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Roy Brooks: Understanding
by Pierre Giroux
Roy Brooks was a preeminent hard-bop drummer who early on participated in seminal recording dates led by Horace Silver, Yusef Lateef and Sonny Stitt. In this release entitled Understanding, produced by Cory Weeds and Zev Feldman for Reel To Real Records, Brooks is documented live by The Left Bank Jazz Society at The Famous Ballroom in ...
Muse Records: Ten Smoking Hot Albums
by Chris May
Alone among the other great jazz labels of the 1960s and 1970s—Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, Impulse!, Strata-East and Atlantic—Joe Fields' Muse is rarely anthologised, written about or otherwise celebrated. Yet like its peers, Muse was prolific, releasing over 200 premium-grade albums during the 1970s, its most active decade, alone. This relative obscurity is ...
Lift Every Voice And Sing: Twenty #BlackLives Albums That Matter
by Chris May
Jazz has been inextricably linked with social and political protest since at least the late 1930s, when Billie Holiday made famous the leftist songwriter and poet Abel Meeropol's “Strange Fruit." The song, which has a power to move that is undiminished by familiarity, likens the bodies of lynched African Americans to fruit hanging in trees.
Atlantic Records: More Giant Steps: An Alternative Top 20 Albums
by Chris May
Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun's Atlantic Records differs in one key respect from Prestige, Riverside, Impulse!, Strata-East and Flying Dutchman, the most prominent labels covered so far in this Building A Jazz Library series. Those labels' discographies consist almost exclusively of jazz. Atlantic had parallel interests in soul and rhythm-and-blues and, later, rock. This had consequences, as ...
Drummers as Bandleaders: An Alternative Top Ten Albums
by Chris May
Drummers have been key members of every band which has changed the course of jazz history, from Max Roach with Charlie Parker to Elvin Jones with John Coltrane and onwards. Yet drummers have been the leaders of a surprisingly small proportion of landmark bands themselves. Chick Webb in the 1920s was the first of the few. ...
Trout Mask Replica
by Eric Gudas
“No Instruction Sheet": Trout Mask Replica's Unfathomable Origin Story If you were a teenager who liked freaky stuff, on a June day in 1969 you could bicycle down to your local record store and buy a brand-new, shrink-wrapped album with a man covering his entire face with an actual fish head on the cover. A double-LP ...
Strata-East: Seizing the Time
by Chris May
Operating on minimum finance and maximum passion, Brooklyn's Strata-East label was a pivotal platform for the spiritual-jazz movement that emerged during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1970s. Its closest contemporary comparator was Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Both were non-profit organisations. The AACM was non-profit by design. With Strata-East, co-founder Charles Tolliver ...
Results for pages tagged "Roy Brooks"...
Maisha: There Is A Place
by Chris May
The London jazz scene, which is in 2018 more active and characterful than it has been since the jazz-dance movement of the 1980s, offers up another jewel with this debut physical-release by spiritual-jazz septet Maisha. The band, led by drummer Jake Long, surfaced in 2016 with the download-only live album Welcome To A New Welcome (Jazz ...
Charles Mingus: Jazz In Detroit / Strata Concert Gallery / 46 Selden
by Chris May
Summer 2018 saw the general release of privately held recordings by two giants of twentieth century jazz. First up was John Coltrane's Both Directions At Once: The Lost Album (Impulse!). It was followed by Thelonious Monk's Mønk (Gearbox). In autumn 2018, recordings by another totemic figure, Charles Mingus, become the year's third newly revealed archaeological discovery. ...
