John McLaughlin makes his return with Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 2022 through earMUSIC. This essential live album beautifully captures the seamless synergy between John and his longtime band The 4th Dimension.
On July 11th, 2022, John returned to the Montreux Jazz Festival with The 4th Dimension and award-winning special guest Jany McPherson on piano and vocals. Delivering a masterclass in fusion to the audience of Stravinski Auditorium. Performing favorites such as New Blues Old Bruise, El Hombre Que Sabia, as well as Pharoah Sanders The Creator Has a Master Plan. Johns history with the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival spans 52 years as a headlining artist and sometime guest performer.
Category: jazz
This is the end — the final recording from arguably the greatest of genre-busting bands. A celebration, not only of Shakti‘s 50th anniversary tour in 2023 but of an entire career — one that began in 1973, when John McLaughlin and Ustad Zakir Hussain first jammed in New York’s Greenwich Village. By embracing Indian Carnatic and Hindustani traditions — fused with McLaughlin’s jazz DNA — Shakti broke down musical boundaries, and by extension, cultural and social boundaries as well.
Cherry-picked from multiple shows, these six tracks are also a tribute to tabla maestro Hussain, who passed away in December 2024. Shakti had survived loss before, when ‘Mandolin’ U. Shrinivas died prematurely in 2014, but Hussain and McLaughlin were the heart and soul…
…remastered by Kevin Gray from original analog masters recorded by Rudy Van Gelder.
On View at the Five Spot Café: The Complete Masters collects the original 1960 album, recorded in New York City with a killer quintet line-up, along with nine additional tracks from the same club dates – six of which are being released for the first time. Burrell, a classically-trained guitarist who’d logged time with giants like Dizzy Gillespie (his first professional gig), Oscar Peterson, Billie Holiday and Tony Bennett, made his debut as a bandleader on Blue Note’s 1956 release Introducing Kenny Burrell. He’d cut two more LPs for the label by the start of the decade and several more for Prestige, but Blue Note was behind his first live recording as a bandleader. Working with hard bop…
…Samantha e Adrian is more than just an album — it is the story of a profound artistic connection between Brazilian actress/singer Samantha Schmütz and American composer Adrian Younge.
This record is the intersection where Rio and Los Angeles merge into a lush, cinematic, and deeply personal experience created by two musical soulmates.
Produced and recorded at Younge’s Linear Labs, an all-analog studio, Samantha & Adrian is a grand, orchestral, and soulful record. It’s a bridge between Brazil’s MPB tradition and the elegance of 1970s LA soul. With sweeping string arrangements, rich harmonies, and undeniable grooves, the album conjures the feeling of a lost classic—music that takes the listener back to a ’70s…
In his sixth and latest album New African Orleans, released by ENJA and Yellow Bird, bass guitarist and composer Alune Wade explores the multiple junctions between his native West African rhythms, the Afrobeat and juju rhythms from Lagos and the brass band repertoire immortalized in New Orleans. “I’m exploring a world that goes from my roots to the lost branches on the other side of the Atlantic,” explains the musician from Senegal.
…The 11 numbers, both originals and standards such as Herbie Hancock’s ‘Watermelon Man’, Fela Kuti’s ‘Water No Get Enemy’ (taken at a simmering slower pace), Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Child’ and Dr. John’s ‘Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya’ exploit the talents of guests like New Orleans drummer Herlin Riley, Cuban percussionist Pedrito Martinez…
In their fourth collaboration on Origin Records, bassist and bandleader Rodney Whitaker and Central Michigan composer Gregg Hill strike gold once again, backed by a formidable gathering of musicians. Hill’s music has experienced a surge in interest due to his prolific releases on Origin, which have featured musicians in and around the impressive jazz faculty roster at Michigan State University, a program with Whitaker at the helm.
Hill’s compositions have a notable sound uniquely tied to both urban Detroit and the Michigan countryside. Sweeping melodies seem to express the structured machinations of daily urban reality, while others feel like wispy clouds hanging over lakefront countryside in the isolation of a Michigan winter. The opening two tracks are…
Multi-reedist Marty Ehrlich has led several remarkable sax-bass-drums trios since his 1984 debut recording The Welcome, which featured bassist Anthony Cox and drummer Pheeroan AkLaff. His latest effort, Trio Exaltation — featuring longtime collaborators bassist John Hébert and drummer Nasheet Waits — returns seven years after its debut with seriously good stuff. This Time presents six original Ehrlich compositions alongside two interpretations of pieces by the late, great pianist Andrew Hill, with whom Ehrlich collaborated for four or five years. The album is dedicated to Hill’s widow, Joanne Robinson Hill.
Ehrlich’s “Sometimes This Time” opens with sizzling cymbal work that soon extends across the drum kit, underpinned by a round, grooving…
More than 60 years ago, Victoria Spivey heard Maria Muldaur (nee D’Amato) perform as part of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and knew the young singer was extraordinary. Born in 1906, Spivey was a well-known blues singer, songwriter, and entrepreneur who had worked with the best acts of her day, including Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Clarence Williams.
Spivey was celebrated in the 1920s and ’30s for her bawdy compositions and indelicate material. Or as the Allmusic Guide puts it in their biography of the singer, she was “an energetic, talented blues singer, drawn to themes of drugs, violence, and sexual deviance”. In the early ’60s, Spivey took Muldaur under her wing (along with Bob Dylan, whose first recordings were on Spivey’s label).
