Reassessing

Santana Welcome Columbia 1973

Once upon a time there was a guitar god who had grown bored with all his fame, riches and glory. He longed for something more than another multi-platinum selling record. He desired not simply acclaim, but respect. He knew to get it he would have to walk away from ...

Lee Konitz and Martial Solal Star Eyes 1983 Hatology 2009

Even in his eighties, pianist Martial Solal has proven to be the Higgs' Boson of jazz. He readily demonstrates the substantial mass he brings to music most recently on his uniformly excellent Live at the Village Vanguard: I Can't Give You Anything But ...

Roy Eldridge In Paris Vogue 1951 Trumpeter Roy Eldridge left the United States for Paris in 1950 fearing that the emergence of bebop, which he had strongly influenced, would make his more traditional style of playing obsolete and lose him his formerly adoring audiences. Eldridge did not stay in Paris for as long ...

Among Ornette Coleman's periods of relative quiet, the turn of the 1960s into the 1970s may well be the most frustrating. More than three years of musical life--from the final Blue Note sessions of April-May 1968 to the release of Science Fiction on Columbia in 1972--remain shrouded in mystery and obscurity. Every recording made under Coleman's ...

Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie Ella and Basie! Verve 1963

In July 1963, singer Ella Fitzgerald and pianist Count Basie's orchestra entered the studio for their first full-length recording session as a collective. They produced a gem for both veteran jazz fans and novices. The album features both artists in top swinging form ...

Charles Lloyd Quartet Love-In Atlantic 1967

Four-and-a-half decades after the event, saxophonist Charles Lloyd's Love-In, recorded live at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium in 1967, the counterculture's West Coast music hub, endures as much as an archaeological artifact as a musical document. From sleeve designer Stanislaw Zagorski's treatment of Rolling Stone photographer Jim Marshall's ...

Clifford Brown With Strings Emarcy 1955

Recordings setting soloists alongside string ensembles were not a staple of the bop years, but, when trumpeter Clifford Brown recorded With Strings, he had two illustrious predecessors. In 1946, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie recorded four Jerome Kern standards with an ensemble arranged by Johnny Richards. Kern's estate, horrified ...

Dave Brubeck Quartet Time Out Columbia 1959

As the authors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (Penguin, 1992-2008) observed, pianist Dave Brubeck's Time Out has become so familiar that “no one actually hears what's going on anymore."

The album is one of two masterpieces made in 1959 sharing that fate. The other ...

Pharoah Sanders Thembi Impulse! 1971

It is strange that two of the most striking albums made by saxophonist Pharoah Sanders during the first flush of late 1960s/early 1970s astral jazz have been so often overlooked in reissue series. Tauhid (Impulse!, 1967)--the recording which launched astral jazz, the style Sanders fashioned alongside harpist/pianist Alice ...

Antonio Carlos Jobim Wave CTI/A&M 1967

Singer, guitarist, pianist and--above all--composer Antonio Carlos Jobim was among the first artists to be signed by producer Creed Taylor when he set up CTI Records in 1967. The Brazilian, who helped launch bossa nova internationally when his tune “Desafinado" became a Top 10 hit for saxophonist ...

Horace Silver Song For My Father Blue Note Records 1963

The nice thing about reissuing classic, fifty year-old records is the benefit of hindsight; delving into a well-established catalog that's been lauded for decades helps ensure that every release will be desirable. The classic Blue Note Records catalog of the 1950s and '60s ...

John Coltrane Kulu Sé Mama Impulse! 1967

It is rare to find Kulu Sé Mama on somebody's desert-island list of recordings by saxophonist John Coltrane. Why, is a mystery. Despite the brooding intensity of the cover photo, the performances are accessible and delightful, and, as an artifact, although it was recorded over ...

Pharoah Sanders, Hamid Drake, Adam Rudolph Spirits Meta 2000

Following the death of saxophonist John Coltrane in 1967, two of his band members, pianist/harpist Alice Coltrane and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, aligned themselves to fashion--separately and together--music which became known as “astral jazz." The style foregrounded the African and Asian song forms, and percussion ...

Lonnie Liston Smith Astral Traveling Flying Dutchman 1973

For many jazz fans, pianist Lonnie Liston Smith irredeemably blotted his copy book decades ago. Right enough, for Smith's smooth jazz and quiet storm albums of the 1980s and 1990s were bland, blissed-out, insubstantial affairs. But between 1965, when he was featured on saxophonist (Rahsaan) ...