Looking Forwards :: Listening Back

Yes. It is true that I have just had the better part of three weeks away from posting.  That does not however mean that I have lost interest in music or even writing about it.  I have also now gone three whole weeks without seeing any live music! There comes a point where, in order to assimilate that which I have seen and heard in the last few months of new music, both live and recorded, I have to pause :: rewind.  I need to listen to it again, when I can, think about it, read other people's thoughts (something that the internet has totally revolutionized) before I can establish some kind of personal equilibrium with it.

This is important for several reasons.  Like it or not the end of the year is approaching and with it come those "Best of" lists which, to be honest, I love thinking about (my own) and reading (those of others) and also, of course, what to expect in 2013!
There are of course many albums/artists that I have wanted to listen to but have failed to do so for one reason or another. A few of the most obvious ones that I have come to notice in the last fortnight are however currently winging their way to me in time for possible inclusion and one of them falls in a category that I'm not going to include in such a list, because my selection is going to cover the period from 2010 onwards, the renaissance of which I'm detecting and a genre of recording that I'm delighted to see coming to attention again. The proper 'essentially single concert' live LP (with minimal editing and over-dubs). This conveniently has some cross-over both with my own "Best Of" lists and also new music that I am anticipating the arrival of in 2013.

While writing this it is all too much like complicated to listen to new music. I have instead been listening to a slice of wax released forty-two years ago this month in the UK as CBS S64087 ---  Abraxas - Santana. It contains another recently discussed topic, that being an example of a cover version that widely becomes assumed to be the original. This is something that I have been guilty of on many occasions but not, as it happens, this one: Peter Green's 'Black Magic Woman' (1968) is the case in point here. 

Very early on in this adventure, in 2006, I mentioned that I had no particular wish to review things that I don't much like, especially to the extent of acquiring them for that purpose. I have, however, just succumbed to something rather akin to the opposite - buying an album by an act that I saw live this summer (and have mentioned in a post here) because of the negative review that it was given in The Guardian a fortnight ago today... Either things went very pear-shaped on the album or the review was harsh --- I shall let you know my verdict in due course. (That is enough information to work out the identity, if you want to try!)