Category Album Reviews
Tribal Tech’s ‘Illicit’: the ‘Heavy Weather’ of the 1990s?
Many 1980s and 1990s jazz/rock bands tried and failed to match Weather Report’s killer combination of catchy melodies, elegant group interplay and cutting-edge improvisation, exemplified by their 1977 masterpiece Heavy Weather. But surely the most successful of the lot was guitarist Scott Henderson and bassist Gary Willis’s Tribal Tech. The LA-based group released four albums […]
Rahsaan Roland Kirk: Vibrations In The Village & Live At The Penthouse
Rahsaan Roland Kirk fans – this is the winter for you. He’s one of the most extraordinary musical figures of the last 70 years, a gifted multi-instrumentalist and political animal, a blind man who detested the word ‘jazz’, became one of Charlie Mingus’s most trusted collaborators and yet arguably achieved his greatest fame for playing […]
Essential 1980s Jazz/Rock Albums (Part 2)
Continuing our look at some of the finest jazz/rock albums of the 1980s. You can find part 1 here. Jaco Pastorius: Twins (1982) A classic double album (an edited version was released as Invitation) recorded live in Japan just after the bass pioneer left Weather Report. Jaco’s brand of fusion took in jazz, Cuban, soul […]
Essential 1980s Jazz/Rock Albums (Part 1)
1980s jazz/rock generally gets the side-eye these days. But it wasn’t all the Chick Corea Elektric Band prancing around the stage in tracksuits or pitiful WAVE-style smooth jazz. The 1970s fusion pioneers were mostly going strong and, if some were too tempted by synths and drum machines, the best music was made by sticking pretty […]
Anthony Braxton: Quartet (England) 1985
Anthony Braxton has one of the largest discographies in music history, encompassing a huge variety of styles and formats: operas, pieces for two pianos, orchestras, solo saxophone, 100 tubas, jazz quartets, ‘found’ objects and many more. The saxophonist/composer/teacher turned 80 in June, and has also just been inducted into the illustrious DownBeat Hall of Fame. […]
Dave Liebman/Billy Hart/Adam Rudolph: Beingness
The tributaries from Miles’s fabled 1970s period spread ever further. NEA Jazz Masters drummer Billy Hart and soprano saxophonist Dave Liebman met during the recording of Davis’s On The Corner (1972) and have played together many times since, most notably in Quest. Now they’ve teamed up with percussionist/keyboardist Adam Rudolph for the powerful, semi-improvised album […]
Nanami Haruta: The Vibe
Nanami Haruta was born in Sapporo, Japan, and started playing piano at just three years old. By the age of eight, she’d moved over to trombone and quickly became somewhat of a child star on the instrument, winning local competitions and giving concerts. Moving to Tokyo in 2020, she continued her meteoric rise, contributing to […]
Steve Hunt/Tim Miller: Changes
Arguably no guitarist has stepped into Allan Holdsworth’s shoes since the Yorkshireman’s sad death in 2017 – hardly surprising since he was one of the greatest, most original voices on the instrument. But if anyone can get close to recapturing Holdsworth’s compositional magic, it’s keyboard player Steve Hunt who toured/recorded with the guitarist between 1988 […]
Rescued From The Vaults: Phil Upchurch’s Companions (1984)
There’s a good case that 1984 was Last Call for classic jazz/funk (soon to morph into the dreaded smooth jazz) just before the machines took over and albums like David Sanborn’s A Change Of Heart became de rigeur (but only for a few years – there was an ‘acoustic’ revival in the late 1980s…). Phil […]
Sun Ra Arkestra (Under The Direction of Marshall Allen): Lights on a satellite
One of the unexpected treats of last year was a new – and excellent – album from the Sun Ra Arkestra: Lights On A Satellite. If you’re looking for an antidote to musical torpor, this could well be it. It draws on free jazz, classic big-band swing, spiritual jazz, gospel, New Orleans and light funk […]
Lyle Mays: Street Dreams
I was a fan of most things jazz/rock as a teenager, scuttling off to HMV or Virgin in central London to buy the latest John McLaughlin, Mike Stern, Steps Ahead, John Scofield, Bireli Lagrene or Miles. Whilst Pat Metheny was never a favourite, I dug American Garage and 80/81, and always had a soft spot for […]
Rescued From The Vaults: Greg Osby’s Season Of Renewal (1989)
Of all the musical scenes that emerged during the 1980s, M-BASE – a Brooklyn-originated fusion of jazz and funk with many other influences thrown in – may be the least understood/remembered. The term was co-authored by saxophonists Greg Osby and Steve Coleman. The M stands for ‘Macro’, BASE is an acronym for ‘Basic Array of […]
