★Cool Cult Records
Renaissance
Modern and grounded in the 1960s hard-bop sensibility, the American pianist and composer Albert Dailey (1939 – 1984) had perfect control over his instrument. Since an early age he played with cutting-edge musicians of the likes of Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Charles Mingus, and Lee Konitz, only to name a few. But despite that, he was an underrated artist during his lifetime, receiving the deserved recognition only after his death. Renaissance 2 November 1977 is his second album, played…
New York City Live November 11, 1979
Original cosmonaut Sun Ra was one of the jazz world’s most individual and eccentric talents. Born Herman “Sonny” Blount in Alabama in 1914, he became Sun Ra during the 1950s, proclaiming that he was born on Saturn and focusing on outer space due to what he saw as the perpetual faults and failures of mankind on earth. Pursuing an unorthodox musical method which meant that no two recordings nor performances were ever alike, he persued various incarnations of his Arkestra throughout the decades. Th…
Magic Cat
Guitarist Harry Case is an unsung hero of the Atlanta funk scene of the 1970s and 80s. He was part of the band that issued the legendary material credited to drummer Steveland Milne’s Alias, Stevo, put together under the aegis of Calvin Arnold, with trumpeter Tommy Stewart in charge of musical arrangements. A full decade after the baffling and highly sought-after Musica Negra release, Case’s debut solo album, Magic Cat, was issued by Ichiban Records, the label established by the british blues an…
Koolin Out
Jazz drummer Greg Adams was active on the Los Angeles experimental jazz scene of the early 1980s. Based in the working class coastal town of Long Beach, California, and with longstanding ties to the industrial east coast city of Wilmington, Delaware, Adams sought to hearken back to the naturalistic form of be-bop, which is why he recorded the material on Koolin Out in a live session with no overdubs in April 1983. Privately pressed in minute quantities as the sole entity on his own hip city impr…
My Favorite Things: October 14th, 1977
My Favorite Things October 14, 1977 presents a superb collection of tracks recorded by the great Sun Ra and his Arkestra at the Variety Recording Studio, NYC. One of the rarely heard documents of the El Saturn label of the ‘70s, these recordings catch Sun Ra and John Gilmore firmly in the foreground, especially when performing on masterly interpretations of John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things and Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy. The performance shows that both are capable of masterfully reflecting the…
Hesterian Musicism
Musicism is the core concept of transcultural artistic research that rose to prominence at the beginning of the 80s thanks to the ingenious mind of Karlton Hester. Composer, flautist and saxophonist Hester set himself as the promoter of a multidisciplinary idea in which musicians, visual artists and poets collaborate in a synergic manner to produce new art forms. Hesterian Musicism is an avant-garde spiritual jazz record composed and issued by Hester on his San Francisco based label Hesteria in …
Benkei
A Japanese rarity from 1984, Benkei is a unique jazz funk session that sees the drummer Akira Toyoda working with a group that features Joe Lovano on sax, Peter Madsen on piano and Dean Johnson on bass. This early document showcases the beginning of Lovano’s career as a fine jazz player as well as being an excellent testimony of the vibrant Japanese jazz scene of the mid-80s that drew many American players to visit the Land of the Rising Sun.