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Chucho Valdes And The Birth Of Irakere
by Chris May
Rumor Records' Jazz Cuba series cherry picks from 300 recordings made primarily for local consumption from the mid 1950s through the late 1980s at the Panart and Areito studios in Havana, Cuba. Some may briefly have surfaced in the US via the Cuban exile community, but none have previously been released in the UK or mainland ...
Orrin Keepnews' Riverside Joins The Remaster Party
by Chris May
Everyone's doing it--producing 24 bit remasters of landmark albums from the 1950s and 1960s and repackaging them with newly written background essays, archive photos and, where they exist, alternate takes--most notably Blue Note and Prestige, with remasters by the albums' original studio engineer Rudy Van Gelder. And now, not before time, the era's third great independent ...
Kenny Clarke: Klook's The Man
by Chris May
Kenny Clarke Klook's The Man Proper Records 2007 Of the three great African American drummers whose work in the early and mid 1940s shaped the contours of bop--Kenny Clarke, Max Roach and Art Blakey--it was “Klook" Clarke who lit the first and fattest fuse: taking timekeeping away from the bass ...
Abram Wilson: Ride! Ferris Wheel To The Modern Day Delta
by Chris May
An intact and heritage-conscious American abroad, the Arkansas-born, Louisiana-raised trumpeter Abram Wilson--based in London these past five years--made his debut as leader in 2004 with Jazz Warrior (Dune). The album attempted the difficult trick of addressing both jazz and hip hop, with unconvincing results, and this new set avers that it continues along a similar route. ...
Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie: Bird And Diz
by Chris May
Charlie Parker played in some strange settings during his career--with a cowboy band in Hollywood, a “Gypsy" string trio in a Manhattan restaurant, the street busker Moondog, and several klezmer bands--but such liaisons tended to be random, unrecorded encounters in clubs and restaurants. Aside from a 1945 session which included the novelty hipster, vocalist and guitarist ...
Adam Bishop Quartet: Sanctuary
by Chris May
A gorgeously lyrical tenor saxophonist, Adam Bishop has emerged from the sideman shadows with the most assured and compelling British jazz album to be released so far this year. He's in the company of three other young London tyros: vibraphonist Jim Hart, bassist Larry Bartley and drummer Shaney Forbes. On Sanctuary the quartet play supple, melodically ...
Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Segu Blue
by Chris May
Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba Segu Blue Out Here 2007 Bassekou Kouyate is a virtuoso of the ngoni (West African lute), approximating the larger kora (West African harp) in sound but with a tougher, more percussive edge. Outside his home country of Mali, where he is widely ...
Charlie Christian: The Original Guitar Genius
by Chris May
Charlie ChristianThe Original Guitar GeniusProper Records2005 The New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden--active in the early 1900s--won his reputation as a founding father of jazz without leaving any recorded evidence of his talent. His epoch-shaping stature is based entirely on folklore, the testimony of a few contemporaries, and ...
Liberation Music: South Africa, Zimbabwe & Zambia
by Chris May
Protest music has a long and honourable tradition in southern Africa. In the colonial era, it began at least as long ago as 1897, when the South African songwriter Enoch Sontonga wrote his classic “Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika" ("God Bless Africa"). The song went on to become the anthem of the country's African National Congress and, translated ...
Miles Davis Quintet: Cookin'
by Chris May
I may not be the sharpest tool in the box, but I've finally worked out why Blue Note and Prestige are issuing so many of their iconic mid-'50s albums remastered by original sessions engineer Rudy Van Gelder. Partly it's to encourage those of us who already own the discs to buy them one more time; but ...
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