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Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker: Live Revisited
by Chris May
The first six tracks on this album, which were recorded at New York City's Town Hall on June 22, 1945, are amongst the most exciting in the jazz compendium. Not only because of their intrinsic artistic merit but also because they mark one of the first, if not the first, occasion the vanguard of the bop ...
John Coltrane: Evenings At The Village Gate
by Chris May
It is important to emphasize, at the outset of this review, that Evenings At The Village Gate is a John Coltrane album of headline significance. Recorded during a four-week run at the New York City club in August and September 1961, the disc is a snapshot of Coltrane partway through the most momentous year of his ...
Gigi Masin & Greg Foat: Dolphin
by Chris May
Dolphin is billed as a collaboration between a jazz musician, British keyboard player Greg Foat, and an ambientist-electronicist, Italian synthesizer player Gigi Masin. Depending on taste, you may find the album mellifluous and relaxing, or vacuous and inconsequential. Unintentionally but irrefutably, Foat and Masin's project highlights the unbridgeable disconnect between jazz and ambient. ...
Tubby Hayes: No Blues: The Complete Hopbine '65
by Chris May
"Who the fuck are you?" said Tubby Hayes, encountering Ron Mathewson on the bandstand of London's Hopbine club an hour or so before the start of the gig which this album chronicles. “I'm the bassist," said just turned twenty-one year old Mathewson, who had been booked to deputise for the Hopbine's regular bassist ...
Elina Duni: A Time to Remember
by Chris May
Someone once described Leonard Cohen's music as “uplifting in a peculiarly depressing way." The music of singer Elina Duni and guitarist Rob Luft is not depressing, though it certainly is uplifting. It is, however, full of tristesse, of sadness for things that are lost, be they people or places. This feeling goes deeper than mere nostalgia. ...
The Master Musicians Of Joujouka At The Forge
by Chris May
Every June, what the Guinness Book of Records has dubbed “The Smallest Festival in The World" and Rolling Stone has called “The Most Exclusive Dance Party in The World," is held in the village of Joujouka high in Morocco's Rif mountains. For three days, the Master Musicians of Joujouka play host to trance-music connoisseurs and newbies ...
Bokante: History
by Chris May
Snarky Puppy leader Michael League does not like the band being called a jazz ensemble. He describes it as a “a pop band that improvises a lot, without vocals." But anyone listening to jazz through the aural equivalent of a wide-angle lens would likely keep Snarky Puppy in the picture. League's spin-off group ...
Tony Allen: Jazz Is Dead 18
by Chris May
Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad's Jazz Is Dead continues its mission “to exalt the legacies of iconic musicians who have shaped the fabric of jazz across generations, genres and continents." The label's summer 2023 album features the late great Tony Allen. Jazz Is Dead 18 presents the Nigerian jazz and Afrobeat drum legend, who passed ...
Enrico Pieranunzi & Bert Joris: Chet Remembered
by Chris May
Chet Remembered is the second disc the pianist Enrico Pieranunzi has recorded with a big band in as many years. Both are what used to be called “concept albums." 2022's offering, Blues & Bach (Challenge), was made with the Orchestra Filarmonica Italiana, and celebrated the compositions of John Lewis, mainly those Lewis recorded with the Modern ...
Samuel Blaser: Routes
by Chris May
The Jamaican trombonist Don Drummond (1934-1969), the inspiration for Routes, was in certain respects a mid-twentieth Jamaican parallel of the New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden (1877-1931). Bolden pioneered jazz in the US, Drummond in Jamaica. Both achieved mythic proportions during their lifetimes and both their legends endure. Both, tragically, spent their final years in what were ...
