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Various Artists: Sunny Side Up
by Chris May
London DJ Gilles Peterson's worldwide touring produces some singular jazz and near-jazz experiences, the best of which he documents on his Brownswood Recordings label. Modern Cuban music figures prominently in the catalogue, and there have been several Japanese jazz albums, most memorably the Toshio Matsuura Group's Loveplaydance: 8 Scenes From The Floor (Brownswood, 2018). The label has released another left-field contender with Sunny Side Up, which showcases near-jazz bands from Melbourne, Australia, where there is, we learn, a thriving underground ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: La Casa Murada MoonJune Sessions, Volume 1
by Mark Sullivan
Magic seems to happen routinely at Spain's La Casa Murada Residential Recording Studio, a converted 12th century farmhouse, at least during the MoonJune Records recording sessions. For listeners who have not been following the label's releases, this generous 80-minute sampler offers a delightful overview. For those who have, it includes one track released in advance of Serbian guitarist Dusan Jevtovic's forthcoming 2019 album If You See Me. The MoonJune musical family frequently operates as a kind of repertory ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Jazz Fest: The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival
by Jakob Baekgaard
On the surface, some jazz festivals look a lot like each other, with the same established names travelling around the globe. This is globalization at its worst, meaning we can travel endless miles to hear the same musicians we could have heard in our own backyard. However, a good jazz festival is also a celebration of local musical culture. The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival is the perfect example of this. But make no mistake, like every other festival, ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Whiskey Juliet Foxtrot
by Luke Seabright
Much like the highly-regarded We Out Here (Brownswood Recordings, 2018), Whiskey Juliet Foxtrot is all about showcasing some exciting new talent in jazz. However, there is perhaps an extra lesson to be learned from Byrd Out's new compilation album; we would be wrong to assume that the UK's flourishing scene is solely concentrated in London. There is no denying that the capital is the epicentre of it all. The range of music coming out of there and the ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: The Social Power of Music
by Jakob Baekgaard
It could be argued that music has been around for as long as humans have walked on Earth. When we are born, one of the first things we do is cry and scream, and to calm babies down, lullabies are sung. As we grow up, music becomes the soundtrack for joy and mourning; the rites of passage in life are marked by wedding songs and funeral blues. We use music as a guiding light and a way to express what ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Nicola Conte presents Cosmic Forest: The Spiritual Sounds of MPS
by Chris M. Slawecki
A labor of love, Cosmic Forest was compiled by Italian musician, producer and DJ Nicola Conte to both revisit and present to a new audience Conte's favorite “spiritual jazz" recordings from MPS Records' 1965--'75 catalog. Eight of these thirteen pieces came from albums released as part of the MPS label's mid-1970s “Jazz Meets the World" series masterminded by jazz activist and label partner Joachim-Ernst Berendt. Cosmic Forest can take you as deeply in or as far as you ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Spiritual Jazz 9: Blue Notes Parts 1 & 2
by Chris May
The ninth volume in Jazzman's Spiritual Jazz series is a 2 x CD (and 2 x double LP) compilation from the Blue Note catalogue. Just over half the material was recorded between 1964 and 1966, the final years during which the label was steered by Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff and when the go-to engineer was still Rudy Van Gelder. Most of the remaining tracks are from 1968 and 1969. It has all been previously released. Spiritual ...
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