Mixed and mastered by Jim O’Rourke from unheard tapes recorded in the ’70s, Echo Park is a snapshot of Los Angeles life from helium-voiced mainstay Tommy Peltier that foreshadows the blue-eyed soul that would emerge just a few years later.
Now 90 years old, Peltier is still playing relatively regularly for a nonagenarian, but he cut his teeth as a jazzman – he’d never really intended to make pop music.
Born in New Orleans, Peltier relocated to Los Angeles as a teen and quickly established himself on the jazz circuit, playing cornet in his band the Jazz Corps and even recording an album with Roland Kirk. But it wasn’t to be; Peltier suffered an injury in 1970 that ended his horn playing career so he retrained as a singer-songwriter…
Category: jazz
Harriet Tubman is a vanguard electric jazz-funk trio composed of guitarist Brandon Ross, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and drummer J.T. Lewis. Together since 1997, Electrical Field of Love is only their sixth album and debut for Pi Recordings. It’s their second co-billed collaborative outing (their first was 2017’s Araminta with Wadada Leo Smith), this time with keyboardist, composer, and singer Georgia Anne Muldrow. She encountered them decades ago as a jazz studies major at New York’s New School; they were performing at a now-defunct arts space. She claims: “It was like the juke joint of my dreams. I heard everything in that music. And I was never the same after that.” Since then, Muldrow has released more than 20 albums. Harriet Tubman has always explored Black…
Dr. John – Live at Rockpalast 1999 is a powerful live document capturing one of New Orleans’ most iconic musical voices in full command of his craft. Recorded on July 9, 1999, at the legendary Loreley open-air stage in Germany.
Known worldwide as The Nighttripper, Dr. John—born Malcolm “Mac” John Rebennack Jr.—was far more than a performer. He was a musical high priest of New Orleans culture, blending blues, funk, R&B, Creole traditions, and voodoo mysticism into a sound that was entirely his own. A six-time Grammy Award winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member, his influence reaches far beyond genre boundaries.
Dr. John’s recording career began in 1968 with the haunting debut album Gris-Gris, a spellbinding…
In this most challenging of times, we need music to lift our spirits and relieve the gloom. Step forward, in all their retro-chic, cabaret-burlesque splendour The Puppini Sisters, with their perfect harmonies and songs that cheer and distract.
Their style, and sometimes the songs themselves, are drawn from the dark days of the 1940s, when The Andrews Sisters filled the crackling airwaves with songs such as “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, their style heavily influenced by an earlier close-harmony sister act, The Boswell Sisters, who came out of the Jazz Age and enlivened the years of the Great Depression.
The Puppinis aren’t in fact sisters and there have been changes of line-up during their 20-year career, but for The Birthday Party,…
Curated by Ricardo Villalobos, When There Is No Sun reflects on Afrofuturist icon Sun Ra’s influence on electronic music. The release (issued as a single CD or three 12″s, one of which includes bonus mixes) draws from the Sun Ra Arkestra album Living Sky, as well as My Words Are Music, an album of Sun Ra’s poetry recited by Saul Williams, Last Poet Abiodun Oyewole, TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe, and others. Detroit techno collective Underground Resistance appears twice, both times with Williams, adding sparse but insistent beats to lyrics about natural blackness and cosmic waves of sound. Chez Damier and Ben Vedren also contribute two tracks based on Ra’s poetry, with “The Three Dimensions of Air” featuring lush kora playing along with restrained…
They say timing is everything. The time to meet the right person. The right time to start over. Blink, and you might miss them. But is there ever really a perfect time? Or does timing just feel perfect when we’re finally ready to listen? The release of Full Circle at the first hint of spring feels almost too on the nose: an album about retreat and renewal arriving just as the world thaws out. For Tom Misch, timing does a lot for narrative work. After years of constant motion, his long-awaited second studio album captures the lightness of transformation and the undeniable bounce of realising you’re once more in bloom.
Once upon a time, Geography cemented him as a defining voice of the late-2010s bedroom producer wave. Everything felt easy. Since then,…
Bassist Miroslav Vitous made his bones in the late ’60s and early ’70s as both player and composer for the original lineup of Weather Report, not to mention as a major contributor to pianist Chick Corea’s landmark trio album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs. But he’s been a leader on his own albums for ECM since the late seventies, and he’s never rested on any laurels in doing it. Thus Mountain Call, which combines three different sets of players into a remarkable program that threads the needle between jazz and classical musics.
