Home » Jazz Articles » Various Artists
Jazz Articles about Various Artists
Various Artists: MPS: 50 Years
by Chris M. Slawecki
In 2018, MPS--Musik Produktion Schwarzwald--Records, Germany's first jazz label, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Pianist Oscar Peterson recorded the first release for MPS after his contract with Verve expired. Its catalog expanded to feature George Duke, Red Garland, Wolfgang Dauner, Horst Jankowski, George Shearing, Monty Alexander and many other pianists. Violin became the label's second most featured instrument through releases by established masters such as Don “Sugarcane" Harris and Stéphane Grappelli, and emerging ones such as Didier Lockwood and Jean-Luc Ponty. ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: The Sea at the End of Her String
by Phil Barnes
Genre is increasingly a problem in our modern musical world--it is all pervasive yet meaningless at the same time. If the internet only gives us what we search for, then a classification that is predicated on a formulaic 'if you like that then you'll love this" algorithm is never going to be good enough. Music as an art form is not specific, it implies emotion and feeling through the notes, tones and chords rather than itemising or cataloguing what a ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Unusual Sounds: The Hidden History of Library Music
by Chris May
Library music--aka stock or production music--was first marketed in the 1920s, to be used by “picture palaces" showing silent movies. Its golden age came during the 1960s and 1970s, when it provided off-the-shelf incidental music for radio, television, film and advertising. Ever since Quentin Tarantino included recordings by one of that era's most prolific British library-music composers, Keith Mansfield, on the soundtracks for Kill Bill: Volume One (2003) and Grindhouse: Death Proof (2007), the genre has acquired a collectable retro-allure. ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Confessin' The Blues
by Doug Collette
If it weren't so scrupulously annotated (at least up to a point) or attractively designed, this title might be flippantly described as “The Greatest Hits of the Blues." As is, it is the third in a roots revival series of sorts. Confessin' The Blues follows Chicago Plays the Stones (Raisin' Music, 2018), where a Windy city musical aggregation covers the curators of this set and, last but not least (and actually first in chronological order), Blue & Lonesome (Rolling Stones, ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Putumayo Presents: Ska Around the World
by Jim Trageser
For casual fans and newcomers to the music of Jamaica (a growing number, given the popularity of the BBC / France 2 TV mystery series Death in Paradise and its Jamaican-infused soundtrack), the definitions of ska vs. reggae are likely too obscure to worry about. Much as only hardcore jazz fans worry about drilling into the differences between cool and bop, those who simply love the sun-drenched rhythms of all the postwar popular styles of Jamaica are content to listen ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Running The Voodoo Down Volume 2
by Chris May
A raft of scholarly theories can be put forward to explain the affinities linking the genres represented on this compilation, subtitled Explorations In Psychrockfunksouljazz 1965-77. But there is a simple explanation: grass and acid, the lingua franca of the era's counterculture. True, there is only circumstantial evidence to suggest that John Coltrane and Joe Zawinul, both featured on the album, used either substance. But if they did not, a large proportion of their audience certainly did. As for the other ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Nicola Conte presents Cosmic Forest: The Spiritual Sounds of MPS
by Chris May
The description “spiritual jazz" means different things to different people. It was first applied to the predominantly African American style platformed by the Strata-East and Muse labels in the early and mid 1970s. The tag was not introduced until a decade later, and a better one would have been “cultural jazz," despite the tautology--for although every Strata-East and Muse artist would, if asked, almost certainly have acknowledged the inspiration of John Coltrane's masterpiece A Love Supreme (Impulse, 1964), little of ...
Continue Reading
