Jazz /
I'll Remember
LP version. Tip-on sleeve. For every celebrated name in jazz, soul and related music, there are probably another 1000 musicians who had all the talent and potential but for whom widespread recognition remained elusive. Roscoe Weathers is one such figure, a jazzman who earned his chops the hard way, a sideman in smoky clubs from Memphis to Seattle, before finally settling in LA. He recorded a significant amount of music through the 1960s, but never found the slightest modicum of commercial acclai…
Filles De Kilimanjaro
**180-gram audiophile vinyl** Filles de Kilimanjaro (named after the Kilimanjaro African Coffee) is one the many masterpieces American composer and trumpeter Miles Davis recorded during his lifetime. It can be seen as a transitional album, right between his “acoustic” and “electric” period. He recorded this incredible work of modern jazz together with music great's such as Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea. The five different songs all fitting together as expressions of the same bas…
Nights of Ballads & Blues
As the title implies, this McCoy Tyner release is a low-key, after-hours affair. Far removed from the intensity of work with then-boss John Coltrane, Tyner stretches out on a fine mix of standards and bebop classics. The pianist, of course, always had his own fleet and rich way with ballads, in spite of the galvanizing marathon solos he became known for on live dates and his later experimental recordings with Coltrane. His ballad style is even touched with a bit of sentimentality, which thankful…
Swing, Waltz, Swing
*2022 stock* Three – instead of – four this figure can mean a whole different world, when it comes to beats. Whereas the even number lets you march straight, turns right-angled, divides itself symmetrically, the odd rhythm goes around in circles and whirls. One heavy step, followed by two light ones, that can not go straight, that has to turn and turn and turn. The old Vienna and its young people was once ruled by “Waltz speeding” as today the beat shakes up even country dancefloors. Yet, that c…
Music For Small Hours
*2022 stock* Had it not been for the post-war migration of many top American jazz musicians to Europe, it is quite likely that the legendary Clarke-Boland Big Band might never have come into existence. As it happened, when Gigi Campi set up the first big band record date in Cologne on December 13, 1961, (Jazz Is Universal for the Atlantic label), he was able to call upon such distinguished self-exiled jazz stars as Benny Bailey (originally from Cleveland, Ohio), Sahib Shihab (Savannah, Georgia),…
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 …
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…
Basra
By the time drummer Pete La Roca recorded his debut album Basra in 1965 he had already appeared on 9 Blue Note sessions as a sideman and spent time in bands led by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. But it was another tenor titan, Joe Henderson, that La Roca brought in as the sole horn voice to front a dynamic quartet that was completed by what liner note writer Ira Gitler called “one of the most attuned rhythm sections in jazz” featuring bassist Steve Swallow and pianist Steve Kuhn. The resulting…
Inventions & Dimensions
For his third Blue Note album Inventions & Dimensions (1963), pianist Herbie Hancock began moving away from the modernist hard bop sound that defined his first two albums Takin’ Off and My Point Of View. Inspired by explorers like Eric Dolphy and Tony Williams, Hancock went in search of greater musical freedom by composing a set of ingenious originals each with their own unique inner logic that did away with what he considered the established jazz “assumptions” of the time. Hancock also pared th…
First Encounter
After playing with Mingus, Coltrane, Lady Day and Abbey Lincoln, inventive jazz pianist Mal Waldron moved to Europe and first reached Japan in 1970, where he met Idaho-born double-bassist Gary Peacock, who had played with Art Pepper, Bud Shank, Bill Evans and free-jazz giant, Albert Ayler before moving to Japan to study zen Buddhism.First Encounter, recorded in Tokyo in 1971 for French producer Herve Bergerat, shows that the intense pairing was quite natural, the harmonic dissonance of Waldron’s…
John Cassavetes' Shadows
For the first time on vinyl, Charles Mingus's great score for the legendary 1959 directorial debut of John Cassavetes, Shadows. Much has been said about the controversial relationship between these two masters."The score encapsulates Cassavetes's and Mingus's unique approaches to both improvisation and composition in their respective media, illuminating the oppositional nature of jazz to mainstream cultural production and the underbelly of race relations in 1950's America." - Ross Lipman
The Tradition
"Alternative Fox present a reissue of Archie Shepp's The Tradition, originally released in 1978. Avant-garde giant Archie Shepp made an indelible contribution to experimental jazz. Double-LP The Tradition was recorded in Rome in 1977 for Horo Records with drummer Clifford Jarvis and bassist Cameron Brown; the raucous Hooray For Mal has shades of be-bop, while Duke Ellington's Sophisticated Lady is largely tackled by Shepp on upright piano (with gorgeous soloing by Brown); Things Have Got To Chan…
Retribution, Reparation
Available on vinyl for the first time since its original release in 1984, Outernational Sounds proudly presents Build An Ark pianist Nate Morgan’s second outing for the celebrated Nimbus West label – the conscious and spiritualised sounds of Retribution, Reparation.
Spirits Known and Unknown
Leon Thomas' debut solo recording after his tenure with Pharoah Sanders is a fine one. Teaming with a cast of musicians that includes bassist Cecil McBee, flutist James Spaulding, Roy Haynes, Lonnie Liston Smith, Richard Davis, and Sanders (listed here as "Little Rock"), etc. Thomas' patented yodel is in fine shape here, displayed alongside his singular lyric style and scat singing trademark. The set begins with a shorter, more lyrical version of Thomas' signature tune The Creator Has a Master P…
Vodooo
Black Saint present a reissue of the Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet's Voodoo, originally released in 1986. Voodoo shows the Sonny Clark soulful hard bop conception as seen through the oblique perspective of a NY Downtown all-star quartet featuring John Zorn (alto sax), Wayne Horvitz (piano), Bobby Previte (drums), and legendary bassman Bill Drummond.This unique and iconic album stands as one of Zorn's first declared tributes to the art of an influential musician and composer. All compositions are …
Rhythmatism
**1.000 copies on coloured vinyl** Drummer and composer extraordinaire Steve Reid’s Rhythmatism is one of his deepest and most radical of albums of all time and features some of the heaviest jazz players - Arthur Blythe AKA 'Black Arthur', Charles Tyler, David Wertman and others – joining Reid. The album was originally released on Reid’s own Mustevic Sound label in 1976.As a radical jazz artist, Steve Reid played with an extraordinary group of artists – including Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Fela Kuti, …
Mingus at Antibes
You can be sure that jazz fans in the year 1960 were unfamiliar with Charles Mingus’s LPs Blues and Roots or Mingus Ah-Um when they poured into the Pinède Gould Arena at the Antibes Jazz Festival held in Juan-les-Pins, France on 13 July. At any rate, as can be seen in a short video clip, all the seats were occupied. In addition, a really good trumpeter was there, whose name would later resound throughout Europe: Ted Curson. What is more, the legendary Bud Powell, who lived in France, was invited…
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…
After the Rain: A Night For Coltrane
**500 copies** In the beginning there was John Coltrane. Teodross Avery experienced an epiphany at 13 when he first heard Trane’s Giant Steps. He emerged in the mid-1990s with two critically hailed releases for GRP / Impulse! Avery’s long and productive journey has taken him down many musical paths, from gigs with jazz legends and hip hop stars to sessions with NEA Jazz Masters and platinum pop albums. With his Tompkins Square label debut After the Rain: A Night For Coltrane, Avery has found his…