Pop this on, close your eyes, and you'll be instantly transported back to the Vegas of 1966. The Sands Hotel was still the "class joint" where Sinatra and his Rat Pack buddies partied, held court, and occasionally even performed. This priceless document (Sinatra's first official live album) captures the Chairman of the Board in performance mode, ably supported by conductor-arranger Quincy Jones and Count Basie and his Orchestra. The set list comprises 16 Sinatra classics--including Come Fly with Me, One for My Baby (And One More for the Road), It Was a Very Good Year, and Angel Eyes - along with two Basie instrumentals and some seriously politically incorrect stage banter. Essential.
Dan Epstein

If you wanna hear me sing serious, buy an album," Dean Martin says early in this 70-minute disc, underlining his point by deliberately mangling the last word's pronunciation. Issued to catch the wave of Steven Soderbergh's remake of the Pack's romp, Ocean's 11, Live at the Sands is the second official issue of a Martin/Frank Sinatra/Sammy Davis Jr. show. This September 1963 date, though, is nimbler and funnier than the previous year's set preserved on The Summit in Concert. Some of the same jokes are told, but this Vegas jaunt adds at least one new running gag (Dino's brief rendition of It's My Party), and Sammy also gets a few racially tinged zingers off in return for those of his partners. Oh, and lest we forget, there's good music. Martin actually plays it straight on two Guys and Dolls duets with Sinatra, who also turns in a half-dozen strong performances on his own. Plenty of mystique is present, but Sands captures the trio hard at work as well, in this gloriously dynamic, audiophile recording.
Rickey Wright

Many people see Peter Gabriel as the creative mind behind Genesis, but a few listens to A Trick of the Tale or Wind & Wuthering may quickly dispel that myth for many. This is an oft-overlooked period in Genesis musical history. The band was seemingly searching or grasping for a new identity in the wake of Peter Gabriel’s departure.
Dance of the Volcano is the first evidence that despite the departure of a very creative and pivotal member of their band, Genesis was still on solid footing. One might expect Genesis to be struggling, or that this album might be weaker than its predecessors in light of Gabriel’s absence. In which case, one would be quite wrong in each case. From the opening notes and through the entire CD, Genesis displays a self-assurance that is quite conspicuous in its presence.
Indeed, Phil Collins steps up from behind his drum kit to handle lead vocals with a level of confidence that belies his relative vocal inexperience. This isn’t a slam on Peter Gabriel, so much as a testament to the band’s adaptability and growth.

Progressive Genesis bites back, with songs like Eleventh Earl of Mar (complete with a storyline based on a Middle Ages figure) and Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers... In that Quiet Earth (often split into two parts.) The former sums up the album rather nicely, one part energetic prog onslaught of various keyboards, one part quiet, intimate soft-pop. And though his voice isn't as lively or versatile as Gabriel's, Collins does a good job. The latter is one of Genesis' best instrumentals, and where all the band members join together. Hackett and Collins specifically stand out, Hackett leading the song with a spacey guitar melody, who keeps relatively quiet on the album, besides some acoustic guitar playing, and manic drumming from Collins. Genesis' [largely ripped off by 80s and 90s prog bands] brand of elegant, sweeping progressive rock still maintains a large presence in the music on Wind and Wuthering.

First things first: let’s take it as read that this is a classic of the 20th century jazz canon and an essential point of reference in Coltrane’s own tumultuous career. 1958 found Coltrane recording for Prestige as a leader, having left Thelonious Monk’s quartet and before heading back to Miles Davis’ band to make history on Kind of Blue the following year. Here, he’s hunkered down with the Red Garland Trio (Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Arthur Taylor on drums), enjoying the easy interplay that had developed between the musicians over years of playing together, and taking the opportunity to throw out his newly-honed chops. Yes, this is the album on which Coltrane first emerged as the primary innovator of the jazz world, wielding an astonishing technical virtuosity and a blinding vision of the possibilities of the tenor sax.

Recorded February 8, 1960, this is another of the sonic spectaculars with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. They were in top virtuoso form on that day (the final movement is one single take), and RCA's recording team brilliantly captured the warmth and clarity of Orchestra Hall. Never before has sound of the mastertape been so vividly replicated, with scintillating high percussion, sonorous bass, and a sense of space missing in many more modern recordings.

Recorded three years before his landmark album Kind Of Blue (Columbia, 1959), Cookin' was part of Davis' remaining five-album commitment to Prestige, recorded a year to the day after Georges Avakian lured him to Columbia in October, 1955. The XRCD remaster is bound to draw comparisons with the equally brilliant but slightly warmer DCC remaster which preceded it, and the later disappointing Rudy Van Gelder remaster.

Adapted from the renowned novel by Shusaku Endo, Masahiro Shinoda’s 1971 film Silence (Chinmoku, co-written with Endo) explores the violent cultural conflict amid the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century Japan. Shinoda’s excellent direction — coupled with a pensive score by the legendary Toru Takemitsu — gives cinematic expression to inner spiritual paradox, and imbues with religious mystery a landscape that seems already sentient with wind, rain, and light.