Vitous opens the album with a four-song mini-set featuring duets with late clarinetist Michel Portal that sound like two old friends having a truly interesting conversation – interesting enough that more of its appear throughout…
Whatever you think of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you have to admire Michael Peter Balzary’s efforts to establish an aesthetic hinterland beyond the unit-shifting funk-rock of his regular band. Even at the height of the Chilis’ socks-on-cocks tomfoolery, Flea was telling anyone who’d listen that Gang Of Four were the greatest band who ever lived, acting in indie movies like My Own Private Idaho, investigating Transcendental Meditation and playing lounge jazz with Mike Watt. Since the turn of the millennium, he’s ramped up his extra-curricular activities, forming supergroups with Damon Albarn and Thom Yorke, and guesting with the likes of Patti Smith, Tom Waits and Morrissey.
He’s also gravitated back towards his first instrument – trumpet – and his first musical…
Magma’s Cosmic Masterpiece: The Absolute Classic Live Album That Redefined Progressive Music Magma’s mythic 1975 live set, captured in full fire at Paris’ Taverne de l’Olympia, returns to mark its 50th anniversary with a stunning new edition. Presented as an exclusive 2LP pressing on translucent blue vinyl and housed in a deluxe gatefold sleeve, this release honors one of the most powerful live documents in progressive music history. Widely hailed as one of the greatest live albums ever recorded, Live captures the band at their most transcendent, delivering a performance that shattered genre boundaries and redefined the possibilities of rock. The recording radiates raw intensity, precision, and an otherworldly vision that remains unmatched decades later.
Chicago-born record label International Anthem capped off an entire year of anniversary activities (under the IA11 chrysanthemum banner) with a very special event celebrating the label’s actual eleventh solar return at their new Southside Chicago HQ inside Theaster Gates and Rebuild Foundation’s latest space-based project, The Land School.
The evening featured a performance by Rob Mazurek with Matthew Lux and Mikel Patrick Avery (the ensemble behind Alternate Moon Cycles, the very first album in the IARC catalog, which was originally released December 2nd, 2014), in what Mazurek refers to as “A Polysonic Resonance Field in One Continuous Movement.”
About the performance, Mazurek recalls: “At the invitation of International Anthem, I gathered…
For their sixth album, What We Are Made Of, Shalosh turn their focus inward while extending the scope of their sound. The music reflects the trio’s shared history, shaped by years of collaboration and extensive touring, and draws on the influences and impulses that have gradually formed their collective musical language.
“From the very start of Shalosh, we have always said that we would never commit to any one genre but keep our music as open as possible,” drummer Matan Assayag says. “It’s the best way to bring ourselves fully to each song and the only way to stay truly authentic.” In more than a decade since its founding, the trio has made its signature this freewheeling, energetic and deeply-felt blend of jazz improvisation with…
Saxophonist Ben Wendel has been experimenting with form and technology throughout most of his career. He is an ambitious composer and fluid improviser, so that makes him a “jazz” musician by default. Whether on his own or as a founding member of the band Kneebody, he has played with groove-oriented rhythms, electronics, and unusual instrumentation, as if jazz tradition were secondary to creativity. His new album, BaRcoDe, uniquely does exactly that.
Recorded after this band had a pair of residencies at New York City’s Jazz Gallery, BaRcoDe brings Wendel together with four innovative vibraphonists/percussionists: Patricia Brennan, Simon Moullier, Joel Ross, and Juan Diego Villalobos. That’s the band: tenor saxophone…
Talented Norwegian guitarist Frode Kjekstad discovered jazz in his early teens through the bebop genius of Charlie Parker and the refined touch of Joe Pass. He started formal jazz guitar studies at fifteen and moved to Oslo in 1994, where he immersed himself in the local scene and performed with legends like Johnny Griffin, Frank Foster, and Diane Schuur as part of the acclaimed Sandvika Storband. Today, he balances freelancing, composing, and teaching, releasing albums that fuse hard bop traditions with fresh, contemporary ideas. Joining him on tenor saxophone is Eric Alexander, born in Illinois, who shifted from classical alto studies at Indiana University to become a dominant force in modern jazz.
Alexander has led more than twenty albums…
On his sixth LP In Another, Toronto-based, Japanese-born, musician and composer Masahiro Takahashi (髙橋 政宏) continues the collaborative expansion of his sonic universe that listeners witness on his 2023 release, Humid Sun. Here he enlists a rotating ensemble of ten guest artists from Toronto’s vibrant music community, including his labelmate Joseph Shabason, who also serves as the album’s co-producer and engineer.
