Boots Randolph - The Fantastic Boots Randolph (2016) [Hi-Res]

Homer Louis "Boots" Randolph III was an American musician best known for his 1963 saxophone hit "Yakety Sax". Randolph was a major part of the "Nashville sound" for most of his professional career. A transitional album, The Fantastic Boots Randolph is the first Randolph album cobbled together from sessions over a substantial period of time. The liner notes boast of the album being two years in the making, which, by Sixties standards (especially Nashville 60s standards), was a lifetime. In reality, the album is essentially a singles compilation: the swaggering "Windy and Warm", one of the best tracks here dates from 1963; seven of the other tracks had appeared on singles between 1964 and mid-1966.

Unsurprisingly, the album is stylistically all over the map, but the first side's "Yakety" songs (except for "King of the Road") share a Memphis-style grittiness, both in Randolph's tone and in the big brassy arrangements. Horn and string sections play a major role on many of these songs, and signal the full-scale move to Hollywood that would begin with Randolph's next album, making this his last album to feature the joyful 'session men cut loose' vibe of his earlier records. This is also the first Randolph album to feature chorused vocals, probably provided by the Anita Kerr Singers, an uber-soulless whitebread conglomeration whose pawprints were all over the mid-sixties Nashville sound: "Miss You", "Honey in Your Heart" (a pretty bad song all around) and Ferlin Husky's "Gone" are completely torpedoed by their presence. The best track, "Theme from a Dream" is a stark, noirish Mancini-esque piece that doesn't sound like anything else in Randolph's catalogue, but the rest (apart from the three vocal-infected tracks) is good stuff as well.