The final minutes of Flowing offer a quintessential Naruse conclusion. The setting is a traditional geisha house (in actual fact an okiya, a kind of brokerage house which connects geisha up with clients, whom they meet elsewhere) which is undergoing a slow process of decline and disintegration, as the owner Madam Tsutayako finds it increasingly difficult to keep the house running and to make ends meet. In this concluding sequence Tsutayako and another middle-aged geisha Someko perform on the shamisen as six-year-old Fujiko (daughter of Tsutayako’s niece Yoneko and with whom Tsutayako has begun the long period of geisha training) goes through a series of formal dance moves. This scene is an affirmation of the traditional values represented by geisha culture but there’s sadness and poignancy here as well.
Includes a 10-minute program of audio commentary by Kent Jones and Phillip Lopate known as 'Audio Notes.'

Repast is a film about the quotidian, and appropriately enough, it begins and ends with routine. Appropriate to Naruse’s usual milieu, this is largely the routine of women and their work – here, mainly housework – and the morning routine we see in the opening and close of the film is that of women diligently tending to their families. What is perhaps surprising about this image of the everyday is the figure through which Naruse chooses to portray it: Setsuko Hara, looking a good deal more harried, run-down, and frazzled than we are used to seeing her.
Includes a 15-minute program of audio commentary by Kent Jones and Phillip Lopate known as 'Audio Notes.'

Sound of the Mountain begins in the clustered confines of Tokyo’s streets and ends in an expansive urban park with what Kikuko, the film’s heroine, describes aphoristically as “an unobstructed view.” It is a familiar narrative arc: the cluttered, confounding nature of things becomes steadily clearer to the characters, and the story’s denouement entails a physical as well as psychological opening-up, an expansion of horizons, and a view of relationships and circumstances as they are. But here this trajectory is accorded a kind of ambiguity particular to Naruse. Characters and spectators alike see things more clearly perhaps, but the way ahead remains dim. We are optimistic but uncertain, and this opening up of space gives a sense not only of expansiveness, but also of chaos, an indication that life will move forward – in fact, already is moving forward – whether we like it or not.

“Environmentalism is just repackaged Marxism” Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace. Environmentalism, with its attendant army of politicos all armed to the teeth with environmental laws, is, let us make no mistake, the highroad to hell.
Before going all the way green, I urge you to take a longer look into exactly what horse you're backing here: it may well turn out to be a horse of an entirely different colour than you think. Ray Harvey

Though Status Quo is best known for fast and undistinguished hard rock, they were quite capable of subtlety when it suited them. Despite the name, most of the music on Quo's fifth album, Piledriver, is varied and subtle enough to be interesting. The power rock and roll is indeed there, as represented by crowd-pleasers like "Don't Waste My Time" and "Paper Plane," but so also are quieter, softer pieces with acoustic textures and progressive structures. The melancholy "A Year" is a standout track, a stark, melancholy song about carrying on after a loved one has died. The soft rock intro gradually shifts to a more powerful guitar piece in a way that is reminiscent of early Fleetwood Mac and has that band's delicate sense of dynamics. Elsewhere on Piledriver the band turns in a very credible slow blues piece and a folk-inflected duet for 12-string guitars. Still, most of the Status Quo fans wanted power rock, and the band obliged with one of their best pieces, the tempo-shifting "Big Fat Mama," which actually managed some U.S. airplay, though no actual chart position. The album rounds off with a heavy version of The Doors' "Roadhouse Blues". On the whole Piledriver is an enjoyable listen, one that has aged better than much other hard rock from this period. Richard Foss, All Music Guide
Includes bonus track "Don't Waste My Time" (Live at the 1973 Reading Festival).

Crosby is sober now, and his third solo album, Thousand Roads, represents some of his most compelling work to date. By turns witty and wistful, Roads is haunted by a tender nostalgia and empowered by a knowingness that comes only to those who have lived a few years and learned a few lessons. Given that, it's fitting that Crosby has enlisted support from some of the songwriters who have lent their talents to Bonnie Raitt's most recent projects: John Hiatt's "Through Your Hands," with its warm verses and inspiring refrain, is a highlight, while Paul Brady contributes the fragile ballad "Helpless Heart," and Bonnie Hayes lends "Coverage," which alludes to Crosby's previous inclination to get press for all the wrong reasons. "I got a mention in the Monday news," Crosby sings, "I was on my last leg."

AKIRA KUROSAWA'S ''One Wonderful Sunday,'' which opens at the Public today to begin that theater's ''Summer in Japan'' series, is something of an archeological find. Here is an alternately sweet and desperate romantic drama made early in 1947, less than two years after Japan was A-bombed into unconditional surrender and before Kurosawa made his internationally recognized classics, including ''Rashomon,'' ''Ikiru,'' ''Seven Samurai'' and ''Throne of Blood.''

Though ''One Wonderful Sunday'' looks simple, it's a carefully composed, elegant, sometimes prescient work, a small-scale love story set against a background of tumultuous social and political change. We never see any members of the Allied occupation forces, but one is never unaware of their presence, if only because of a litter basket marked ''Trash'' seen, by chance, at the corner of the screen.