Merch: December 25, 2008

Miles Davis Kind of Blue: 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition (Columbia/Legacy)
According to our friends at Amazon.com, you can purchase a nice no-frills edition of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the bestselling jazz album of all time, for a mere $7.49. If you’re a chump and want the wacky 2004 version on DualDisc– a CD/DVD hybrid that includes a 25-minute video – it’ll cost ya $18.98. If you wanna throw down for the jumbo new Collector’s Edition box, it will run you about $110 in stores, and about $71.50 online.

Yow! So what are you getting for all that? First off, probably the most beautiful jazz record ever made. Trumpeter Davis cut two 1959 sessions with a dream sextet that included John Coltrane on tenor sax, Cannonball Adderley on alto, and (on four of the five tracks) Bill Evans on piano. You know the story: Miles came to the dates with a bunch of sketches based on scales. The band lyrically ran ’em down, mostly in first takes, and blew everyone away.

If you like jazz at all, chances are you already have this record in some format. If you buy the new slipcased box, you get it on a blue vinyl LP and on a CD. There are actually two CDs in the package: One contains the original album, the familiar alternate of “Flamenco Sketches” (available on the budget disc mentioned above), and eight pointless false starts and snippets of studio chatter totaling around nine minutes. The other disc encompasses five 1958 sextet tracks, previously available on Legacy’s complete Davis-Coltrane box, and a much-bootlegged 17-minute concert version of “So What” from Holland in 1960, with Coltrane in full “sheets of sound” flight.

There’s also a DVD that contains an extended version of the 2004 DualDisc documentary (with the original color footage now in groovy monochrome) and an exceptional 1959 Davis TV special noteworthy for its music (some of it with Gil Evans’s big band) and the fact that everyone smokes cigarettes on camera. A 60-page LP-sized book lays out lots of familiar session snaps and notes by Gerald Early, Francis Davis, and Ashley Kahn; if you’ve read Kahn’s very fine book about the making of the album, you won’t learn much. Oh, and there’s a poster and a facsimile of Bill Evans’s original handwritten text of the liner notes.

OK: I’m a Miles Davis freakazoid, but even I’m not sure I need this package, except maybe for the ’59 TV show, which is utterly spellbinding. It’s (cough) jazzy-looking, but at the end of the day you get virtually no new music, a bulked-up video, and a coffee table book. If you’re buying for the Jazzbo Who Has Everything, it’ll work. Most humans I know would be willing to settle for the eight-buck package. This kind of greatness needs no window-dressing.
–Chris Morris

Genesis 1970-1975 (Rhino)
Yes, I understand. “Invisible Touch” burnt you. Or perhaps some other 1980s piece of pencil-in-the-ear Phil Collins wetwork like “We Can’t Dance” or “In the Air Tonight,” though the latter wasn’t even Genesis, for fuck’s sake. If your whole crusty-punk ego is bound up in hating strings, horns and intelligence, then rock on, dumb-ass. Genesis began in 1965 as two separate art-school bands in Godalming, Surrey that eventually merged the talents of Michael Rutherford, Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel. Fashions in post-Sgt. Pepper rock demanded a proggy new pantheon of rock gods, but none were as adulation-ready as Gabriel, whose hippie-boy idealism and wit are all over this sturdy collection of five of the band’s earliest studio albums, plus extras that swell the package to a whopping 13 discs.

Trespass (1970) is a push toward prog that falls well short of Procol Harum or even Blodwyn Pig. Here Gabriel began to steer the band’s evolving reputation for flowery eccentricity, a rep that peaked in 1971 with Nursery Cryme and its magisterially weird “The Return of the Giant Hogweed.” Genesis found itself on Foxtrot (1972), with “Get ‘em out by Friday,” a dry run for later rock operatics. Gabriel’s characters move along a grim story of council house profiteers and a government edict reducing English humanity to a height of four feet, all the better to squeeze them as tenants.

