buy music. I finally got around to spending them, and I picked up a couple positive additions to our music collection, most notably a new John Coltrane CD called One Up, One Down: Live at the Half Note. It's absolutely great! one of the best CD's I've gotten in years. It's made up of live performances at a club in New York in 1965. In typical "“lost classic"” fashion, the master tapes had been in a hall closet in his widow's house for years before getting remastered and released recently. There are only four songs between the two discs, but they're full of epic solos from Coltrane and his pianist, McCoy Tyner (who's about to wrap up his annual residency at Yoshi's; sadly, we were too late to get tickets.) Some of Coltane's solos are out of this world, as are McCoy's, especially during My Favorite Things. If you like jazz, and Coltrane's later stuff isn't too skwonky for you, you should definitely check this out.



The other two I got were the newest Kanye West, and a CD by the band Mastodon. I think Late Registration lives up to the hype. (As for Ye the person, well, that Rolling Stone cover is a bit much, but he really won me over after saying GW doesn't care about black people.) I feel a little guilty grooving to a song about blood diamonds, but it's catchy as hell. The CD by Mastodon is the first metal album I've bought in nearly a decade that wasn't by Iron Maiden. I learned about Mastodon when I saw them at Ozzfest last summer. They're really cool, and the album that I got (Leviathan) is a concept album about Moby Dick. How metal is that?

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