Jazz /
Off Limits
*2022 stock* Myths take a long time dying, especially in jazz where the ability to confuse fact and fantasy has marked several generations of both critics and listeners. Perhaps the great Buddy Bolden could be heard for 14 miles on a clear night, but those who still believe that old one deserves to be interned in the same kind of institutions that housed Buddy in his latter days.
The European jazz musicians, despite years of recorded evidence stretching right back to the wonderful Django Reinhar…
November Girl
*2022 stock* One of consolations of the electronic age is that those great moments in music which once were ephemeral and irretrievable can be faithfully captured, preserved for all time and savoured over and over again. Thus, some of the great musical peaks in the ten-year lifespan of the great Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band are stored for posterity on more than a score of albums. Despite writer Bob Houston’s urgent appeal for a conservation order to be put on this improbable aggregation o…
Zamboni 22
*2022 stock* Climate- atmosphere is what we say. Soul with beautiful expression, is what they say in the modern jazz scene in the US. It’s a necessary component for good jazz, as well as for swing. But to achieve an organic atmosphere which is therefore vital and alive, a relationship of intentions and views, and a congeniality of thoughts are needed. When Tommasi was in Rome for a few days and had Santucci and Scoppa listen to the latest pieces he had composed, the three musicians ideas, …
Rearward in Italy
*2022 stock* It was a really great idea to search for pieces, with the taste of a collector, and to produce this compilation, with jazz pieces and pieces extracted from refined sound tracks which have a subtle and intelligent taste, among the production of some of the biggest Italian composers in this sector. It is a piece that has never been reedited and it is of great taste, and consequent will to give works to an audience that otherwise are difficult to discover. And therefore has taste for …
Abstraction
*2022 stock* Gianni Cazzola confesses that he would have never expected that an one of his albums from the late sixties would be re-discovered and re-issued. Thirty years after its release people are again talking about “Abstraction”. Recorded in November of 1969 in Milan, “Abstraction” is Gianni Cazzola’s first record as a leader, with Oscar Rocchi on the piano and composing and Cornelio Dattoli on the electric bass. The album was born from an idea developed in a jazz club in Milan.
For those t…
What's happening?
*2022 stock* Giorgio Azzolini was never a front man bt played with the best Italian musicians of the day, as well as American Expats going through like Chet Baker or Bobby Jaspar. Here he has a trio which is amazing for 1966 in that it combines fuild renditions of standards like "When I Fall In Love" or Bill Evan's "Interplay" or Bird's "Moose The Mooche" but here with the along with Franco D'Andrea (who was pianist in the famous Basso Valdambrini Quintet and along with Renato Sellani the godfat…
Crucial Moment
*2022 stock* «Crucial moment» the title assigned by Giorgio Azzolini. And as a fact, jazz in the past years has been going through a crucial, decisive period. On one side the conservation of traditional values of the language and its well-known inspiring of the cause; on the other side the intentions, sometimes only foolish aspirations, of subversion and reorganization, on quite different bases, of jazz expression. The transformed historical – environmental conditions in which the American jazzm…
Night In Fonorama
*2022 stock* Night in Fonorama. And it was a night in the real meaning of the word, that the five jazzmen spent at the Fonorama, one of the most important studios in Milano. It was the night of May the 31st 1964. They met at nine o’ clock in the evening, and they saw the day-break on a working Milano while they still were trying to perfectionate the last tune.
We said they «met»: and no word is more significative to indicate the meeting of the five musicians at the studio. There was nothing deci…
Our Kinda Strauss
**CD Digipak issued with 28 page book and a slip case** This album of waltzes by the Clarke-Boland band is a compilation of pieces from four different sessions, the first of which, in February 1966, produced the album Swing, Waltz, Swing. This LP was one of a series of recordings made by the Philips company, under the direction of label manager and jazz producer Siegfried Loch, to be sold with twen, the Cologne-based magazine for young people, published by Hans Hermann Koper.
