fbpx

Tag Archives: Boxed Sets

Deeper Shades Of Soul: The Good Good Feeling Fania Boxed Set, Part 1

In the world of record collecting — and music collecting, I should say — there is both excitement and periodic regret which comes with experience. The excitement is from the joy of discovering new music which we’ve never heard before and come to love. The regret comes from knowing that we’ve overlooked this music many many times in the past.

Such is the case with for me with what are now regarded as classic — and even legendary — recordings on the Fania Records label.  Most of my life I remember seeing albums from this company, which specialized in modern Latin sounds, popping up pretty much everywhere I looked.  But, for whatever reasons, I never bothered to stop and try to listen to them. So, I frequently skipped over these records when I would find them out in the wilds of collecting, from garage sales and flea markets to used record shops. My bad. As I’ve been diving deep in to Soul and Latin musics, especially over the past 20 years, my collection and listening tastes are much more balanced and diverse than when I was a kid. 

Nowadays many of these Fania recordings are highly revered by both fans of dance music as well as jazz infused Latin sounds. If you go to whosampled.com and search for some of the great Fania artists like Ray Barretto and Joe Battaan you’ll find they have been referenced a whole bunch in the digital age, pumping up the collectibility and value of these already rare original records as DJs around the world seek them out for their collections and new projects. 

Just recently I was very excited to have found one of these rare Fania albums at a garage sale in great condition for its age by the great Latin soul singer Joe Battaan.  It is sooooo good! When I looked up the album on Discogs.com, I was kind of stunned as even the CDs and re-issues of his recordings are commanding some very hefty prices on the marketplace!  There were no original vinyl pressings listed at the time of this writing!

Joe Bataan

So the point of all this record collector’s hoo ha is simply that if you want to start exploring this music, there are some good options out there. Thankfully, the good folks at Craft Recordings — which owns the Fania Records catalog — are beginning to make this music available again on a wider scale.

First up is a fine new four CD hardcover book styled set providing a terrific overview of the label and the single releases from its major artists.  This music onIt’s A Good, Good Feeling: The Latin Soul Of Fania Records sounds timeless and totally fits in with the music that new artists today are making as heard on labels like Penrose Records and Colemine Records. I’ve written about these labels before and some of the lowrider-vibing bands on them such as Thee Sinseers, Thee Sacred Souls, The Altons and Los Yesterdays. If you missed these reviews, please click on those label names in the prior sentence add you’ll jump to some of the stories.

All this really whet my appetite for more of this music so the timing of receiving It’s A Good, Good Feeling: The Latin Soul Of Fania Records for review was just perfect. I’m way into this, as you might be able to tell! 

A little paragraph from the album’s official press release may help to put this music into further perspective: “In the ’60s, a unique musical moment was brewing in New York City, as young Latin American artists—many of them second-generation—found themselves split between the traditional music they grew up on and the rising sounds of soul, doo-wop, and R&B. They began experimenting in the clubs, blending Afro-Cuban beats, Latin jazz, and soul with predominantly English lyrics. The result was a delectable new genre with broad appeal that epitomized the cultural melting pot of New York. While boogaloo and Latin soul was a short-lived craze (peaking in the late ’60s and early ’70s), it popularized Latin music in America and established the careers of many internationally beloved artists.” 

In total on the set you get nearly 90 songs spread across four nice sounding compact discs. This music was originally designed for play on AM radio back in the day so there is a certain flavor to these single mixes which still sound great whether you are playing them on at home, on headphones or your car stereo. That said, don’t be thrown by the reality that the recordings were pulled from best available sources, a combination of masters as well as 45 singles and other non analog sources. Generally, the fidelity is great on this set all things considered.

There is so much goodness here, its hard to narrow down favorites on It’s A Good, Good Feeling: The Latin Soul Of Fania Records. You’ll find classics like Joe Bataan’s “Gypsy Woman” and the Doo Wop-inspired low-rider vibe gem “When We Get Married.”  Monguito Santamaria’s “Crying Time” is a wonderful slow jam with punchy horns and a fat bass line (and yes, he is the son of legendary Cuban percussionist and bandleader, Mongo Santamaria!).  

I’ll go into more of my favorites tomorrow in Part II of this review. If you want to start streaming it to get a taste of the music, you can find it in CD quality on Qobuz (click here) and Tidal (click here). 

Monguito Santamaria

You can also check out some of the tracks I’ve posted below for you to taste these great grooves. 

There is so much more, so tune in tomorrow as we continue to explore It’s A Good, Good Feeling: The Latin Soul Of Fania Records. More fun to come!

Why Would You Want Brian Eno’s Music For Installations On Vinyl or CD vs. Tidal and Qobuz Streams?

“If you think of music as a moving changing form and painting as a still form what I’m trying to do is make very still music and paintings that move. I’m trying to find in both of those forms the space in between the traditional concept of music and the traditional concept of painting.” — Brian Eno

The prospect of exploring a nine LP set of beautiful ambient works by music legend Brian Eno is a daunting task, but a challenge I’m up to. I finally got my hands on a copy of Eno’s Music For Installations, an appropriately beautiful, museum-quality, first-time vinyl collection (issued in 2018) which not only does justice to the sounds within but brings into historical and contextual perspective Mr. Eno’s ambient installation works which many of us have not known much about. Half of this music has never been released and half of it has only had very limited direct-to-consumer releases on CD. 

