Category Album Reviews
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 […]
Sounds Of Surprise 