Says C-BBB founder …
Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie
"Clap Hands, Here comes Charlie Drewo, the most famous of all the Viennese tenorists! – Well now, without exaggeration – Karl Drewo, 32 years of age – or Charlie as his American friends like to call him – is undoubtedly one of those rare specimen of European jazz talent. He plays as if he were born in the US and raised right in one of the darkest neighbourhoods of Harlem, possibly somewhere near the old Cotton Club where Duke Ellington used to excite his audiences for more than almost a quarter …
At Her Majesty's Pleasure
Inspiration in jazz has many sources. Who would have thought that British prisons could have inspired a Belgian-born composer, arranger, co-leader of a truly international band? The fact is that when the Clarke-Boland band came to this country at the beginning of 1969 for their memorable booking at the Ronnie Scott Club tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin was, to quote the sleeve “whisked off to Pentonville”. It was nothing worse than a question of outstanding income tax from a previous visit and G…
Summer Dawn
*2020 small repress* Here is music for your strange mood. The piano starts the first track, slow tempo beat, a strict beat, a swinging beat. Lillemor—here minor harmonies give the tune a rural, romantic feeling of some place in Spain or France. The tempo changes to medium fast—the flute solos. Light phrasing contrasts beauti¬fully to the earthy, swinging beat of the rhythm section and the repeating piano figures. The trombone adds a new color, a counterpoint of sound and phrasing, backed by the…
Jazz (Now) in Italy
*2022 stock* At the Jazz Festival which took place in Sanremo in March ’66, out of the seven bands present only one was Italian; that is of course if you exclude Guido Manusardi, an Italian pianist that has been living in Sweden for years. What I’m talking about is Franco D’Andrea’s piano trio with Giorgio Azzolini and Franco Tonani: an excellent trio that I think would have been able to obtain a bigger interest if Eraldo Volontè and Dino Piana had been added to these three excellent musicians. …
Smoke Stack
On his second Blue Note album Smoke Stack, pianist and composer Andrew Hill used an unusual line-up of two bassists (Richard Davis and Eddie Khan) along with the masterful Roy Haynes on drums. Blue Note founder Alfred Lion considered Hill to have as distinct and important a compositional voice as Thelonious Monk, and the seven Hill compositions that the quartet explore here contain all the rare beauty to be found in his music. Designer Reid Miles photographed Hill himself for the striking album …
The Rumproller
After trumpeter Lee Morgan set the music world on fire with the runaway success of his hit soul-jazz single “The Sidewinder” in 1964, many artists tried to duplicate his triumphant feat in search of another boogaloo sensation. Even Morgan himself cooked up funky follow-ups using “The Sidewinder” recipe including “The Rumproller,” which was recorded the next year. Beyond the groovy title tune (which was written by Andrew Hill) the quintet featuring Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone, Ronnie Mathews…
Introducing Johnny Griffin
Johnny Griffin had been kicking around in R&B bands for years before his Blue Note debut in 1956. And what was "introduced" was a tenor saxophonist with a fresh sound, a warm, soulful style and the fastest technique in jazz. He moves from lyrical ballads to blistering tempos with ease. Within two years, Griff would become one of the leading tenor saxophonists in jazz as a member of Thelonious Monk's quartet.
In 'N Out
Recorded in April 1964, In ‘N Out falls square in the middle of the formidable run of five classic Blue Note albums that launched tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson’s legendary career. The line-up featured the transcendent frontline of Henderson and trumpeter Kenny Dorham along with a powerful rhythm section with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Richard Davis, and drummer Elvin Jones. The music charted expansive post-bop territory on three Henderson’s originals (“In ‘N Out” “Punjab” “Serenity”) and two…
Mr. Jones
After his six years with the seminal John Coltrane Quartet, the mighty drummer Elvin Jones signed with Blue Note Records in 1968 and made a series of 10 fantastic albums including 1972’s Mr. Jones, produced by Francis Wolff and George Butler, and featuring saxophonists Dave Liebman, Steve Grossman, and Pepper Adams, Thad Jones on flugelhorn, pianist Jan Hammer, bassist Gene Perla, and percussionists Carlos “Patato” Valdes, Frank Ippolito, and Albert Duffy. The music delves into expansive post-bo…
Doin' Allright
Though he first recorded in the late-1940s, Dexter Gordon’s Blue Note debut Doin’ Allright—recorded and released in 1961—marked a rebirth for the great tenor saxophonist after a decade in which drug addiction and legal troubles limited his output. But his Blue Note years put him back on top with a run of essential albums that stand as classics of the jazz canon. Doin’ Allright featured a top flight quintet with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, pianist Horace Parlan, bassist George Tucker, and drummer …
A Swingin' Affair
Just 2 days after saxophonist Dexter Gordon recorded his classic album GO! in August 1962 he brought the same quartet with pianist Sonny Clark, bassist Butch Warren, and drummer Billy Higgins back into Rudy Van Gelder’s studio to record the equally sublime A Swingin’ Affair. All the joy and beauty of the great tenor man’s music can be found in the irrepressible opener “Soy Califa,” a Gordon original that moves deftly between Latin and swing rhythms as Dex holds forth with his commanding horn. Th…