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Jack Wilkins: Windows
by Chris May
Guitarist Jack Wilkins' debut on producer Bob Shad's Mainstream label lay gathering dust for almost forty-five years before being reissued on CD by Solid Records in 2017. That disc, and now WeWantSounds' 2018 vinyl edition, have restored to general circulation an album that can be filed alongside such mid-twentieth century jazz-guitar gems as Johnny Smith's Moonlight ...
Harold Land: A New Shade Of Blue
by Chris May
If Harold Land had left nothing else behind him other than the 1960 Contemporary Records album The Fox, a place in jazz history would be secure. The disc not only featured some of the finest mid-period hard-bop tenor saxophone to come out of the West Coast, but in Land's frontline partner, Dupree Bolton, it showcased a ...
Tony Kofi: Point Blank
by Chris May
British saxophonist Tony Kofi has made a specialism of heritage projects. Among the best of them is the Monk Liberation Front, a band which Kofi co-founded with pianist Jonathan Gee in 2003 and which performs Thelonious Monk's music. The work of Julian Cannonball Adderley is the focus of another venture. An early spin-off from the Front ...
Lokkhi Terra meets Dele Sosimi: Cubafrobeat
by Chris May
A younger version of London's Grand Union Orchestra, founded by world-jazz pioneer Tony Haynes in 1982, Lokkhi Terra was put together by keyboard player Kishon Khan in 2005. Both ensembles have made a specialism of jazz / South Asian fusion, with Lokkhi Terra also giving as much attention to music from Cuba, where Bangladeshi-born, London-based Khan ...
Various Artists: Innerpeace: Rare Spiritual Funk And Jazz Gems
by Chris May
It took a few years for producer Bob Shad's newly formed Mainstream Records to nail its direction in the 1960s. A less than auspicious start was releasing the first singles by the latter-day Trump-boosting halfwit Ted Nugent. A better move, given hindsight, was releasing the debut album by Janis Joplin's Big Brother & The Holding Company. ...
Wojtek Mazolewski Quintet: Polka (Worldwide Deluxe Edition)
by Chris May
Jazz in Poland has a courageous and artistically distinguished history--first in cultural opposition to Soviet-era dictatorship, later as a celebration of national and personal freedoms. Despite this, most Polish musicians remain little known beyond their own borders. The violinist Michal Urbaniak and the late pianist Krzysztof Komeda and trumpeter Tomasz Stańko are among a tiny handful ...
Buddy Terry: Awareness
by Chris May
Strictly niche in 2018, and on the margins even during his early 1970s heyday, New Jersey's Buddy Terry was among the cohort of soul-jazz musicians who, inspired by the rise of the black consciousness movement in the late 1960s, elected to recalibrate and repurpose their music. The new aesthetic became known as freedom jazz (and, later, ...
Nat Birchall meets Al Breadwinner: Sounds Almighty
by Chris May
The British tenor saxophonist Nat Birchall has been recording uplifting cosmic-jazz since 1999, when he self-released his debut album, The Sixth Sense, a hard-bop tinged affair which included, in tracks such as the two versions of Helix Nebula," pointers to his future direction. It took Birchall a decade to come to wider attention, with the release ...
Don Cherry: Home Boy, Sister Out
by Chris May
Don Cherry was in the vanguard of not one, but two uprisings which changed the face of jazz. He pioneered both the free-jazz revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the world-jazz movement of the 1970s. Home Boy, Sister Out, first released on the French label Barclay in 1985 and reissued in summer 2018 ...
The Mystery Of The Bulgarian Voices: BooCheeMish
by Chris May
Extraordinarily, given the global success of the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir's idiosyncratic and uplifting Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares (4AD, 1986), this is the BSTFVC's first release of newly recorded material in over two decades. It is another triumph, recapturing the magic, and much of the quirky harmolodic signature, of the ensemble's acapella debut ...


