Tag: meta-albumoftheweek

What’s up in early 2025 for the Album of the Week?

I’ve been writing about jazz (and some other music) on this blog now for … a while! The first real post in the series (Eva Cassidy’s Live at Blues Alley) happened in January 2022, so almost three years now. And we’ve written about some really great stuff—Trane, Bill Evans, Cécile McLorin Salvant, CTI.

What I’ve found most interesting about writing these columns is that, the more I stretch outside my comfort zone, the more interesting things get… and when I return to my comfort zone, things are richer for the detour.

So the upcoming columns. I’ve been thinking about the narrative we’ve heard so far… how traditional jazz went avant garde, splintered into rock-influenced fusion and funk-influenced jazz-pop, and returned to something like a traditionalist stance… all within the scope of about 20 years, from 1964 to the end of the 1970s.

But what happened then? Jazz is still around, but the journey it went on in the 1980s was very different. And along the way it had some flirtations with some very different kinds of music.

So we’re going to start next week exploring some of the kinds of music that touched jazz in the 1980s—but we’ll explore them on their own terms, not just as jazz adjacencies. And we’re going to visit what happened to some of the artists we’ve been following as well as how other kinds of music were changed by jazz. And we’re going to do it all through the lens of one of the most successful popular artists of the 1980s.

Hope that’s whetted your appetite, and will see you next week!

What’s next for the #albumoftheweek?

I was trying to figure out what I should write about after wrapping up our series on Johnny Hartman, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Kurt Elling, and it occurred to me that there were probably a few Miles Davis and Miles-adjacent records that had entered my collection since I did my series on the great trumpeter starting over two years ago.

I checked and there are more than a “few”; between Miles and his sidemen, I have enough to keep us going for a while. But why revisit ground I’ve already covered? Turns out there are a few reasons.

First, there are a few sidemen who merit a second look; we’ll get to one of those early in the project.

Second, there are projects by some of Miles’ sidemen (and by Miles himself) that are too outstanding not to cover, though I didn’t own them on vinyl when I was writing the series. Likewise, there are some fascinating twists and turns in their discographies that make for fun listening. Somehow those records have newly turned up in my collection, so I thought it would be fun to listen.

Third, I cut off the series with Miles going electric, but his sidemen kept going, and I think it’s interesting to talk about the music they made as they got older and the musicians they made the music with.

So get ready to talk about some musicians we’ve discussed before in some new places and new (and old) records! And after this series? Well, there are some very fun connections that will take us into types of music I haven’t reviewed yet as part of this project, so stay tuned.