The late Tom Dowd's influence on music is legendary. As an engineer, he invented the eight-track recorder. As Atlantic Records' in-house producer, he worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Ornette Coleman before helping Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, The Allman Brothers and Ray Charles. His life is traced here through interviews with Dowd himself, Charles, Franklin, Ahmet Ertegun and Eric Clapton, and through fine archive footage and recordings, Inspiring.
RELEASED A YEAR after Sergio Leone created the genre with A Fistful Of Dollars (1965), Django, directed by Leone's onetime assistant Sergio Corbucci, was the movie that saw the spaghetti western explode; a fact borne out by the countless unauthorised sequels it spawned across Europe and beyond (as far as Jamaica, where Perry Henzell's 1973 Rude Boy classic The Harder They Come paid heavy homage). Blue-eyed Franco Nero plays the eponymous mystery gunslinger, wandering in from the filthy wilderness, dragging a coffin behind him, toward a Hellish-looking bordertown.
It's an odd time to evaluate Paul Simon's solo career in light of his successful 2004 reunion tour with Art Garfunkel. But maybe all that boomer nostalgia needs a little levity, and the sweep of his solo work proves Simon has never dwelled on the past. The Studio Recordings 1972-2000 is that rare bird—an attempt to collect an artist's entire oeuvre.
