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Etuk Ubong: Purpose Of Creation / Etuk's Ritual
by Chris May
Lagos-based Etuk Ubong is part of a long line of fiery Afrobeat-rooted trumpeters which stretches back to Tunde Williams, a founder member of Fela Kuti's Africa 70 band in the 1960s. The lineage's foundational provenance is centred around players such as Lee Morgan and early period Freddie Hubbard. Ubong made his own-name debut in ...
Ingrid Laubrock & Tom Rainey: Stir Crazy
by Chris May
The spring-going-on-summer 2020 cancellation of live performances has hit jazz fans hard and it has hit musicians even harder, denying them their main source of income. Nonetheless, the response of many players has been selfless, making available morale-boosting livestream performances, most of which it is possible to watch for free, sometimes with the option of giving ...
Rob Luft: Life Is The Dancer
by Chris May
British guitarist Rob Luft's debut album, Riser (Edition, 2017), was greeted with huge acclaim. Some observers likened his arrival to the emergence of Wes Montgomery or Pat Metheny. The music world is used to hyperbole, but for once the praise is justified. For anyone yet to hear Luft, a useful yardstick is the pianist Bill Evans: ...
Pharoah Sanders: Live In Paris (1975)
by Chris May
Pharoah Sanders' catalogue of newly-discovered album releases is expanding as fast as those of his fellow travellers Alice Coltrane and John Coltrane. Which is great, but... most of the albums were recorded live, sometimes with poor audio capture, and do not always find the musicians at their best. You have to pick and choose between them. ...
Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers: Just Coolin'
by Chris May
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man or woman in possession of a good quantity of Art Blakey albums, must be in want of a lot more. Previously unreleased albums are particularly enticing. So do not be fooled by the Reid Miles-inspired cover of Just Coolin': the disc is previously unissued. It presents Blakey ...
Funky Chemist: Groove Generator
by Chris May
You know where you are with organ / guitar / drums trios. The genre is among the most rigorously codified in jazz and has remained fundamentally unchanged since Jimmy Smith erupted on the US scene in the mid 1950s. In large part this is because the tonalities and textures of the Hammond B3 are finite and ...
Tom Green Septet: Tipping Point
by Chris May
The second album from British trombonist, composer and arranger Tom Green's Septet follows the little-big-band's locally acclaimed Skyline (Spark), released back in 2015. Rather remarkably, the only change to the lineup since then is the replacement of alto and soprano saxophonist Matthew Herd by Tommy Andrews. Green's specialism appears to be big bands. His ...
Ted Poor: You Already Know
by Chris May
Breaking news 3/23/20: Impulse! is getting its mojo back. Showing definite signs of, anyway... Since its glory days in the 1960s and 1970s, Impulse! has been little more than a logo wheeled out by its parent company, Universal Music, to lend credibility to unrelated one-off projects. Until very recently, the only newly recorded ...
Ian Shaw, Iain Ballamy, Jamie Safir: What's New
by Chris May
What's new? Not the dozen songs on this enchanting trio album. Most of them have been around for well over fifty years and people will likely still be enjoying them in another fifty. The composers include Duke Ellington, Richard Rodgers, Burt Bacharach, Jimmy Van Heusen, Michel Legrand and Leonard Bernstein. Musically sophisticated and lyrically literate, the ...
Christian McBride: The Movement Revisited
by Chris May
The spring 2020 release of The Movement Revisited: A Musical Portrait Of Four Icons is the latest chapter in Christian McBride's inspirational salute to the African American civil rights movement and to four of its heroes: Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. Embracing big band jazz, small group jazz, gospel, funk ...
