The Replacements--For Sale: Live at Maxwell's 1986 (Rhino): At long last, a great sounding Replacements live performance! I was a huge fan of the sizzling Minneapolis band in the '80s and then they fell off my radar, just as they'd drunkenly fallen off a stage just as many times. The 'Mats (someone online referred to them as the "Placemats") could be brilliant or sheer amateurs on any given night of the week, but even the brilliance was only captured on a series of poorly recorded bootlegs that were floating around. This set at Maxwell's in Hoboken, NJ is full of thrills, including "Bastards of Young," "Color Me Impressed" and a rowdy cover of Kiss' "Black Diamond" (where drummer Chris Mars really shines). Vocalist Paul Westerberg is on a tear, and it's one of the last shows before they fired inspired but undependable guitarist Bob Stinson. Sure, there are a few failures--a cover of Sweet's "Fox On the Run" breaks down after about a minute--but For Sale: Live at Maxwell's 1986 is uniformly out of this world, propulsive stuff that captures those short moments and years when there was no better rock'n'roll band in the universe.
Celine McLorin Salvant--Dreams and Daggers (Mack Avenue): I belatedly discovered Salvant just before her fourth release in September. My interest snowballed: found one of her albums in the local library system and checked Wikipedia to find out about her. Salvant was about to turn 28, so I put her in my birthday programming on my KAOS show. Then I saw that she was coming to Jazz Alley in Seattle--all this in just a few days.
Dreams and Daggers is an often astonishing set of live performances from the Village Vanguard in New York, recorded in September 2016. There's a playfulness, a sense of daring and raw talent I haven't heard from a jazz singer in years, with a flawless trio that colors the repertoire in both subtle and robust ways--pianist Aaron Diehl, bassist Paul Sikivie and drummer Laurence Leathers. Through standards and original songs, Salvant makes well-worn jazz sound utterly contemporary; I especially love "Sam Jones' Blues" (from the Bessie Smith songbook), "Never Will I Marry" and "Wild Women Don't Have the Blues," where she implores the audience to find out about Ida Cox--spelling out her name--who ruled nearly a century ago. It's traditional and it's modern but above all, Dreams and Daggers is engrossing, soaring past Celine McLorin Salvant's already superb studio recordings.
My favorite single of the year is probably Rihanna's "Love On the Brain" (Roc Nation), which was released in 2016--I didn't hear it until the summer of 2017. It's quite a powerful and smooth melding of retro and modern styles from a voice that has so much character. Woo!