Articles containing - Promising Music
Cecil Taylor: FLY! FLY! FLY! FLY! FLY!
by John Kelman
83 years old and approaching ninety releases as a leader, pianist Cecil Taylor's place in the history of jazz may already rest assured, but he's more cited than seen these days. He may not come up as a primary influence as often as usual suspects Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner or Herbie Hancock, but in the free jazz realm there are few as distinctive or influential--and who've avoided the lure of compromise. Paul Bley comes close, but while the ...
read moreEddie "Lockjaw" Davis & Johnny Griffin Quintet: Tough Tenors Again 'N' Again
by John Kelman
It's been over a year since Promising Music's last series of lovingly remastered and repackaged titles from the classic MPS catalog of the 1960s/70s, but they're back with two 2012 reissues that, once again, demonstrate the breadth and depth of a German label that ran the gamut from straight-ahead to fusion, and from down-and-dirty blues to the freest of the free. First up is Tough Tenors Again 'N' Again, truly a lost 1970 classic of muscular and unrepentantly down-the-middle jazz ...
read moreDon "Sugar Cane" Harris: Cup Full of Dreams
by John Kelman
While Sugar Cane's Got the Blues (MPS, 1972; Reissued Promising Music, 2008), teamed the violinist with Europeans including Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal, German keyboardist Wolfgang Dauner and British (though, with a life-changing accident looming, not for long) drummer Robert Wyatt, Cup Full of Dreams finds Don “Sugar Cane" Harris back on American turf, with a group of players that would feature, in various permutations and combinations, on his remaining MPS releases into the mid-1970s, after which he'd mysteriously disappear, until ...
read moreIrene Schweizer / Dewan Motihar / Barney Wilen / Manfred Schoof: Jazz Meets India
by John Kelman
Years before John McLaughlin began a deep investigation into the music of India that resonates to this day, there was Jazz Meets India. It wasn't the first time that Indian music had crept into popular western culture--The Beatles and John Coltrane, amongst others, had already seen to that--but this 1967 MPS date was an early experimental meshing of linear Eastern modality with free jazz improv. There have been plenty of failed cross-cultural experiments, but thanks to Promising Music's ongoing MPS ...
read moreDon Ellis: Haiku
by John Kelman
One of the more tragic casualties of the 1970s was Don Ellis. Emerging from the big bands of Maynard Ferguson, Charlie Barnet, and Ray McKinley, the trumpeter began releasing albums under his own name in the early 1960s, distanced from his mentors' more mainstream big band sound. Beginning in small ensembles with free-thinking players such as pianist Paul Bley and bassist Gary Peacock, Ellis proved himself a more experimental instrumentalist, a quality he carried over to a return to larger ...
read moreZbigniew Seifert: Man of the Light
by John Kelman
If ever a title was in need of the wider exposure it eluded when first released, it's Polish violinist Zbigniew Seifert's unparalleled Man of the Light--finally seeing the light of day thanks to Promising Music's ongoing series of remastered re-releases from the German MPS label of the 1960s and '70s. Seifert's death from complications from cancer in 1979, at the age of 32, cut tragically short a career that had only begun its upward trajectory in North America with his ...
read moreStu Goldberg: Eye of the Beholder
by John Kelman
The measure of an artist's worth is his entire oeuvre, not simply a specific moment in time, a particular group or a single release. Still, while keyboardist Stu Goldberg never made the name for himself that he should have as a member of John McLaughlin's mid-'70s Mahavishnu Orchestra and late-'70s One Truth Band and as a sideman on drummer Alphonse Mouzon's powerfully eclectic Virtue (MPS, 1977), also recently reissued by Germany's Promising Music, the pianist's Eye of the Beholder (MPS, ...
read moreThe Jan Hammer Trio: Maliny Maliny
by John Kelman
Sometimes plenty can happen in three years; sometimes plenty can happen in a matter of days. When Jan Hammer recorded Maliny Maliny at a club in Munich on August 30, 1968, the keyboardist had no idea that, in three short years he'd be at the top of the jazz heap as founding member of one of fusion's most significant groups, guitarist John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra. He did know, within 30 days of this live recording--when the young Czechoslovakian moved to ...
read moreAlphonse Mouzon: Virtue
by John Kelman
Digging deep into the MPS catalog for its first reissues of 2009, Promising Music revives drummer Alphonse Mouzon's Virtue, an eclectic 1977 fusion date that may have coasted towards nascent smooth jazz territory but highlights the significant difference between what that term meant then and now.
With a chorus singing “Master Funk" over the funky opening track of the same name, and Mouzon's get-down clavinet playing (he adds a wealth of keyboards in addition to those ...
read moreBarney Wilen and His Amazing Free Rock Band: Dear Prof. Leary
by John Kelman
Any album combining '60s hits like “Ode to Billie Joe" and “Respect" with Ornette Coleman's “Lonely Woman" deserves more than a passing glance. The late French saxophonist Barney Wilen was already thirty-one when he recorded Dear Prof. Leary with His Amazing Free Rock Band in 1968 for the German MPS label. Best-known by then (and, likely, afterwards as well) as Miles Davis' saxophonist on the trumpeter's noir-esque soundtrack to director Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour L'échafaud (1958), Promising Music's reissue of ...
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