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Muse Records: Ten Smoking Hot Albums
by Chris May
Alone among the other great jazz labels of the 1960s and 1970s—Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, Impulse!, Strata-East and Atlantic—Joe Fields' Muse is rarely anthologised, written about or otherwise celebrated. Yet like its peers, Muse was prolific, releasing over 200 premium-grade albums during the 1970s, its most active decade, alone. This relative obscurity is ...
Wayne Escoffery, Art Blakey, Gunhild Carling and More
by Joe Dimino
As this COVID-19 pandemic has silenced the world of live music, jazz musicians continue releasing more and more great albums. This week we focus on some of them, Wayne Escoffery, Warren Wolf, Gunhild Carling and Ran Blake. Enjoy the music. Playlist Wayne Escoffery “Benedictus" The Humble Warrior (Smoke Sessions Records) 00:00 Host talks 5:23 ...
The Rebel Festival
by Karl Ackermann
On the morning of July 4, 1960, there were more than a few signs of the mayhem that had taken place the night before in Newport, Rhode Island. Newport's Millionaires Row woke up to broken store windows, overturned vehicles, and storm drains clogged with garbage and beer bottles. One-hundred-eighty-two people, mostly young, New England college students ...
Ralph Peterson & the Messenger Legacy: Onward & Upward
by Paul Rauch
Generally speaking, legacy bands are created to preserve the music of an artist. They feature innovative interpretations of an artist's compositions or past performances to share with future generations of listeners. In the case of drummer Ralph Peterson, his ambitious efforts to honor the continuum of his mentor Art Blakey are forward thinking, about a collective ...
Blue Note Records: Lost In Space: 20 Overlooked Classic Albums
by Chris May
For anyone with a passion for Blue Note, it is hard to conceive of an album that has been “overlooked," let alone twenty of them. For connoisseurs of the most influential label in jazz history, the passion can be all consuming: if a dedicated collector does not have all the albums (yet), he or she will ...
Lift Every Voice And Sing: Twenty #BlackLives Albums That Matter
by Chris May
Jazz has been inextricably linked with social and political protest since at least the late 1930s, when Billie Holiday made famous the leftist songwriter and poet Abel Meeropol's “Strange Fruit." The song, which has a power to move that is undiminished by familiarity, likens the bodies of lynched African Americans to fruit hanging in trees.
Charles Tolliver: Blowing Down The Walls Of Trump’s Jericho
by Chris May
Charles Tolliver has played with practically every major African American jazz stylist of his generation, and composed for some of them, too. In addition, he is the co-founder of Strata-East, the most influential label at the intersection of hard bop and spiritual jazz during the 1970s. Tolliver's long and distinguished career continues to flourish, with a ...
Art Blakey: Just Coolin'
Listening back to the tape he recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, N.J., on March 8, 1959, Blue Note producer Alfred Lion liked what he heard. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers were on fire. The music was tight and ferocious, with the horns—trumpeter Lee Morgan and tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley—improvising on point. The ...
Atlantic Records: More Giant Steps: An Alternative Top 20 Albums
by Chris May
Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun's Atlantic Records differs in one key respect from Prestige, Riverside, Impulse!, Strata-East and Flying Dutchman, the most prominent labels covered so far in this Building A Jazz Library series. Those labels' discographies consist almost exclusively of jazz. Atlantic had parallel interests in soul and rhythm-and-blues and, later, rock. This had consequences, as ...
Impulse! Records: An Alternative Top 20 Zeitgeist Seizing Albums
by Chris May
There can be little argument that a jazz label ever captured a zeitgeist more completely than Impulse! did during its original 1960s incarnation. In the US, the fight back against white racism was cresting, opposition to the Vietnam war was growing, outrage over the assassinations of figures of hope such as President Kennedy, Martin Luther King ...
