Bozo Mark's Hot Pix In The CD Player For Spring (April and May)

1. Duke Elegant

Dr. John

Blue Note

What a great idea! - The good Doctor takes Ellington to New Orleans. This album includes the chestnuts ( "Satin Doll", "It Don't Mean A Thing", "Caravan") as well as some little known gems, of which "On The Wrong Side Of The Railroad Tracks" and "I'm Gonna Go Fishin'" sound like they were written for the Physician of Funk. In fact, everything on the album sounds more like Dr. John than the Duke, and that's a compliment. This is no neo-swing tribute, but rather one very unique artist's take on the repertoire of another. Great songs, fabulously funkified. Highly recommended.

2. The Bach Book/40th Anniversary Album

Jacques Loussier Trio

Telarc

Loussier is a French jazz pianist who got the idea of swinging Bach back in the sixties. I was a big fan of his back then, and have a good chunk of his stuff in my LP collection. Basically, he approached Johann Sebastian as a jazz composer - he plays the head fairly straight, albeit with a swing rhythm, then solos on the changes before returning to the head. He always worked with just a trio, except for a couple ill-fated attempts to pair him with an orchestra. This is the trio, and as far as I know is all that's available of Loussier on CD, so it's particularly welcome. The tunes are all the expected choices (Brandenburg #5, "Jesu, Joy...", et cetera) but the playing is exquisite. And, on the Brandenburg, the first movement has a perfect funk-rock beat. Whooda thunk it?

3. The Straight Story

Angelo Badalamenti

Windham Hill

I'm a big, big fan of Badalamenti, of whom I first became aware when Twin Peaks was on the air. All the stuff he's done for David Lynch is cool, especially the aforementioned soundtrack, the one for the Twin Peaks movie "Fire Walk With Me", and the two solo albums of Lynch's favorite singer, Julee Cruise. Badalamenti has done albums outside the Lynch umbrella, and sometimes they work (Marianne Faithfull's A Secret Life) and sometimes they don't (the awful duo album with Tim Booth, Booth And The Bad Angel). When I heard about this motion picture and its subject matter, I wondered a) would Badalamenti do the soundtrack, and b) what in the world would it sound like? His forte has always been menace, forboding, darkness - as I understood it, that wasn't what this picture was going to be about. Well, I went to the flick, there I saw Angelo's credit, and my goodness! it's a very, very interesting score. It sounds just like him, and it doesn't. How he managed to get so much forboding in major keys is just astounding! The darkness is there, but buried underneath the open voicings and bucolic melodies. I find it haunting, the sort of music Copland might have written if he had become infatuated with goth. The only thing missing is Julee Cruise singing a country song with odd Lynchian lyrics...

4. Funky Good Time: The Anthology

The J.B.'s

Polydor

The 70's version of James Brown's great backup band belonged to trombonist Fred Wesley - he was the primary soloist, wrote the charts, hired the musicians, rehearsed the band, for all I know he drove the bus. And it was the decade when the J.B.'s got prominently featured, both on record and in performance. This is the anthology of those years. Fred is one of the most accomplished musicians in the world, and one of the few who can both swing and funk with equal facility. (His good buddy Maceo Parker, for example, is great at funk and blues, but when the changes start going V of V he gets left behind.) And this band reflects every last bit of his musicianship and soul. It's a two-CD set with more pleasures than can be enumerated, but "Watermelon Man", "Breakin' Bread", and one number I can't find the title of at the moment (the webmaster just made me look it up - it's "I'm Payin' Taxes, What Am I Buyin'") with cool vocal a cappella breaks by the band are among many, many standouts. This is the party album for this summer, and any summer. Get down!

5. Two Against Nature

Steely Dan

Giant

Okay, it's pretty simple: either you already own this album, or you don't. If you're one of the latter, we probably don't have much to talk about here. As for the rest of you: AIN'T IT GREAT TO HAVE THE DAN BACK IN TOWN? How's your little girl?