Old Enough to Forget

I can't say this was an album I'd heard when I was a kid. To be fair I was exposed to a lot of really cool music through my cousins Dean and Jeff and my Aunt Jeanne and Uncle Lloyd. Heck I remember Jeff having a Wayne Newton record and really liked "Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast" which I am not making fun of at all. I'm just using that to show that despite my penchant for B.T.O. and Brownsville Station's "Smokin' in the Boys Room" I was exposed to a pretty wide range of music. I mean my favourite record in my dad's collection was the clear red vinyl version of South Pacific . Heck, I played my Aunt's 45 of "Hitchin a Ride" by Vanity Fair about a hundred times. Okay, I've forgotten what I was doing.  Right, Sergio Mendes. Yeah, as a kid, never heard of him. As an adult, well that's another thing. I went through a phase where I got a lot of Latin Jazz, and his 1966 album The Swinger from Rio (that was apparently record...

The late '60s were an awesome time for so many reasons - not least among them was the music. Music was exploding and splintering into a million (okay, maybe a dozen) different directions and the generation gap was widening, and if you were over 30 you weren't to be trusted. There was no middle ground. Maybe not, but there was middle of the road. For a brief period of time up to the late '60s there was this strange no man's land, where popular artists had their songs filtered through the lens of other artists who were considered safe for consumption and that somehow made it palatable to an older generation who wanted to be hip to what the kids were down with, but who couldn't stand what the kids were actually listening to. This is what I believe at any rate. How else to do explain this type of stuff. It's too easy to blame Herb Albert and Jerry Moss who founded A&M and unleashed The Tijuana Brass in 1962 with a range of originals and homogenized versions of p...

There's no telling what you can find if you spend enough time riffling through the dollar bins. I originally picked this one up, and then put it back - then found another copy, so I went back and compared the two and figured it was a sign so I put it in the pile. It cleaned up nice, and I could hardly wait to see what kind of cheese I was in for. As a kid I thought Herb Alpert's trumpet playing was the coolest of the cool and "Spanish Flea" would crack me up every time I heard it, and as I got older I picked up on the subtext and thought it was funnier than ever. Their style of articulated trumpet soloing would go on to provide the thematic fodder for game show theme composers for years to come. I'm somewhat conflicted, as there are truly great heaping dollops of pure whipped cheese throughout the album, especially the trumpet parts on "Jingle Bells" but there are a couple of really nice renditions as well, which actually make this more enjoyable than I ...