Music & More

  Photo courtesy of artist On last week's new music Friday, Jackson Browne delivered the long awaited Downhill From Everywhere , his most listenable album in years. Not only is the title track an environmental reference to the ocean (natch) but the whole record brims with joyous lead and slide guitar that will remind you of David Lindley.  Similarly, David Crosby came out with For Free , which also sounds as great as it was long awaited. Crosby displays his inner-Steely Dan with accompaniment of the velvet voiced Michael McDonald on the first track. He also sounds great doing Joni Mitchell's "For Free," with Sarah Jarosz.  As if that weren't enough, in-`demand Nashville producer Rodney Crowell released his latest album Triage , also long awaited. Triage is the latest in a long line of superior singer-songwriter albums of the country persuasion.  No one should be surprised that Capitol Records would release Glen Campbell's last live recording. What is surprisi...

Photo: Phil Stern/Gilles Petard/Redferns As I was going through the new releases recently, I noticed that Verve had released a 23 track deluxe edition of their  Ella & Louis For Lovers , so I gave it a spin. This entry in the label's For Lovers series previously contained 11 tracks. This new expanded set is so good that I had to write about it. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong were already stars in their own right in 1955 when they got together to record an album of duets called    Ella & Louis. A year later, they made a second LP,  Ella & Louis Again. This release is drawn mostly from those two LPs with the addition of three bonus tracks for good measure (two singles and a stereo version).  When these LPs were recorded, Fitzgerald and Armstrong were both at the top of their game. These selections sound like the cream of the Great American Songbook and the backing by Oscar Peterson and his trio could not be better.  Russell Perry (All About ...