(Click on the cover art or album title for larger cover art, plus track listings and liner notes.)
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(Click on the cover art or album title for larger cover art, plus track listings and liner notes.) |
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"B" LIST - DON'T LIVE WITHOUT THESE EITHER!
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Al Nevins recorded four solo side-project albums for RCA, and this overlooked gem is by far the most insanely rarest and coolest. It's a concept album telling a loose narrative about a trip around the world using ambient sound effects and radically shifting stylistic arrangements (within individual songs!). Its intrigue value is self-evident from the liner notes. A work of complex genius by arrangers Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal that makes this perhaps the most avant-garde of the Suns LPs. Some sections are more drop-dead enthralling than others, otherwise this would have gone on the "A" list...
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Unlike the 1954 Soft and Sweet, where the Suns went for their first major swim in an ocean of strings, this string-soaked album is one subtly subversive reality mangler. A cursory listen has had some collectors lump this with EZ stuff like Montovani, but this uneasy-listening wonder has arranger Charles Albertine at a fascinatingly and sophisticatedly convoluted stride. Unnerving tracks like "Poor Butterfly" are so surreal that one wonders just what sort of "romantic mood" Albertine was intending to cultivate. Although it's a bit uneven, where it's interesting, the closer you listen, the weirder it gets...
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This mis-titled, mispackaged, rather cartoony-sounding LP boasts some fun arrangements for the Suns by Sid Ramin and Marty Gold. The cover implies another elevator ride like Soft and Sweet, but the orchestra here is more about horns and perky percussion than strings, and the overall vibe is closer to Raymond Scott than the Melachrino Strings.
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But wait! Here's an appropriately titled album that actually sounds like its description! This album on RCA's budget Camden label is the most consistently fun and interesting of their collections of earlier recordings from the RCA vaults. Some of the early, original-trio material can be fairly ho-hum, formulaic ballroom dance fare, but this LP displays better than any other the fun factor of pre-Albertine Three Suns.
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SWINGIN'
ON A STAR One would have higher hopes for a somewhat spacey-themed Three Suns LP arranged by Albertine. Its splendor admittedly falls short of the liner notes' assertion that Albertine "must have written [the arrangements] while suspended in orbit with a martini in one hand." But this boppin' and kinda rockin' record, which spotlights the legendary King Curtis on saxophone with the Suns, is still an overall charmer.
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