Spurred by his longtime admiration for chamber pop spanning the High Llamas and Free Design to the Beach Boys, Takahashi deviates from the underlying processes of his past two outings, trading Ableton sequences for lead sheets, focusing on creating robust melodic and harmonic foundations first.
Loose collaborations can go in two directions – some sort of loose jams that just might go nowhere, or innovative chipping of ideas that result in some interesting musical results. In the latter case, there is usually a core set of musicians that bring in a sort of semblance to a possible chaos, leading the way to something that is tangible and ultimately listenable.
For At Your Pace, their second album offering, Modha, a core Berlin-based duo of Dhanya Langer and Max Scholl operate as a sort of collective bringing in outside talents of the likes of Shanice Ruby Bennett (bass), Käthe Johanning (Rhodes), Fabiano Lima (percussion), Konstantin Döben (horns), and Tim Sensbach (guitar), as well as a set of guest vocalists/rappers like…
Many extraordinary works fade quietly into obscurity, only to be rediscovered years later. Roland Brival’s Créole Gypsy belongs firmly to this overlooked category, a staggering, deeply political, and intensely beautiful work of Pan-Caribbean spiritual jazz that has remained a ghost in the annals of music history since 1980. Now, rescued from obscurity and newly remastered by Soundway Records, this holy grail of Antillean music finally demands the reckoning it has always deserved. Appreciating Créole Gypsy begins with understanding the life and perspective of its creator. Born in 1950 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, music represents just one dimension of Roland Brival’s versatility. He is a celebrated novelist, poet, literature critic, painter,…
Lisbon-based American bassist and composer Michael Formanek introduces a new septet, New Digs, featuring his trio partners from Thumbscrew — guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Tomas Fujiwara — alongside British organist Alexander Hawkins and a three-horn frontline of saxophonists John O’Gallagher and Chet Doxas, plus trumpeter João Almeida.
Driven by imaginative, free-flowing arrangements, the band opens with “New Old World”, a platform for resolute bass lines, psychedelic organ textures, slippery rhythmic shifts, and bursts of cacophony marked by stabbing saxophone and trumpet figures over counterintuitive guitar accompaniment. Solos by Halvorson, O’Gallagher, and Doxas stand out, with the latter channeling…
Bassist Clovis Nicolas plays with the building blocks of jazz on his 2026 trio album Blues in Blueprint. Named after the Duke Ellington song covered here, the album finds the French-born/New York-based instrumentalist exploring the varied harmonic, textural, and structural possibilities of the blues; the musical form from which jazz (not to mention most popular music) is built upon.
Joining him are two veteran New York luminaries in pianist Larry Goldings and drummer Carl Allen. Together, they each bring a deep wealth of experience to the album which, while showcasing Nicolas, is imbued with a deep sense of collaborative group camaraderie.
They open fittingly with “Old Stack O’Lee Blues,” a relaxed midtempo number whose origin…
Pianist Harold Mabern (1936-2019) was talented beyond measure. Though he never received the honor and distinction of the prestigious NEA Jazz Master designation, his music and the musicians who knew him tell a different story. That story unfolds beautifully throughout the 10th anniversary reissue of Mabern’s 2015 recording, Afro Blue. The newly remixed and remastered recording features performances from some of the most celebrated names in vocal jazz, including Gregory Porter, Norah Jones, Kurt Elling, Jane Monheit, and Alexis Cole. The recording also features contributions from an all-star band, including longtime bandmates Joe Farnsworth (drums), Eric Alexander (sax), and John Webber (bass), alongside Steve Turre (trombone), Jeremy Pelt…
Almost three years after the release of É Soul Cultura, Vol. 2, Luke Una harvests another unmixed crop of deep dancefloor truffles that spans decades, genres, and continents. The well-traveled U.K. underground club institution asserts his intent with track one, “Spread Love” – impelling disco-funk from Harris & Orr, a duo on the same wavelength as Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson.
The ’90s and 2020s are each represented with two cuts, including DJ Harvey’s aloft and beatless mix of DJ Food’s “Peace” and a shadowy downtempo gem from Fatdog. All else dates from the latter half of the ’70s through the late ’80s, and though there’s wide variety even among what was made within close proximity, a dialogue of sorts occurs from track to track.