Audio Files

A guide to the hottest in new recordings

By GINA VIVINETTO, GERRY DOYLE and JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 22, 2000

JOHN COLTRANE, COLTRANE JAZZ (RHINO):

Hooray for Rhino, the reissue label, for releasing a collection of John Coltrane albums, several with never-before-heard alternative tracks.

One of those gems is Coltrane Jazz. The saxophone great had just split from Miles Davis' group, but borrowed the rhythm section of Jimmy Cobb and Paul Chambers, as well as ivory tickler Wynton Kelly, to record Coltrane Jazz, released in 1961.

It's a beauty. Lyrical and buoyant, Coltrane Jazz maintains the open bebop groove that Coltrane worked on 1959's Giant Steps. The rhythms are sprightly and Trane's sax tone is bright. Harmonique, with its gleeful sax bursts, is wild and joyful. Even the standard Little Old Lady is pepped up, with a tempo that insists this li'l lady is a spry one.

Like Sonny, a tribute to sax man Sonny Rollins, is the album's most striking cut, a reverent imitation of Coltrane's hero's playing. The original, included here, is full of samba beats, but an alternate version features exciting West African rhythms.

Coltrane Jazz, most importantly, signaled transition for one of jazz's most important voices: Coltrane is investigating spiritual matters; his obsession with astrology is kicking in, indicated by songs such as Fifth House. His quartet is not fixed yet, but a brilliant exchange of ideas is going on. Coltrane also had recently kicked heroin and booze, which may account for Coltrane Jazz's sunniness. Grade: A.

-- GINA VIVINETTO, Times staff writer

HEAVY D AND THE BOYZ, HEAVY HITZ (UNI/MCA)

Since Heavy D and the Boyz waddled onto the hip-hop landscape in the late '80s, they haven't exactly loomed large on the scene.

But Heavy D has a greatest hits album anyway.

To be fair, many of the tunes on the album are standards of sorts, in an '80s rap kinda way. The Overweight Lover's in the House, a tribute to pudgy Romeos everywhere, still has the catchy beats that made it a fun house-party tune in 1987. And the second track, Mr. Big Stuff, has the straightforward, boom-box beats that make you want to drag out a sheet of cardboard and start breakin'.

Heavy D is sometimes imaginative but often is just kind of silly. Witness the lyrics from On Point: "Gorgeous women/Swimming in 'em/Cinnamon with denim/Diva pigeons/Peep the glissin'/Y'all don't listen/See what you missin'."

Not exactly a New York poetry slam.

But Heavy D never claimed to be deep. Just big. And the booty-shaking grooves and gets-stuck-in-your-head lyrical hook from Gyrlz, They Love Me proves that point perfectly. Even though it's just a typical song about how he is a little, well, overweight but still is a James Brown-esque sex machine, you can't help but want to turn it up and get more people on the dance floor.

Some of the newer tracks, such as the annoying pseudo-techno, C+C Music Factory-sounding Now That We Found Love and the saccharine Don't You Know, don't belong on anyone's greatest hits album. And 1994's Got Me Waiting leaves the listener waiting for the end of the track. But if you dodge these lyrical land mines, the album's worth having for old-school house-party sentiment.

There's nothing new or earthshaking on the album. It moves chronologically from the first track to the last, moving through Living Large (1987) to Heavy (1999). And through the album, you can see Heavy D's descent further into mediocrity. Like many rappers from the '80s, he seems scarcely content to be a party MC. By the end of the album, his tracks have him rapping about things more serious than shaking one's booty. It's scary.

Few weighty issues are seriously discussed on the album. But if light fare is in order, Heavy Hitz should be next on the menu. GRADE: B-

-- GERRY DOYLE, Times staff writer

SATURDAY NIGHT (NONESUCH)

This is Sondheim's first musical, for which he wrote, at 24, the score and lyrics, with a book by Julius Epstein, only to have the show aborted when the producer died. It lay unperformed for more than 40 years, until it was staged first in London, then in Chicago and finally last spring in a New York production whose cast is heard here.

In a way, Saturday Night is a Sondheim show for people who don't like Sondheim, or at least those who don't like the dissonant, bittersweet transformation he brought to a genre previously known mainly for its boy-meets-girl pieties. It's a great example of his precocious talent. The approach is very much that of a young artist working in the tradition that he obviously adores but will soon set out to overturn.

Set in Brooklyn in 1929, it's a tuneful, relatively simple score based on the idea that the worst thing in the world is not having a date on Saturday night. Sondheim's lyrics are as resourceful as ever. The story follows Gene (David Campbell), a young man desperate to break out of provincial Flatbush and make it in the wider world of Manhattan, and the woman he loves, Helen (Lauren Ward).

Many songs from Saturday Night have been on Sondheim anthologies over the years, and it's good to hear such gems as So Many People and I Remember That in context. The album is superbly done, with a bright young cast, sleek orchestrations by longtime Sondheim collaborator Jonathan Tunick and musical direction by Rob Fisher. Grade: B

THE STEPHEN SONDHEIM ALBUM (FYNSWORTH ALLEY)

Here's yet another Sondheim anthology, and if there's nothing especially groundbreaking on it, there are some winning performances, especially Brian D'Arcy James' heartfelt performance of Giants in the Sky from Into the Woods, and Theresa Finamore and Andrew Lippa's spirited run through A Moment With You from Saturday Night.

The CD has seven songs from Follies, including a wonderful rendition of Sondheim's anthem to show-biz survival, I'm Still Here, by Dorothy Loudon. On the downside, Dame Edna's treatment of Losing My Mind gives the impression of fingernails scratching across a blackboard.

This is the debut release of a music theater label, Fynsworth Alley, which plans to make CDs available on its Web site http://www.fynsworthalley.com cq for three months before they are sold in stores. Recordings bought online will include an extra track not on store copies. Here, it's Emily Skinner singing the never-before-recorded I Must Be Dreaming from All That Glitters, a show Sondheim wrote in college. There's also a "hidden" track, a crazed version of Getting Married Today as if done by the McGuire Sisters. Grade: B

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