I have read about Harvey a lot, her albums are often in year-end best of lists and she’s been around long enough that everything that she releases gets a lot of coverage. But I’ve taken a really long time to listen to her.
Tag: 1993
Roy Hargrove Quintet with the Tenors of Our Time (1993)
This record should really be called the Roy Hargrove Quintet with the Tenors of Another Time or the Roy Hargrove Quintet with the Tenors of Our Parents’ Time. I didn’t know Wynton had discovered Hargrove; had I, I wouldn’t have borrowed six of his cds from the library. Oops.
House of Cards (1990), To Play the King (1993), The Final Cut (1995)
This review contains some mild spoilers.
Grieg: Songs (1993) by Anne Sofie von Otter; Bengt Forsberg
This is a collection of Grieg’s songs that includes both Haugtussa and other songs from his numerous sets, picked, I guess, arbitrarily. Haugtussa is the highlight for me and a reason to rate this set higher than just an arbitrary collection of a composer’s songs should be rated.
Kleines Requiem fur eine Polka; Concerto for Harpsichord; Good Night (1995) by Henryk Gorecki, performed by the London Sinfonietta et. al
This is a rather arbitrary collection of Gorecki’s later “avant garde” works, featuring a concerto from 1980 and two chamber pieces from the 1990s. But putting the arbitrariness to the side, what we are left with is some very stirring music.
Birks Works: the Verve Big Band Sessions (1956, 1957, 1993) by Dizzy Gillespie
I recently listened to this band’s performance at Newport and was underwhelmed. It just goes to show you the power of mood. I guess just wasn’t in the mood and I imagined the Newport show as some kind of semi-modernist response to Ellington’s Newport show of the year before. I think I was over-thinking.