Jazz Articles

Ornette Coleman: To Whom Who Keeps a Record

by Kurt Gottschalk
March 8, 2008

In principle, copies of the Beauty is a Rare Thing (Atlantic, 1992) box set should be issued with every voter registration card; no home is complete without the collection of Ornette Coleman's prodigious 1959-1961 output. A gathering of the six albums released during that time, three later albums culled from those sessions and alternate takes, it is a crucial document of American art. One of those three later albums, To Whom Who Keeps a Record was released ...

Charles Mingus: Tonight at Noon

by Joel Roberts
November 8, 2004

A valuable reissue for Mingus fans, Tonight at Noon compiles five tunes originally recorded for two of the great bassist's most important album's, 1957's The Clown and 1961's Oh Yeah. Though the two sessions cover somewhat different stylistic ground, they blend together seamlessly and amount to much more than a haphazard assemblage of dusty outtakes.

The earlier session is the more restrained of the two, with Mingus and a typically responsive quintet (trombonist Jimmy Knepper, alto saxophonist Shafi Hadi, pianist ...

Eddie Gale: Ghetto Music

by Germein Linares
March 10, 2004

It is often difficult to gauge the relative importance or message of an artwork, years or decades after its initial release. Truly impressive are those works that not only retain their Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, but also find relevance and significance with the present. Listening to the re-release of 1968's Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music, one not only senses the social awakening of the late 1960s, there is an equal and unfortunate awareness of our current cultural waste. Francis ...

Eddie Gale: Ghetto Music

by AAJ Staff
November 8, 2003

Seeing the titles of Eddie Gale's two Blue Note albums, Ghetto Music and Black Rhythm Happening, might summon an idea of funky soulful electric music, maybe with a healthy scoop of disco production values. Viewing the cover photos of musicians mostly in Monk's habits looking like wild austere heretics, learning that the leader had worked with Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, and realizing that one album features eleven vocalists ï" the other eight ï" may cause you to readjust your ...

Albert Ayler: Nuits De La Fondation Maeght 1970

by Mark Corroto
December 1, 2002

Certainly no one at the time would have known that this recorded performance of the Maeght’s Festival in St. Paul de Vence was to be Albert Ayler’s last. But looking back on events that led up to his tragic death, his flame burnt so very bright that it surely was not going to burn long. Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1936, Ayler embarked on a lifetime of spontaneous combustion that centered on the ‘new thing’ jazz movement and threatened to ...