A full fifty years since their self-titled debut, Rio jazz-funksters Azymuth release their latest studio recording with only one original member left in the trio, the incomparable electric bass maestro Alex Malheiros, but with their essential group sound entirely intact. [...]
When tenor saxophonist Leandro ‘Gato’ (the cat) Barbieri came to record these versions of mainly jazz standards in a Rome studio in 1968, he was already 35 years of age and more or less fully formed as a player, with [...]
Another overlooked 70s classic remastered from the original tapes and returned to vinyl, this time as part of ECM’s audiophile Luminessence strand. The Jewel in the Lotus is a remarkable, Buddhist-inspired suite of original pieces composed by the saxophonist and [...]
The Mack Avenue organisation’s acquisition of the rights to the legendary artists’ label Strata-East has already resulted in some fabulous recordings becoming available once again, on high quality vinyl as well as via digital files, compact disc and streaming. Even [...]
A real curiosity, this. Mack Avenue’s first fruit of releases from their rights to the Strata-East catalogue includes the above-named 1974 New York studio date by the estimable Monk sideman-saxophonist Charlie Rouse (note he’s called Charles here). He’s playing with [...]
The news that the Mack Avenue Music Group has acquired the rights to the legendary musician-run label Strata-East is followed by a special Record Shop Day vinyl release of the Pharoah Sanders‘ 1969 recording for the company, ‘Izipho Zam’, translated [...]
Like the recent release of McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson’s ‘Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’ from 1966, Freddie Hubbard’s 1967 date at Sylvia Robinson’s Bronx club, the Blue Morocco, is a superior recording that wholly deserves its belated disinterment. [...]
One of the great early artistic successes of the ECM catalogue and a foundational text for contemporary solo jazz piano, Chick Corea’s ‘Piano Improvisations Vol 1’ (and come to that, Vol 2, which hasn’t been added to this Luminessence vinyl [...]
It’s not news because everyone with an interest in jazz or design already knows: the Blue Note record label was in its prime one of the most perfectly made marriages of form and content, packaging and product ever devised, in [...]
A relatively little-heard but canonical classic of the solo jazz piano repertoire, Paul Bley’s ‘Open, to love’ forms a vital part of what amounted to producer Manfred Eicher’s quest to find a particular acoustic setting for an instrument that was [...]
