MUSIC

Do you hear what I hear?

Holiday shopping: CD box sets

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, December 01, 2008

The flood of CD box sets that music fans have welcomed every holiday season seems to finally be abating. There are, after all, only so many Miles Davis outtakes that Sony can exhume from the vaults - as evidenced by this year's Davis box, a desperate, utterly unnecessary repackaging of the classic `Kind of Blue.'

But by and large, we're not scraping the bottom of the archival barrel yet - there's still plenty of great music waiting to be collected, annotated and attractively packaged. If you're looking for an easy holiday gift for the music fan in your life, one of the box sets below should do the trick.

Hank Williams

Hank Williams: The Unreleased Recordings

(Time-Life, three CDs)

About this there will be no argument: You can never have too much Hank. And the 10-disc 'Complete Hank Williams' is not, in fact, complete. Which makes these three discs — recorded, flubs and all, live at Nashville radio station WSM and aired at 7:15 a.m. daily — welcome under any circumstances. The performances are remarkable; the hits are oftentimes fresher and better than more familiar versions. And it's nice to hear on some of these 54 tracks (with the promise of more on the way) a man who lived a life of profound physical and existential pain actually cutting loose and having fun.

There's the first public performance of 'I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love with You),' the Bailes Brothers' 'Dust on the Bible' (one of many gospel cuts), a kicky version of 'Mind Your Own Business' and a brutal and insistent take on 'Cold, Cold Heart' — written after Williams' wife, Audrey, was hospitalized following a home abortion. (At the hospital, she threw the gifts he'd brought her at him. Ouch.) Any fan of real country is going to love this set. But if you're exchanging gifts with James Hand, your shopping is done.

— Patrick Beach

Willie Nelson

One Hell of a Ride

(Legacy, four CDs)

Released in April to coincide with Willie Nelson's 75th birthday, this four-disc set looks somewhat flimsy to be the authoritative compilation of one of the world's most beloved veteran performers. But one look at Nelson tells you he's never been a big one on packaging. It's all about the music, man, and this box is a special delivery.

Opening with the ironically titled 'I've Sung My Last Hillbilly Song' from a 1954 radio show, these 100 tracks chronicle every aspect of Nelson's career, from honky-tonker to crooner to prairie mystic to sad balladeer to gospel singer, making the claim that this singer, songwriter and guitarist is the most all-around talented musician Texas has ever produced. This set goes full circle, ending with a 2007 version of 'Hillbilly Song.'

Although the best known songs from the Outlaw Country heyday cluster on discs two and three, the most revelatory material comes on the first disc and the last. In the beginning, one hears an ambitious Nelson not content to be a check-cashing songwriter. He set out to be as big as Lefty Frizzell.

The last disc, usually a throwaway for artists who've been recording for more than 50 years, contains some of Willie's best work, including the poignant 'Rainbow Connection' (beautiful guitar solo!) and 'Too Sick To Pray' from 1996's 'Spirit,' one of his many comeback albums.

With its cheap cardboard casing this might reek of a cash-in, but Willie's music is always from the heart.

— Michael Corcoran

Nina Simone

To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story

(Columbia/Legacy, three CDs, one DVD)

In 1957, at the start of her recording career, Nina Simone was covering tunes by Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. A little more than a decade later, she had moved on to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, without giving up a stitch of credibility. (Hall & Oates' 'Rich Girl,' which she tried her hand at a decade later, was stretching things.) Her secret was that, no matter whose lyrics she was singing, Nina Simone remained, adamantly, Nina Simone. The Ellington song that opens this career-spanning set, 'Mood Indigo,' is usually rendered as a late-night-of-the-soul slice of heartbreak, but Simone — who could slice heartbreak as finely as anybody — instead romps through it, hardly the last time she would thumb her nose at convention. 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues,' on the other hand, she takes at a near funereal pace. In both cases, her voice is gorgeously textured, though it would become less so as time went on. In short, 'To Be Free' portrays, as the saying goes, a woman in full. Angry, sad, funny; jazz, blues, rock — Nina Simone did it all.

The DVD, a 23-minute 1970 TV documentary made up of live performances and an interview, is an interesting snapshot ('Everybody is half dead,' Simone declares at the top of the program), but the low fidelity does her band no favors.

— Jeff Salamon

Cheap Trick

Budokan!

(Epic Legacy, three CDs, one DVD)

So we've had the legendary 'At Budokan,' 'Budokan II,' 'At Budokan: The Complete Concert' and 'No, Seriously, We Think This is Everything from Budokan.' Why not throw in a DVD and see if the diehards will spring for the thing yet again?

Call me foolish and sentimental, but I'd pay the discount price of around $30 just for the DVD of the Trick's April 28, 1978, concert, recorded for and aired exactly once on Japanese TV. First impression: Wow, it's been a long time since guitarist-songwriter Rick Nielsen's been that thin, hasn't it?

The original 'Budokan' was a sacred text and a huge influence on me before I even earned my driver's license, and seeing the DVD is kind of like discovering there was a long-lost movie of 'War of the Worlds' that accompanied the radio drama. They were — and still are — a tremendously hardworking live band, and Nielsen wrote songs with punch, wit and killer hooks. Nobody knew it at the time, but Cheap Trick was the bridge between Britpop and indie rock, the latter of which was still many years away. The three CDs might fall into the 'do I really need to dump this into my iTunes?' category, but the DVD — good-not-great quality though it is, but hey, it was 1978 — is a true gift for fans. Call me foolish, sentimental and a sucker but I can't believe I went so long without this set, hereafter known as 'Hey, Look — We Found Some Footage from Budokan.'