Selling England by the Pound is even Village Greenier, retro folk-rock from some Wessex of the soul, as out-of-sync with the state of 1973 prog as remaking The Ventures in Space might’ve been. The pinnacle of the Peter Gabriel era came with ole Gabe’s bow with the stupendous 1974 rock opera, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Phil Collins, who joined as drummer and apprentice vocalist on Nursery Cryme, upped his game on this double LP. “Lillywhite Lilith,” “Fly on a Windshield,” and “Broadway Melody of 1974” are tight-wound models of sophisticated aggression with much to enchant fans of Goldfrapp, Deerhoof or the Decemberists. Gabriel’s departure eventually handed the reins to the vertically inhibited drummer. Collins made them great, but that’s another (and far worse) story.
–Ron Garmon

Black Sabbath The Rules of Hell (Warner Bros./Reprise/Rhino)
T’was a messy divorce indeed, when Black Sabbath first swapped American singer Ronnie James Dio for original lead vocalist Ozzy Osbourne back in 1979. Osbourne’s firing arrived after the pioneering heavy metal band had celebrated its tenth anniversary, and coincided with the group’s musical spark almost having been entirely doused around the time of Never Say Die, Ozzy’s swan song. Dio, formerly of Rainbow (among others), brought with him a far more operatic vocal technique, one more in line with the latter-day metal style.

The Rules of Hell brings together all four albums in that lineup’s canon: three studio discs and the double-CD in-concert Live Evil (1982). Rhino’s remastering is top-notch, but the box contains no thick book of text or photos: you have to open the jewel cases and dig out the booklets to read the new liner notes there. The Dio Years began big: 1980’s Heaven and Hell creatively reignited the team of guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Terry “Geezer” Butler, and drummer Bill Ward, and the resulting album saw Sabbath re-envisioned and recalibrated for the new decade. Gone were the slow, stoner-riffic tones of the ’70s; in came a hard-charging beast that could flatten all comers.

1981’s Mob Rules was less impressive, although once again producer Martin Birch gave the proceedings virility and life, and drummer Vinny Appice replaced Ward and supplied the album its bite. The final studio album in the trio is 1992’s greatly overlooked Dehumanizer; Dio had left to form his own band after quarreling with the others after Live Evil, and his hugely successful albums and tours as Dio served him well for more than a decade. Still, the frontman was coaxed back into the fold for a short-lived reunion by Iommi and Butler, and the resulting Dehumanizer, although released to zero support from metal and rock magazines in its day, heard afresh after 16 years sounds as potent and alive as anything the band recorded together.

This year, Sabbath with Dio recently completed a successful tour under the “Heaven & Hell” appellation, and a new studio album is already underway. (Osbourne, now on better terms with the others, prefers Iommi and Co. not call themselves Black Sabbath when he isn’t personally involved.) Whatever the name, this set makes a fine addition to the collection for those too young to have enjoyed their first go-round, or for those who might wonder just why Dio’s name is spoken in such hushed, revered tones by the likes of Tenacious D. And others, too.
–Joshua Sindell

Warren Zevon Warren Zevon (Collector’s Edition) (Rhino)
Trust a man as contrary as Warren Zevon to self-title his second solo album. The Excitable Boy’s first, 1969’s Wanted Dead or Alive was a commercial and critical dud that sent him back to writing jingles for the first half of the 1970s. This time, with pal Jackson Browne in the producer’s chair, the once-and-future Mr. Bad Example got it right. A big chunk of L.A.’s “Mellow Mafia” – Waddy Wachtel, Glenn Frey, David Lindley, Lindsey Buckingham – sat in on this decidedly un-mellow album, their familiar sunniness lending these black-pop tales of felons, satyrs, drunks and junkies a tense benevolence destined to become a Zevon signature. That the singer-songwriter was a man given to inappropriate reactions is evident on the opener, “Frank and Jesse James.” Zevon pleads for these distant relatives of mine in his famously creepy stentorian tones: “They rode against the railroad/And they rode against the banks/And they rode against the governor/Never once did they ask for a word of thanks.” The album kicks into high gear with “Mohammed’s Radio,” its famously oblique lyrics making stark sense to anyone who’s ever moved among L.A.’s night people. “Desperados Under the Eaves” starts with a dirge-like piano figure, as Warren mumbles feelingly of gypsies and empty coffee cups while trying to reckon a way to beat his bill at the Hollywood Hawaiian. The palm trees “that look like crucified thieves” make for an image that sticks, and this hymn for the Hollywood hopeless ends with the penitents’ chant of “Look away down Gower Avenue.” As the chant fades, the realization comes up with a swell that we were just in the presence of rock’s Nathaniel West.
–RG