Tuneful treasures

Looking for advice on what McGill-related CDs to search out in music stores or on eBay? We asked a few alumni experts for suggestions:

Bernard Perusse, BCL'76, LLB'77, entertainment journalist with the Montreal Gazette

Burt Bacharach: The Look of Love box set (2003)
One of the few box sets I keep returning to - so I can be dazzled each time by the tricky arrangements and brilliant songcraft. Bacharach, AMus'48, DMus'72, is one of pop music's hall-of-famers.

Leonard Cohen: Field Commander Cohen (2001)
This live show from 1979 seems to capture Cohen, BA'55, DLitt'92, at the top of his game, with the work of violinist Raffi Hakopian making a near-perfect moment all the more special.

The High Dials: War of the Wakening Phantoms (2005)
A group with its heart firmly in the right place and one that actually delivers the songs - courtesy of Trevor Anderson, BA'97, MA'99. Their first disc was terrific, the second was even better.

Throwback: Border Crossing (2004)
This band includes singer/songwriter Erik Lind, BCom'03, percussionist Micah Shapiro, BA'04 and guitarist Mike Libis, a McGill political science student. They started off as harmony-based singer-songwriters and are turning into quite the funky jam band on stage. The fact that my daughter Dee (a McGill music student on hiatus) is the group's bass player, has, of course, nothing to do with this choice.

Daniel Seligman, BA'00, creative director for the Pop Montreal music festival

Socalled: Ghetto Blaster (2006)
A new album on the French label, Label Bleu. A brilliant mélange of voices, styles, samples and soul from Socalled (also known as Josh Dolgin, BA'00). And we were in Yiddish Literature together at McGill.

Gonzales: Solo Piano (2005)
Burt Bacharach meets Keith Jarrett. (Gonzales is also known as Jason Beck, BMus'94)

Arcade Fire: Funeral (2004)
For it's classic pop sensibility.

Carl Wilson, BA'89, music critic and columnist for The Globe & Mail and Zoilus.com

Leonard Cohen - I'm Your Man (1988)
This album by McGill's patron sinner-saint divides listeners bitterly: Some think of it as his post-new-wave classic, the moment when Cohen let his sardonic Zen humour finally show its full bald face as he both satirized and sacralized the plasticity of 1980s culture, using crappy-sounding keyboards as his spiritual vehicles. And everyone else is wrong.

Pest 5000 (aka P5K) - Interabang (1996)
One of the many glorious Montreal never-weres: P5K was led by bassist Patti Schmidt, BA'91, host of CBC Radio's Brave New Waves and a veteran of McGill's campus radio station CKUT. Their songs were barely restrained explosions of brainy giddiness and sarcasm layered over intense fragility, with a cornucopia of hooks. If they were around now, they'd easily seduce the fans of the Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade.

Sackville - These Last Songs (1998)
This sadly neglected group was headed by McGill drama graduate Gabriel Levine, BA'98, whose poignant songs stood out among the "alternative country" current at the time, with echoes of Appalachian ballads, Tom Waits and Giant Sand. All their albums are worthwhile but this is the greatest, with miniature cinematic epics such as "Pioneers" and "Tie Back Yr Hair."

Ken Vandermark Five - Free Jazz Classics, Vols. 1 & 2 (2002)
It's a little-known fact that the Chicago saxophonist, composer, impresario and McArthur "genius" grant winner is a graduate of McGill. While not the biggest innovator in avant-garde jazz, Vandermark, BA'86, is a vigilant keeper of its flame (as well as its ambassador to a new, rock-based audience), so this paradoxical effort to create a canon in an anti-canonical field could be considered his signature disc.