Boz Scaggs - Silk Degrees
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Free Music Notes for Silk Degrees
Free Music Review: Boz Scaggs' Best Album Ever Gets The Deluxe Remastering Treatment
Hit: 5 Stars
SILK DEGREES is Boz Scaggs' best album ever, and it just got even better, with extra songs and a deluxe remastering treatment that's warm and close, not harsh and shrill. There are many great songs here, especially "Lowdown and the full-tilt R&B-rocker "Lido Shuffle." If you have the old version, get rid of it after buying this CD.Free Music Review: Okay - okay, I gave in to peer pressure.
Hit: 3 Stars
I've downloaded my entire cd collection on my I Pod. Problem is, when I play it at social gatherings, someone always asks for tunes from this album. After much contemplation, I purchased it to add to my collection. After listening to it, it's not that bad though I prefer his earlier recordings.Free Music Review: Remastered?
Hit: 3 Stars
Columbia, which spit out some terrible CDS in the early days of digital sound, has remastered some of its 70s recordings with success, but this isn't one of them. The original LP of "Silk Degrees" was compressed and short on the bass end. The remastering sounds equally bad: the sound is thick, unlayed, lacking separation and "air". It makes you wonder if the master tape was lost or damaged and all that's left in the vault is an awful, equalized dub. Compare the sound of the studio recording from 1975 with the live ones from a year later. Great music but this disc is sad.Free Music Review: Boz Scaggs- Silk Degrees
Hit: 5 Stars
A standard classic for this era. By far his best album and many of his dance floor favorites.Free Music Review: The sound of the '70s
Hit: 5 Stars
Few albums encapsulate America of the mid-70s as smoothly as Scaggs' 1976 commercial breakthrough. The bluesy-rock roots he sang with Steve Miller and the blue-eyed R&B he recorded since his 1969 solo debut provided a foundation for something more polished and sophisticated. The key was a production sound that took in the elements of disco - strings, horns, synthesizers and danceable beats - but didn't cast Scaggs' soul into slickness. The resulting record grabbed dancers by their velvet lapels and compelled radio listeners to the record store. Scaggs made the urbane turn Robert Palmer would visualize on video in the '80s.
"Silk Degrees" wasn't completely unprecedented, even among Scaggs catalog; he'd already been edging in this direction, bathing in the blues and soul of collaborations with Duane Allman and the Muscle Shoals rhythm section. His preceding LP, 1974's "Slow Dancer," boasted horns, strings and some embryonic disco rhythms, but it didn't have Joe Wissert's sharp production or the L.A. studio rhythm section anchored by drummer Jeff Porcaro and bassist David Hungate. The blend of Porcaro's crisp playing and Hungate's lightly funky low strings creates a propulsive groove throughout the album. Their percussive opening on "Lowdown" is just one of the album's great instrumental moments -- and a popular sample to this day.
Scaggs' songs brimmed with optimism, fitting perfectly into an America that was still re-awakening from the debacles of Vietnam and Richard Nixon, and readying itself for a bicentennial celebration. The horn charts carried the warmth of an L.A. summer, and Scaggs is - for the first time at album length - completely at ease. The album sparkles with the band's intense studio craft, but still feels effortless and organic. Scaggs' tenor fits both the mid-tempo numbers and the soaring ballads with memorable perfection. If you were an American high school student in 1976, you no doubt have fond memories of slow-dancing to the six-minute "Harbor Lights."
Legacy's 30th anniversary reissue includes new notes from Scaggs and an essay by Bud Scoppa. Three bonus tracks provide contemporaneous versions of "What Can I Say" "Jump Street" and "It's Over" from a 1976 concert at the Los Angeles Greek Theater. They're a nice coda to the original album, showing how the songs translated to live performance (good, but not as good as the studio versions), but after ten perfect tracks, the reprise is nearly superfluous. [?2007 redtunictroll at hotmail dot com]
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