This multi-disc 12-inch by 12-inch super deluxe boxed set is something you might want to consider getting if you are a fan of the man’s music. Spread across nine vinyl LPs — or six CDs or 5 1/2 hours of Internet streaming — the album presents a fascinating insight into musics which — arguably — most of us have never heard by the composer, music which was designed for the visual spaces he was presenting in, whether it was a round antiquated train turn-about “round house” building or a meditative space where old men fly kites high in the sky or even the famous Sydney Opera House.

Almost all of this music on Music For Installations comes from physical installation events Eno has created around the world.  Some of it is music for installations that are yet to exist, so the collection is in that sense both backward and forward looking. 

Included with the vinyl box there is a wonderful full color, glossy, LP-sized, soft-bound book which gives you incredible photographs of Eno’s installations with insightful details into what they were about. This is important information to give you a better understanding of how this music was crafted and its underlying intent. 

I am not going to be a spoiler / revealer of all those secrets in this review — you, Dear Readers, need to get the boxed set to fully appreciate this, folks.  

But I will give you some hints…

For example, in the book Eno discusses his early process and desire to create “generative music” that would not repeat itself, essentially. Initially using a series of auto-reverse cassette players — he includes photos of the boom boxes in the installations — and presented in three dimensional spaces in a room, he was able to deliver ever changing surround sound experiences (essentially) which would complement the visuals of the particular moment. The music would never really sound the same at any given point in time and would vary dependent upon where you might physically be in the installation space at a given point in time.

Eno was doing this years before, for example, The Flaming Lips’ famous parking lot experiments in the 1990s, where fans and their car stereos as well as boom boxes created a group surround sound experience.  This tied in ultimately to their multi-disc D.I.Y. surround sound album, Zaireeka. (Side Note: come to think of it, why hasn’t Eno worked with The Flaming Lips? That might be amazing… but I digress…)

Of course one of the beautiful things about Brian Eno’s music is that it stands on its own as well as in these installations, and thus we can listen to this box set in many different ways.  One thing I like about the physical boxed set versions of Music For Installations is that each program retains its own individual identity. Even when flipping an album side, you get enough immersion into the individual work to explore the nuance of each. More on that concept in a bit…

I have been listening to the nine-disc vinyl LP version of  Music For Installations which has been a wonderful experience. All of the album pressings are excellent, pressed on thick, dark and quiet, well-centered 180-gram vinyl

The “quiet” point I make here is especially important for this music since any sonic anomalies might disrupt the aural environment that Mr. Eno has sculpted here. Concurrently, the“well-centered” factor on these pressings is also important as any serious off-center disc could make long extended notes waver. And of course, surface noise could interfere with the mood set by the music. So all those considerations are especially significant with this sort of release, even more than say a much louder modern pop or rock release which might mask certain anomalies within the discs.  This is more like a classical release in that sense…

The albums in Music For Installations sound remarkably rich and resonant on vinyl, without the sort of hollow feeling that can emerge in the 16-bit realm of the compact disc. The fidelity is generally excellent, with no real sense of harsh digital edges apparent in my initial listens, though I suspect some of these recordings were made in the digital realm.  

The music sounds warm, inviting and at times enveloping — I do wish there was an actual surround sound complement to this set, especially since so much of it was created with three dimensional space in mind.  Maybe someday Mr. Eno will issue this whole set on a Blu-ray Disc with the visuals in 5.1 surround and Dolby Atmos. 

While I didn’t have access to the CD version of Music For Installations, I imagine that the experience is similar although the fidelity will be a bit different, likely a little more compressed sounding all things considered. Of course, if you play this over a boombox or computer speakers it won’t matter really so your choice depends on what sort of listening experience you wish to have, ultimately.

I did listen to the streams of Music For Installations on TIDAL and Qobuz it sounded quite good at CD-quality as well (if you have subscriptions you can click on the service names here and it will take you to the appropriate streams). 

The difference in the listening experience — physical media vs. streaming — however was kind of night and day for me because the album on the latter is effectively presented as one long playlist. And while you can go in and specify individual tracks you want to play, there is inevitably the opportunity to forget about what you were listening to. The music can just plays on and on and on for five hours and then some.

And there-in lies both the benefit and the rub of that version of the album. If you just want to hear Music For Installations as an extended long batch of ambient musics you can do that and the pieces start to kind of blend together. I suspect that in some ways, Brian Eno might actually like this notion.  

But,  if you want to have an individualized experience, you’ll have to pay closer to attention to what you’re actually playing and how long it’s going to last before another installation music series kicks in.

Which is my preferred version version? 

At the end of the day I do like the LP version best because of the warmer sound and the fact that it forces you to focus on the individual recording at hand. I’m sure there will be times when I just want to put on the streaming version, to let it play in the background. That is fine. 

But for those times when I want to have my brain focused on what Brian Eno was doing — which is most of the time — I think that the LP or the CD set is probably a better medium. 

The artist also is likely to make more on it financially. Plus, you’ll also get access to the wonderful 64-page book which has all those photos and information about the installations — I can’t stress enough how essential this is for better appreciating this music.  

Music For Installations is widely available so you should be able to find it at your favorite music store or online (click on the title anywhere in this review to jump to Amazon).  This is a great collection for the Eno completist and fans of ambient music in general.  I hope someday I’ll get a chance to experience one of Eno’s installations in person. That would bring my enjoyment of this set full circle for me. 

Select your currency