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Hard Bop: Ten Essential Live Albums
by Chris May
"Fire! That's what people want. Music is supposed to wash away the dust of everyday life. You're supposed to make them turn around, pat their feet. That's what jazz is about. Play with fire. Play from the heart, not from your brain. You got to know how to make the two meet." So ...
Jon Hendricks: An Essential Top Ten Albums
by Peter Jones
Considering he reached the ripe old age of 37 before recording an album, Jon Hendricks' jazz legacy is remarkable. Although a singer, in his head he was more of an instrumentalist. When he improvised, he would imitate the tenor saxophone, the flute, the trombone, or the double-bass. His professional singing career lasted from 1932, when he ...
Mark Murphy: An Essential Top Ten Albums
by Peter Jones
Revered by jazz singers the world over, Mark Murphy is barely known to the general public--which is curious, since he enjoyed a recording career that lasted more than half a century, made 48 albums in his lifetime, and played thousands of gigs with hundreds of musicians from Norway to Australia. A notoriously mercurial and secretive character, ...
Unconventional Instruments
by Karl Ackermann
ECM regularly tops lists of the best jazz labels though their full name--Edition of Contemporary Music--would argue for a broader scope of content. A substantial number of their most popular albums, such as Carla Bley's Escalator Over The Hill (1974), Egberto Gismonti: Dança Dos Escravos (1989), Nils Petter Molvær's Khmer (1997), and many more, are not ...
Charles Mingus: An Essential Top Ten Albums
by Chris May
Charles Mingus was rarely a happy man and yet his music possessed a power to uplift listeners unlike that of most other composer / bandleaders before or after him. It still has that power in 2021, four decades after his passing and on the eve of his hundredth anniversary in 2022. In his personal life, too, ...
John Russell
by John Eyles
On Tuesday 19th January 2021, one month after his 66th birthday, guitarist John Russell died peacefully at home after a long battle against cancer. A flurry of obituaries furnished details of Russell's life and fifty-year career as an improvising musician, some also praising his many music-related achievements far beyond his skills as a guitarist. Some obituaries ...
Albert Ayler & New York Contemporary Five: Revisited, Remastered, Resplendent
by Chris May
The Swiss-based ezz-thetics label was launched in 2019 by Hat Hut Records' founder, Werner X. Uehlinger, and its Revisited strand is a jazz aficionado's dream. The series is devoted to landmark avant-garde recordings from the 1960s, and ezz-thetics does more than simply reissue them. Peter Pfister, Uehlinger's longtime mastering Jedi, improves the audio quality of the ...
John Coltrane: Top Ten Live Albums
by Chris May
This article is a companion piece to John Coltrane: An Alternative Top Ten Albums, which listed ten albums widely regarded as essential items in John Coltrane's discography and discussed another ten of comparable importance. John Coltrane: Top Ten Live Albums narrows the focus to club and concert recordings. Coltrane's live performances had a ...
Instrumental Duos
by Karl Ackermann
The early days of jazz were not always harmonious. Converted dance orchestras often sounded like unbalanced acoustic junkyards; a single violin, cornet, trombone, clarinet, tuba, drums, banjo, and piano, all fighting for attention. The piano was meant to be the glue holding the shrill and boisterous elements together. In 1921 a prodigy pianist named Zez Confrey ...
John Coltrane: An Alternative Top Ten Albums
by Chris May
Miles Davis once said that you could recite the history of jazz in just four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker. To that you need to add two more: John Coltrane. A giant during his lifetime, Coltrane continues to shape jazz and inspire musicians decades after he passed. No other player has come remotely close to eclipsing ...
