![]() ![]() I’m more interested in releases that force us to rethink what we already think we know of the pop music past. I’m not just talking about this year’s fascination with ironic revisionism, from the predictable obsession with Toto’s ho-hum 1982 single “Africa” to Mariah Carey stans launching a campaign to catapult her leaden 2001 soundtrack Glitter to top of the iTunes albums chart. The power of pop music in 2018 is its insistence on going backward to go forward, on excavating the past to fetch and reclaim values we’ve forgotten (and, when necessary, to surrender our sentimental attachments to historical figures who no longer serve us). That gift of re-evaluating the past connects to late writer Amiri Baraka’s concept of “ digging,” the groovy act of excavating history to produce a better present and future. A dispatch sent from the distant past, it forces you to consider the context of its 1963 making, and to re-evaluate/rehear his genius from a uniquely 2018 perspective. Still, the project’s imperfection, its furious attempt to settle on a coherent musical identity, is precisely the source of my admiration. Both Directions at Once occasionally veers into the superlative-it provides a glimpse into the tension between rehearsal process and commercial artifact that informed Coltrane’s music in the aftermath of his 1961 juggernaut My Favorite Things-but it’s hardly the jazz musician’s most transcendent work. This year, the 55-year-old project was unearthed from his family’s surviving reference copy. Recorded in 1963 by sublime saxophonist John Coltrane during his “classic quartet” period, the original master tapes were lost or destroyed by the Impulse! label. One of the albums I can’t stop listening to this year is Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album. Being with all of you, if only virtually, is always a happy place to be. The Women of Country Are Done With Playing by Nashville’s Rules Music Is Moving in Both Directions at Once ![]() The Boundaries Between Fame and Music Have Never Been More Porous
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