How interesting that one of the songs, “Dusk, WSQ,” on double bassist Ted Olsen‘s Violette twice references Joni Mitchell, though to be precise the style and sensibility exemplified by his music has more in common with “Paprika Plains” (Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, 1977) than “Both Sides Now” (Clouds, 1969). The kind of daring and adventurousness witnessed during that period in Joni’s career is reflected in Olsen’s own propensity for genre-blurring and risk-taking. In being issued on Shifting Paradigm, Violette might invite branding as a jazz release, but its material has as strong a connection to chamber-classical art song as anything swing- and improv-related. How telling too that among the musicians contributing to the recording are Minnesota Orchestra…
Tenor saxophone battles are a rich tradition in jazz, dating back to the vibrant days of Gene Ammons and Dexter Gordon and especially the fiery partnership of Eddie Davis and Johnny Griffin. With Cory Weeds Meets Jerry Weldon, the torch is passed with style, swagger, and an infectious swing. Weeds, the Canadian impresario and saxophonist, teams up with seasoned tenor giant Jerry Weldon, whose commanding tone and blues-inflected phrasing offer both a challenge and a source of inspiration. Their interplay throughout the album is a master class in musical camaraderie.
Opening with Eddie Davis’s “Hey Lock,” the duo sets the tone — rollicking, brawny, and full of greasy old-school grit. Weldon’s horn roars with Lockjaw’s ghostly approval, while Weeds…
Many a Calligram release originates from its Chicago home base; occasions arise, however, when one emanates from locales far outside Illinois, Kevin Brunkhorst‘s After the Fire a prime example. The guitarist resides in Nova Scotia where since 2004 he’s taught at St. Francis Xavier University and delivered courses in jazz guitar, composition, music technology, and even The Beatles. Strengthening the Nova Scotia connection, After the Fire was captured in October 2023 at Fang Recording Studio in Dartmouth, with Brunkhorst joined by longtime denizens of the province’s jazz scene, tenor saxophonist Kenji Omae, trumpeter/flugelhornist Paul Tynan, bassist Tom Easley, and drummer Tom Roach. Homegrown talent it might be, but each can play with…
To understand Thank You Kirin Kiki, the ambitious and stunning debut album from jazz and ambient multi-instrumentalist Rindert Lammers, it’s essential to get the proper context. In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 film Shoplifters, Japanese actress Kirin Kiki plays the grandmother of a family who have all fled or lost their own families. In one of her final scenes (both onscreen and in her real life), Kiri looks at her family and says “thank you” twice, an improvised moment for the actress, who passed away later that year.
This moment had a profound effect on Lammers, a Dutch musician born in 1994 who was raised in a musical family and influenced by jazz and progressive rock. Experiencing the sudden loss of three loved ones while studying history…
It’s kind of funny that it took Daniel Colussi, aka Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, four albums to title a song “A Rambling Prayer”; when you consider his entire catalog of songs, they’re all rambling prayers. The Turin-born, Toronto-based artist belongs to an expansive network of local eccentrics occupying the middle ground between soft-rock opulence and abstract experimentation, like his one-time producer Sandro Perri, art-pop crooner Marker Starling, library-music excavators Badge Epoque Ensemble, and the extended Joseph Shabason saxophonic universe. Starting with his 2020 DIY debut cassette, Desire, Colussi has reveled in the sumptuous string textures, whimsical woodwind arrangements, and unrequited yearning you hear on golden-oldies radio.
Scandinavian large ensembles have much to teach their more conservative American counterparts about reinventing the jazz orchestra for the 21st century. Framåt! by Scheen Jazzorkester is a powerful affirmation of this idea.
This Norwegian ensemble has consistently pushed the boundaries of large ensemble jazz, and Framåti — their tenth release since forming in 2010 — is another compelling addition to their adventurous discography.
Preceding this album were two Thomas Johansson-led projects, As We See It (2019) and Frameworks (2014), both released on Clean Feed Records. The latter incorporates his dynamic quartet, Cortex. Like fellow Scandinavian powerhouses Gard Nilssen’s Supersonic Orchestra,…
Up until recently, the consummate drummer Joe Farnsworth was primarily known as a traditionalist. Yet, he has expanded his palette to include younger musicians with a bent toward the contemporary and improvisation.
His latest, and arguably his best album as a leader, The Big Room, deftly balances both of these tendencies with an intergenerational group of players/composers. They are trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, saxophonist Sarah Hanrahan, vibraphonist Joel Ross, pianist Emmett Cohen, and bassist Yasushi Nakamura, with all but Nakamura contributing compositions at Farnsworth’s request.
Farnsworth boasts a resume the envy of many, having played with numerous greats, including Harold Mabern, McCoy Tyner, and…
It is an unavoidable fact of modern existence that, in the infinite interior experience of human creativity, every microgenre of art that has been attempted will at some point be swallowed, retrofitted for purpose, and trotted back out as an ‘homage’ or a ‘revival.’
Jazz, fissured as it is with catalogs of meaning that are sometimes as small as a single person, has provided fertile ground for this, especially for British musicians in this first quarter of the 21st Century. The Sorcerers, based out of Leeds, are the band that drew the inevitable card reading “take your cues from Ethiopian jazz.”
Ethiopian jazz was itself involved in the endless process of amalgamation and renewal. It’s a fusion of American jazz roots and traditional…