Dan Wilson: Things Eternal
These days, jazz/rock generally dials up the ‘rock’ and dials down the ‘jazz’. But, on Ohio-based guitarist Dan Wilson’s fourth solo album Things Eternal, the balance is redressed. Harmony is king, promoted by the repertoire touching on Stevie Wonder (‘Smile Please’), Freddie Hubbard (‘Birdlike’), Herbie Hancock (‘Tell Me A Bedtime Story’), Michael Brecker (‘Pilgrimage’), McCoy […]
Andrew Cyrille/William Parker/Enrico Rava: 2 Blues For Cecil
Even as streaming platforms gain an ever more forceful stranglehold on recorded music, savvy record companies can still deliver impactful physical products which could never be replicated in the digital space. Finnish label TUM are doing that in spades. A key artefact is the recent album by Andrew Cyrille, William Parker and Enrico Rava, 2 […]
Miles Davis: The Bootleg Series Vol. 7 1982-1985
The heart always beats a little faster when there’s news of a ‘previously unreleased’ Miles project. And if it’s from the 1980s, even better. The era is still one the least understood/lauded periods of Miles’s work, despite the stellar efforts of George Cole. It also has not been served well posthumously, particularly by his final […]
McCoy Tyner/Freddie Hubbard Quartet: Live At Fabrik
These two giants of their instruments – Tyner on piano, Hubbard on trumpet/flugelhorn – crossed paths many times in the 1960s, particularly on three of the latter’s most famous Blue Note albums. (Tyner of course is probably best known for his work with the fabled John Coltrane Quartet.) So it was only natural that they […]
Rescued From The Vaults: Eddie Gomez’s Mezgo (1986) & Power Play (1987)
Even amidst this digital revolution, there are still classic jazz and fusion albums which just resolutely refuse to appear on streaming platforms, due to copyright problems, label problems or whatever. Eddie Gomez’s excellent late-1980s albums Mezgo (later rereleased as Discovery) and Power Play are cases in point, recorded for the Japanese arm of the Epic […]
Album Review: Solo Live by Edward Simon
It’s somewhat surprising that Solo Live is Venezualan pianist Edward Simon’s first unaccompanied recording, after a stellar 30-year career in the bands of Greg Osby, Kevin Eubanks, Bobby Watson and Terence Blanchard, and 15 albums as leader. It’s also a testament to the format’s challenges – not all pianists relish having to be the whole […]
Album Review: In His Own Sweet Time by Tommy Flanagan
Pop/jazz keyboardist/producer/impresario David Foster recently remarked in a podcast that the best jazz players seem to have the ‘big picture’ in mind when they start a solo, with a natural sense of storytelling/structure. It rang a bell when listening to a recently rediscovered 1994 solo concert from piano master Tommy Flanagan, now released by Enja […]
Bruford: One Of A Kind Revisited
In the late 1980s, some ‘long-lost’ cult tracks took on almost mythical status amongst my musician friends and I. There was Frank Zappa’s ‘The Black Page’, Rush’s ‘YYZ’ and ‘La Villa Strangiato’, UK’s ‘In The Dead Of Night’ and Bill Bruford’s ‘Five G’ and ‘Travels With Myself And Someone Else’. Guitarist Allan Holdsworth, who died […]
Album Review: Data Lords by Maria Schneider Orchestra
The ‘political’ jazz concept album has a rich history, taking in Max Roach’s We Insist! and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra through to Sonny Rollins’ more recent Global Warming and Darcy James Argue’s Real Enemies, amongst many more. But multi-award-winning composer/arranger Maria Schneider’s latest collection and critical smash Data Lords could hardly be more timely, […]
Album Review: Truth, Liberty & Soul by Jaco Pastorius
Even as the streaming revolution sweeps all before it, there are a few aspects of physical music that seem to be thriving: vinyl and the ‘historical discovery’. Bass superstar Jaco is now a worthy recipient of both, courtesy of Truth, Liberty & Soul, a complete gig recorded at the Avery Fisher Hall in New York […]
Album Review: Conspiracy by Terje Rypdal
Five seconds of silence and then a slowly-building synth, like the spiralling of winter ghosts, accompanied by a cello-like lead guitar and flat ride cymbal: it could only be the new album by Norwegian six-string pioneer Terje Rypdal. He has forged a unique chamber-jazz/rock sound, strong on atmosphere and melancholy, an instantly recognisable blend of […]
Interview: Bryan Ferry talks about ‘The Jazz Age’
