Musical Holiday Gift Ideas for 2015

So you need some musical holiday gift ideas for 2015 – no problemo!  I have donned Santa’s hat and sprawled many tasties on a table for your amusement and to make suggestions on what to buy for yourself or the music lover on your list.  From the king of Afrobeat Fela Kuti to Rage Against The Machine, we’ve got wax and discs of audio and video to inspire and delight.

The Bob Dylan Bootleg Series Volume 12: The Cutting Edge certainly yields some treasures for Zimmy enthusiasts.  This set offers alternate takes and other bric-a-brac from the Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde sessions.  If you’re writing a book on Dylan focusing on that period, maybe you’d want every note available on 18 CD’s!  If you’re hardcore, you’d likely go for the version on half a dozen CD’s.  I’m satisfied getting the best bits which are available on 2 CD’s and/or what I got – the 3 LP set which is packaged with the utmost affection.  I could say the same about the Spoon 10th anniversary re-issue of Gimme Fiction. 

The Sly and The Family Stone set offers both early and late shows recorded at Fillmore East, the storied joint on 2nd Avenue around 6th Street, in 1968.  The Who box set offers a DVD along with 2 CD’s in what could be their final live album, but I think I said that about Who’s Last in 1984.  Same format for Eric Clapton with a DVD/2 CD’s captured at Royal Albert Hall for his 70th birthday celebration.  I was lucky enough to catch one of the two Madison Square Garden shows that he played two weeks before the Royal Albert ones so I was especially pleased that it was recorded and released as Slowhand was in such sparkling form.  The Queen DVD is worth a peek and as far as Jazz goes, I can’t speak highly enough about the Miles Davis set covering 20 years of performances at Newport Jazz Festival.  It’s phenomenal.  The Weather Report and Jaco Pastorius soundtrack I’m just scratching the surface on, but these promise many hours of rewarding listening.

The Big Band Holidays disc by Wynton Marsalis and the fellas hits the spot, as does the Johnny Mathis box which has a few Christmas songs among the singles released between 1956 and 1981.  It’s a worthy collection on Johnny’s 80th birthday.  The Them compilation includes all the tracks on Angry Young Them (1965) and Them Again (1966) along with demos and what have you and it sounds great in remastered form.  Happy holidays!

As I was sitting at Madison Square Garden watching Eric Clapton, it hit me that it was 30 years ago almost to the month that I saw the man at the Worcester Centrum (setlist to that show) in one of my fist concerts.  I was a couple of weeks shy of my 16th birthday.  I’ve seen Slowhand a handful of times since then, most recently at the 12-12-12 show where his inclusion of Got To Get Better in A Little While made wah-wah dreams come true, and it’s always been a richly rewarding experience but I’ve never seen him better than at Sunday’s show (May 3, 2015) which was the second of his two birthday shows in New York.  The first was Friday…a Ranger game in between…with the same guests and nearly identical setlist.

It had it all – a tasty acoustic set including Tears in Heaven that Steve Gadd put a jazz beat on, some deep blues (Robert Johnson’s Little Queen of Spades), fantastic guests, and a few transcendent moments of guitar bliss like the solo he tore off during I Shot The Sheriff.

Clapton has become an outstanding bandleader who surrounds himself with fantastic players and arranges material to get the most out of them.   In addition to Nathan East singing Cant’ Find My Way Home, Paul Carrack sang You Are So Beautiful (not too sweet!) – the first of a pair of songs that Joe Cocker made famous, High Time We Went, being the other – no doubt spurred by having Chris Stainton in the band who played with Joe Cocker from about 66 through 72 and co-wrote the latter.

One could argue…I might even argue that it would have been better to have Tales of Brave Ulysses or any of a number of other great songs from Cream or Derek & The Dominoes etc. rather than those tunes that Cocker is known for.  Yeah, maybe but this Eric is certainly not going to second guess the Eric!  The show was wildly satisfying.  He’s got way too many good tunes to start parsing the setlist in that way.  As he’s been quoted as being fed up with travel, I hope it’s not the last time he comes around but if it is – a more perfect note to go out on could not have been played.