Results for "Blue Note Records"

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers: Just Coolin'

by Mike Jurkovic
April 14, 2020

Great moments play all over Just Coolin', the new archival Blue Note Art Blakey release from 1959, recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's studio with Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons and Jymie Merritt. For a bit of history, let's just point out that Hank Mobley was returning to the tenor chair he held from 1951-56, but which had ...

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers: Just Coolin'

by Chris May
April 3, 2020

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man or woman in possession of a good quantity of Art Blakey albums, must be in want of a lot more. Previously unreleased albums are particularly enticing. So do not be fooled by the Reid Miles-inspired cover of Just Coolin': the disc is previously unissued. It presents Blakey ...

Kandace Springs: The Women Who Raised Me

by Peter J. Hoetjes
March 23, 2020

Cover albums tend to sort themselves pretty neatly into two separate bins. One is filled with tiresome stacks of uninspired music soon to be filed away and forgotten. The other, smaller pile is made up of those few in which the artist on the cover managed to do something more than parrot their predecessors. Those who ...

Robert Glasper: Canvas

by Chris May
March 20, 2020

Of the three dozen albums released in Blue Note's 180gm vinyl Blue Note 80 reissue series, Robert Glasper's 2005 debut, Canvas, is the only one recorded in the twenty-first century. Almost all of the other releases were recorded during Blue Note's 1950s and 1960s belle epoque. It is a singular distinction and an appropriate one, for ...

Freddie Hubbard: Open Sesame

by Chris May
March 19, 2020

Blue Note's two 180gm vinyl-reissue series--Blue Note 80 and Tone Poet--continue on their enigmatic going on erratic, but mostly magnificent paths. Tone Poet is billed as the audiophile option but, on a fairly limited sampling of both series, there seems to be little, if anything at all, separating the two in audio terms. The key difference ...

Hank Mobley: Soul Station

by Greg Simmons
March 16, 2020

Music Matters continues to release exceptionally high quality, all analog reissues of classic Blue Note Records' albums from the golden mid-century age of small-combo jazz. They've recently upped their game with the introduction of a higher-quality raw material formulation they call SRX Vinyl. Hank Mobley was Blue Note Records' most prolific artist, with over ...

Blue Note Records

A World of Piano Trios II

by Mark Sullivan
February 6, 2020

Several parts of the world heard from in this installment: Sweden, Norway, France, and the United States. Esbjorn Svensson Trio (E.S.T.) e.s.t. live in Gothenburg ACT Music 2019 Before Swedish jazz pianist Esbjörn Svensson's untimely death in 2008, e.s.t. was a sensation. They brought an eclecticism and rock-like ...

Charles Lloyd: 8: Kindred Spirits (Live at The Lobero)

by Mike Jurkovic
February 1, 2020

A staggering statement of will and love, 8: Kindred Spirits (Live at The Lobero) big bangs from thin air with “Dreamweaver," a twenty-one minute excursion that doubles down on Charles Lloyd's casually grand schemata that anything and everything goes, that as long as we're all in the music's same head space we can know peace. It's ...

Kendrick Scott: Making Walls into Bridges

by Rob Garratt
January 22, 2020

Kendrick Scott authored one of the most compelling jazz releases of last year with A Wall Becomes a Bridge (Blue Note, 2019), a nuanced meditation on identity, history and prejudice, shepherded under the direction of producer and former band mate Derrick Hodge. Pairing gorgeous, searching improvisatory canvases with break beat interludes and samples from guest DJ ...