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David Liebman: The Distance Runner
by Chris May
A tour de force of spontaneous musicmaking and an object lesson in how to put prodigious technical facility at the service of the music, rather than something to be admired for its own mechanical and ultimately barren sake, master saxophonist Dave Liebman's The Distance Runner is from a solo concert recorded at the Willisau festival in ...
Tom Arthurs / Bruce McKinnon / Joe Sorbara: Squash Recipe
by Chris May
When a young artist like Tom Arthurs--still only 26--gets feted as the Next Big Thing, the pressure to satisfy the technicolour expectations of media, record company and audience can really mess with his head. Next thing you know, he'll release an album which attempts to climb too high too fast... and then there's tears. Following the ...
Tony Allen: Lagos No Shaking
by Chris May
More than any other member of Fela Anikulapo Kuti's early bands, drummer Tony Allen can be said to have co-invented Afrobeat. Kuti provided the funk/jazz/Yoruba folk music themes and arrangements--plus the trademark insurrectionary lyrics and, crucially in the face of vicious and ongoing state attempts to silence the band, the leadership. (The buck sure enough stopped ...
Andrew Hill: Time Lines
by Chris May
At the venerable age of 68, Andrew Hill has made an album which is as lithe, fearless, exhilarating, luminous, exploratory, at-the-barricades and immortal as anything he's ever recorded, including his signature 1964 masterpiece, Point Of Departure. It's an extraordinary achievement. It's hard to think of more than half a dozen artists over 65 who've defied chronology ...
Lee Morgan: The Gigolo
by Chris May
Hard bop's baddest trumpeter, Lee Morgan, may never quite have topped his iconic '63 masterpiece, The Sidewinder, but he came pretty damn close on a couple of occasions. The Gigolo is one of them, and it's been reissued as part of the ongoing Rudy Van Gelder remaster series. The album's menacing, visceral vibe has never sounded ...
Hank Mobley: Workout
by Chris May
Miles Davis dissed him, Leonard Feather called him the middleweight champion, and most people thought that John Coltrane outshone him. Because of these and a few other real or imagined slings and arrows, a kind of victim support group vibe has gathered around Hank Mobley in recent years. He's in danger of going down in history ...
Dexter Gordon: Gettin' Around
by Chris May
An arterial link between Lester Young and the hard bop tenor saxophonists of the late '50s and early '60s, Dexter Gordon's brilliance and significance are today remembered mostly as an afterthought. Partly this is Gordon's own fault: after his prolific vanguard activities of the '40s, the '50s were for him a wasteland of heroin addiction, with ...
Julia Hulsmann Trio With Roger Cicero: Good Morning Midnight
by Chris May
Emily Dickinson isn't the first name to spring to mind when you're thinking poetry and jazz. Rural (she lived in Amherst, Massachusetts all her life), introspective, and of strict Calvinist upbringing, Dickinson and jazz sound about as likely as Baz Lurman and a biopic about St Francis of Assissi. But the unlikeliest of bedfellows sometimes make ...
Blue Mitchell: Stablemates
by Chris May
A luminous chunk of late-period Blue Mitchell--remarkably, on CD for the first time--Stablemates was recorded in '77 in Los Angeles. It stacks up well against the trumpeter's fine work for Riverside and Blue Note in the late '50s and '60s. By '77, after the punishing decade-long combination punch of acid rock, funk and emergent disco, the ...
Thelonious Monk: The Classic Quartet
by Chris May
Intermittently available over the years on various labels and in various guises (most recently as Thelonious Monk Quartet in Japan and 1963: In Japan), this album catches Monk on the cusp between his unflaggingly inventive, mould-breaking Riverside years and his less consistently exploratory, later period with CBS. Clocking in at just over 38 minutes, The Classic ...
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