When you think Bryan Ferry, you probably think white tuxedo, Jerry Hall, that beautifully fragile croon and pop/art gems such as ‘Love Is The Drug’ and ‘Let’s Stick Together’ – you probably don’t think jazz. But look deeper into his career and there are many hints of a latent jazzophilia, from Andy Mackay’s snaky soprano […]
Album Review: Is That So? by John McLaughlin/Shankar Mahadevan/Zakir Hussain
It’s taken this writer two months and countless listening sessions to put pen to paper on the subject of Is That So?. But, as the cliché goes, it’s a lot easier to write about something you hate than something you love. Six years in the making, this spellbinding album may just be the most cohesive musical […]
Album Review: Scott Henderson’s People Mover
Look up ‘uncompromising’ in the dictionary, and there’s a good chance you’ll see a photo of guitar great Scott Henderson. If he’d wanted to, he could have enjoyed a long, fruitful career as sideman to the stars – Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea and Jean-Luc Ponty were a pretty decent start – but in the early […]
Album Review: John McLaughlin & Jimmy Herring Live In San Francisco
If this is indeed McLaughlin’s final album, as some recent interviews have intimated, it’s a pretty remarkable one to go out on. There are various reasons for this; it’s the first bona fide full-scale return to Mahavishnu Orchestra material since the final incarnation of that band waved goodbye in 1975; it was recorded live on […]
Rescued From The Vaults: Jason Rebello’s A Clearer View (1990)
This is a fabulous Wayne Shorter-produced album by a London-based piano prodigy who I believe was just 20 when it came out. Rebello’s compositions are certainly influenced by the sax master – anyone who’s spent any time trying to decode the Atlantis album will relish hearing a slightly more accessible version here. But Jason’s touch […]
Album Review: Courtney Pine’s Black Notes From The Deep
A new Courtney album is always a cause for celebration. Since his big-selling debut, 1986’s Journey To The Urge Within, he’s relentlessly pursued sounds of the Black diaspora (jazz, reggae, calypso, drum’n’bass, ska, hip-hop, soca) and also become a respected educator and broadcaster. And yet the London saxophone legend is still somewhat of a divisive […]
Rescued From The Vaults: That’s The Way I Feel Now
Most jazz players don’t really seem to ‘get’ the music of Thelonious Monk. Decent cover versions are hard to come by, of course with some notable exceptions (Steve Khan, Kenny Kirkland, Lynne Arriale, Paul Motian and probably a few more). During the centenary of the genius’s birth, it seems as good a time as any to […]
Rescued From The Vaults: Johnny Guitar Watson’s Ain’t That A Bitch
As well as being a blues pioneer, Johnny Guitar Watson was steeped in bebop and swing; one listen to his version of ‘Witchcraft’ or brilliant guitar solo on ‘Telephone Bill’ should prove that. But there was a lot more to Watson, who died in 1996. Frank Zappa said that listening to ‘Three Hours Past Midnight’ […]
Album Review: Roscoe Mitchell’s Bells For The South Side
The trio is of course one of the staples of jazz. But legendary Art Ensemble Of Chicago/AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) co-founder, saxophonist and composer Roscoe Mitchell has come up with an ingenious concept on his new ECM double album: he leads four separate trios, then mixes and matches them. Sometimes he […]
Album Review: The Joe Harriott Story
Jamaica-born alto saxist Joe Harriott was one of the UK scene’s most original, inventive and under-appreciated jazzmen of the late-‘50s and ‘60s. Although he died almost penniless in 1973 at the age of just 44, his work is now being reappraised and he’s being cited as a major influence on today’s younger players. Young UK jazz […]
Rescued From The Vaults: Terje Rypdal’s Waves
Terje Rypdal has enjoyed a very long and varied career with ECM Records. His guitar style is an in-your-face mixture of Hank Marvin-influenced wang-bar melodicism and jagged, dramatic lines that would seem more likely to come from a cello or violin. And whilst probably too much of a mysterious presence to be described as a […]
Album Review: Richie Beirach/Gregor Huebner Live At Birdland New York
Fans of over-the-top piano playing: this album’s for you. Richie Beirach should probably be a far bigger name than he is. A classically trained virtuoso, he has worked with Stan Getz and Chet Baker and also enjoyed fruitful collaborations with guitarist John Abercrombie and saxophonist Dave Liebman, whilst also focusing his own deeply personal solo […]
Sounds Of Surprise 