Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

Malo, Malo

File Between: Santana and War

Comments? If 1972 was a Golden Age for any particular form of music, then Latin funk is surely one of the top contenders. Malo was a San Francisco outfit led by guitarist Jorge Santana (Carlos’ brother), and while Santana is an obvious reference point, they were both funkier and harder-edged. Even their softer side was urban-smooth, never devolving into hippie cliches. There are only six cuts on this record, three badass salsa-rock jams (“Pana,” “Cafe,” and “Nena”), two soulful grooves (“Just Say Goodbye,” “Suavecito”), and one ambitiously epic closing track that takes on hard rock, prog, free improvisation, and Dixieland jazz over the course of its nearly ten minutes (“Peace”). It’s never less than engaging, and often thrilling. Jorge’s a less fluid but more intense guitarist than his brother, and his band is both tight and, when called for, loud. A great record, highly recommended.

A Keeper? Good God yes. One of the highlights of my collection, from the Aztec-Romantic cover art on down.

 Vinyl Rip: Cafe

Paul Winter/Winter Consort, Icarus

File Between: Soft Machine and Windham Hill

Comments? This is one of the few albums genre-tagged in my iTunes as New Age, not because I’d heard it when I gave it the tag, but because something with that cover, and song titles like “Whole Earth Chant,” “The Silence Of A Candle,” and the title track, as well as the back-cover information that Paul Winter plays soprano sax, made it a fully educated guess. And it’s not entirely wrong; but this is just at the beginning of the New Age music movement, so it’s less ethereal bullshit and more chamber folk-jazz. (Billy Cobham, the only name I recognize aside from producer George Martin, guests on percussion.) And it’s good — not particularly earth-shaking, perhaps, but the structures are tight, the soloing is efficient, and the fluid movement from instrumentalist to instrumentalist, as well as the build of the group jams, are engaging throughout. The one track with lyrics (multi-instrumentalist Ralph Towner provides the vocals) is undoubtedly a misstep (the lyrics are bullshit New Age poetry, but the instrumentals are varied and interesting, Winter’s free-improv sax and David Darling’s gamelan-like cello being the most frequently recurring stars, though the percussion, which sounds derived from a bunch of different indigenous traditions, is probably the real star. Martin’s production is very Seventies, but even so at times this sounds almost ready to break out into one of Animal Collective’s more melodic moments. Even if it is New Agey, it’s got its roots firmly in the Old Age of hippie jamming and “mystical” jazzmen.

A Keeper: Absolutely. I’m probably not going to be seeking out more Paul Winter, but I’m glad to have this in my life to return to as occasion demands.

Vinyl Rip: Sunwheel

Wayne Newton, Can’t You Hear The Song?

File Between: Paul Anka and Glen Campbell

Comments? The most memorable thing about this listening experience is that apparently when I ripped the album to mp3 the turntable was off-balance for much of the second side, resulting in a woozy, Waitsian couple of songs that would otherwise have been as undistinguished as the rest of the album. From the evidence presented here, Wayne Newton is as personality-free and happily anonymous as any other AM-pop singer of the late 60s and early 70s; it’s a relief that there’s no real hint of his brassy Vegas future in these grooves, but a John Denver clone without the songs or the point of view isn’t exactly inspiring either. There are a lot of covers of previously-hit songs, here, though the only one that stands out is “Alone Again, Naturally,” because its mordant wit is so different from the rest of the treacle around it.

A Keeper? If I was throwing any of these out, this would be one of the first on the chopping block.

Vinyl Rip: Talking In Your Sleep

Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles, Live!

File Between: Tito Puente and The Mahavishnu Orchestra

Comments? Like a lot of live albums of the period, this is a more structured and streamlined listening experience than a concert would ever have been: it opens with a couple of short instrumental jams that might as well be one long one, gives equal time to the headliners with a funky version of Santana’s cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Evil Woman” followed by a stomping version of Miles’ soul-rock classic “Them Changes,” and then, as though exhausted by that much effort spends the second side noodling and jamming through a side-long jam called “Free-Form Funkafide Filth,” which is only occasionally funky, not at all filthy, and less free-form than they think. (This isn’t Derek Bailey or anything.) As a forty-minute slice of sun-baked Latin-soul-rock, it’s as comfortable as an old shoe. As a high point in the discographies of either Santana or Miles, it’s no Abraxas or Band of Gypsys, but then not much is either.

A Keeper? I’ll always need something that my dad can enjoy listening to when his Zune conks out.

Vinyl Rip: Lava

Harry Chapin, Sniper And Other Love Songs

File Between: Jim Croce and David Ackles

Comments: My most significant emotion about Harry Chapin for the last seveal years has been regret that I included “Taxi” in my Hundred Songs Of The Seventies, mostly because I’m never in the mood to listen to it and always skip it when it comes up on the playlist. So this record started out with a strike against it in the form of totally unjustified irritation with a song from a completely different album. And it only partly won me over. You really have to be in a specific headspace to allow the Chapin magic to work on you — the kind of headspace where clumsy rhymes and great whacking obvious metaphors don’t bother you, what matters is the conviction and the imagery — but as I get older and more fastidious about the kinds of lyrics I won’t roll my eyes at, I’m less and less willing to move into that headspace. His band is good — I especially liked the gestures towards rocking out on “Burning Herself” and “Woman Child” — but his song structures are so ungainly that I kept being reminded of a specific form of late 60s/early 70s cultural expression, the Narrative Poem For Children, with its ugly, rubbery illustrations (the inside-sleeve illustrations here partake of the same Gormenghastian aesthetic) and conviction that Structure was a Hidebound Tradition of the Past, and Freeform is Where It’s At, right kids? And I totally hated the nine-minute title track. The Boomtown Rats did it better with “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and they didn’t need to make their killer whine about how nobody listened.

A Keeper? That said, there’s enough loveliness and actual lyrical heft here to make up for the bits I didn’t care for. Chapin is one of the great weirdo singer/songwriters of the period, and it’s a shame that most people only know him for “Cat’s In The Cradle.”

Vinyl Rip: Barefoot Boy