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Bennie Maupin & Adam Rudolph: Symphonic Tone Poem For Brother Yusef
by Chris May
Had the multi-reed player Yusef Lateef still been alive in 2020, he would have been celebrating his 100th birthday. Sadly, Lateef passed seven years earlier. But 93 years is a good span for a jazz musician, especially one of Lateef's generation, who came of age in time to cut his professional teeth in swing bands.
Roots: Deeper Roots
by Chris May
Originally released in South Africa in 1975, Deeper Roots--reissued in spring 2022 on the Canadian vinyl-only label We Are Busy Bodies--inhabits a place on the instrumental jazz/R&B spectrum akin to that of US label Prestige's juke-box singles of the 1960s by artists such as tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons (according to label boss Bob Weinstock, Prestige's biggest ...
Barney Wilen: Zodiac
by Chris May
Tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen's Zodiac is the soundtrack for a mid-1960s film that never got off the storyboard. The backstory... Like other French jazzmen who came of age in the second half of the 1950s, Wilen benefited from the penchant nouvelle vague film directors had for jazz soundtracks. Aged twenty years, Wilen cut his filmic teeth ...
I Am: Beyond
by Chris May
Tenor saxophone and drums duos were a thing at least as early as the 1950s, but John Coltrane and Elvin Jones elevated the format a decade later. Among their most exalted forays was the 27:04 title track of Coltrane's One Down, One Up: Live At The Half Note (Impulse, 2005), recorded in 1965. In case you ...
The Blue Notes: Refugees From Race Hate
by Chris May
In late May 2022, three months into the war in Ukraine, the plight of refugees is at the front of our minds. Around five million Ukrainians have become refugees and another seven million are displaced persons inside their own country. The apartheid-era South African refugee crisis was not on this scale. The number of internally displaced ...
Justin Thurgur: Many Faces
by Chris May
London-based trombonist Justin Thurgur is at home in several traditions. He plays contemporary English folk music with the band Bellowhead and Afrobeat with the Afrobeat Orchestra, the ensemble led by keyboard player Dele Sosimi, a childhood protégé of Fela Kuti, who has done more than any other musician to keep the Afrobeat flame alight in Britain. ...
Shabaka: Afrikan Culture
by Chris May
It would be easy to mislay one's critical faculties when it comes to Shabaka Hutchings. The tenor saxophonist and clarinetist has since 2015 so invigorated the British jazz scene and, more recently, the international one, while eloquently articulating the potential of Afrikan cosmological thinking to realign the disorders of the modern industrial world, that the gravitational ...
John Coltrane: Favorites Revisited
by Chris May
A major event for connoisseurs of John Coltrane's classic quartet, Favorites Revisited delivers one and a quarter hours of landmark live recordings in state-of-the-art 21st century audio. Professionally recorded, and therefore sounding pretty good even on original release, the material now benefits from remastering by the ezz-thetics label's sonic jedi Michael Brändli. At times, it almost ...
Oded Tzur: Isabela
by Chris May
Oded Tzur's 2020 album, Here Be Dragons, the Israeli-born, New York-based tenor saxophonist's first release on ECM, triggered an eruption of purple prose. Critics competed to see who could convey the most enthusiasm. A few even suggested that the Tzur quartet was the inheritor of the mantle of John Coltrane's classic quartet. That might have been ...
Emma Rawicz: Incantation
by Chris May
Incantation is the debut album from British tenor saxophonist Emma Rawicz, whose playing has a degree of poise that is not often found in a teenager (she is nineteen years old) on their inaugural outing. It is not unprecedented, however, as we are reminded by the case of drummer Tony Williams, seventeen years old and brimming ...