— Patrick Beach

Various artists

'Love Train: The Sound of Philadelphia'

(Sony Legacy, four discs)

Listening to these 71 songs that manage to blend funk's sweat with soul's cool, that anticipated everything from disco to bubble-soul, that found a place for syrupy strings and relentless bongos and flawless singing often in the same song, one gets the impression that Philadelphia International Record could do pretty much anything. Philly International was Motown 2.0, a precision-tooled song machine that could do personal (Billy Paul's 'Me and Mrs. Jones'), political (the O'Jay's 'Put Your Hands Together') and aphoristic sloganeering (Jerry Butler's bulletproof 'Only the Strong Survive') in equal measure. Their albums were conceptual, but the singles hit hard (and smooth) on their own. Still striking is the impeccable recording quality — Steely Dan would kill for these sounds and grooves. Stax embodied the dirty South, Motown crossed over to white kids, but Philly International championed the complex, energetic 360 degrees of African American life in the 1970s. It's in every note.

— Joe Gross

The Jesus and Mary Chain

'The Power of Negative Thinking: B-Sides & Rarities'

(WEA/Rhino, four CDs)

When Rhino knocked out the Jesus and Mary Chain anthology '21 Singles' back in '02, even longtime fans found it striking how consistent the songs were, petering out only at the very end of the band's existence in 1998. The duo of Jim and William Reid and whoever was putting up with them that session hit on their formula early and often: retro-pop melodies (think girl group, surf, glam) caked in fuzz Hendrix would admire, and feedback like a pavement saw — generations of indie poppers and shoe gazers started with them.

These four CDs of B-sides are even more consistent for their seeming disposability, but then you notice how sturdy those melodies are (acoustic versions of 'You Trip Me Up' and 'Cut Dead'), the effortless pop swagger ('Sidewalking') and the casual-yet-respectful way with a cover ('Tower of Song,' 'Who Do You Love?'), even if the lyrics don't even bother to convince you they mean something. Disc one has the most noise, but only disc four feels like a coaster.

Brainless? More than a little. Brilliant? No question.

— Joe Gross

Roy Orbison

The Soul of Rock and Roll

(Monument/Legacy, four CDs)

Years ago, German imprint Bear Family put out a seven-disc box covering roughly the first decade of rock's original enigma, but this four-disc set covers Roy Orbison's entire career from 1954, his days with the Wink Westerners and on through to the last time he sang, in 1988. With a healthy number of unreleased masters and live cuts, it's comprehensive but not exhausting.

Yes, the Traveling Wilburys ('Not Alone Anymore,' 'You Got It') are represented here, as is his jaw-dropping duet with K.D. Lang on 'Crying.' Most intriguing, if not consistently great, is the material culled from his '70s output. Generally regarded as a water-treading period before his victorious '80s comeback, there's good stuff here.

But not the best stuff. On the hits, up through, say 'Oh, Pretty Woman' in '64, it was Orbison who brought operatic drama (and arrangements) to pop and a tenor so perfect it sounded superhuman. Nobody, nobody will ever make heartbreak sound so romantic again.

— Patrick Beach

Anthony Braxton

'The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton'

(Mosaic Records, eight CDs)

One reason the 1970s are regarded, unfairly, as a desolate time for jazz is that so much of the music recorded during that decade has never been reissued on CD. Perhaps the most remarkable ommission, now remedied, is the near-complete unavailability of the nine albums that the composer/multi-reedist Anthony Braxton recorded for the Arista label between 1974 and 1980. Braxton, an eccentric figure who rendered his song titles as geometric diagrams, was steeped in both the jazz and European avant-classical traditions, and he has spent most of his career combining the two, often to the disapproval of the mainstream jazz world.

His 1970 recordings find him working at dazzling levels of energy and invention. (For all his professorial bearing, Braxton could blow hot — and inspire others to blow hot — when the idiom called for it.) The highlights include his feverish quartet sides with former Miles Davis bassist Dave Holland, undersung drummer Barry Altschul and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler or tubaist George Lewis; his genre-busting Creative Orchestra Music big band, which veered from 'out' squealing and moaning to a John Philip Sousa-style march; and a collaboration with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett that directly led to the creation of the famed World Saxophone Quartet.

If there's a problem with this collection — other than the fact that the original LPs' extensive liner notes, most of them written by Braxton himself, aren't reproduced here — it's that very stylistic profligacy. Many listeners who like Braxton best when he's playing inside the jazz tradition or extending it, rather than utterly abandoning it, probably won't be thrilled about having to pay for two CDs' worth of his two-hour 'For Four Orchestras,' or 49 minutes of the deadweight 'Opus 95 for Two Pianos.' The Mosiac label's commitment to completeness is admirable, but for most fans, a 6-CD 'The Complete Arista Jazz Recordings of Anthony Braxton' would have been thrilling enough.

('The Complete Arista Recordings of Anthony Braxton' is available only through Mosaic Records, www.mosaicrecords.com.)

— Jeff Salamon