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Kendrick Scott: Corridors
by Chris May
Some of the press releases coming out of Blue Note's Los Angeles HQ since the pandemic have been ripe for inclusion in British satirical magazine Private Eye's Desperate Marketing column. In this, the Eye prints particularly egregious, or just plain laughable, attempts by publicists to hook-up what they are selling with headline news events, or to ...
Kahil El'Zabar's Ethnic Heritage Ensemble: Spirit Gatherer
by Chris May
Anyone who was chair of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians for a decade knows a thing or two about keeping a group of independently minded artists focused on a common goal. Drummer and percussionist Kahil El'Zabar continues to demonstrate that with his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, an acoustic, improvising trio with an African foundation ...
Hanna Paulsberg Concept: Daughter Of The Sun
by Chris May
Ever since Jan Garbarek put Norwegian jazz on the map in the late 1980s, and even more so after the international success of his singularly ascetic Officium (ECM) in 1994, the music has acquired a reputation for being, if not entirely lacking in passion, then at least emotionally detached. Since the millennium, with the emergence of ...
London Crate-Diggers BBE Reveal Lost J-Jazz Gems
by Chris May
In his introduction to The Blue Note Years: The Jazz Photography Of Francis Wolff (Rizzoli, 1995), the late Charlie Lourie reported a remarkable event he had witnessed at the inaugural Mt. Fuji Jazz Festival in 1985. “Where else but in Japan," wrote Lourie, “can one see a field packed with fifteen thousand teens and twentysomethings roar ...
Ivo Perelman / Ray Anderson / Joe Morris / Reggie Nicholson: Molten Gold
by Chris May
Lovingly described by one critic as “a leather-lunged monster," reviews of saxophonist Ivo Perelman's albums typically attract words such as honking, squawking, squealing and apocalyptic. Perelman is not interested in the current vogue for creating safe spaces. He is not the sort of free-improv player one would, in the normal course of things, recommend to AAJers ...
Albert Ayler: Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited
by Chris May
This landmark reissue contains consummately remastered cuts of the killer (among killers) track from Albert Ayler's relatively unknown My Name Is Albert Ayler (Debut 1964) plus the justly celebrated Spiritual Unity (ESP-Disk, 1965) in its entirety. Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited starts with “Summertime" from the 1964 album. In his survey The Jazz ...
Fire! Orchestra: Echoes
by Chris May
The story of supersized jazz orchestras is not pretty. The scene was set by the bleaching deracination of Paul Whiteman and the elephantine bombast of Stan Kenton, bandleaders whose craving for approval by the music establishment fatally compromised their art. Good taste came later with leaders such as Carla Bley and London's Keith Tippett, who proved ...
Donald Byrd: The Emperor
by Chris May
"The Emperor" is the killer track on Donald Byrd's 1972 masterpiece Ethiopian Knights (Blue Note), an album which took Miles Davis' contemporaneous electric experiments, stripped them of their wannabe rockstar aspirations and reframed them with a deep funk sensibility. Byrd, tenor saxophonist Harold Land, trombonist Thurman Green, vibes player Bobby Hutcherson and others bounce off plugged-in ...
Kurt Rosenwinkel & Bill Charlap: Higher Standards
by Chris May
On March 23, 2023, in the run up to Record Store Day, Elemental Records released on vinyl two Criss Cross albums from 1998 which have previously been available only as CDs. Guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel's 2-LP Intuit and pianist Bill Charlap's All Through The Night come in sturdy gatefold sleeves and are pressed on 180-gram audiophile vinyl. ...
Fela Kuti: Yellow Fever
by Chris May
Yellow Fever was originally released in 1976 on Decca's West African imprint, Afrodisia, and both its tracks were hugely controversial in Nigeria. The title track is one of Fela's greatest masterpieces. Sung in Broken English, the language Fela adopted in order to make his words understood beyond Yoruba speakers, the lyrics rail against women's use of ...
