Stanley Cowell, Charles Rouse, Charles Tolliver’s Music Inc.: Strata-East’s Reissued Triage Displays The Label’s Range

AFTER A PHAROAH SANDERS RECORD STORE DAY REISSUE, THERE’S SO MUCH MORE TO THE STRATA-EAST CATALOG

If my previous Tracking Angle review — on the new Pharoah Sanders Izipho Zam reissue — framed Strata-East within so-called spiritual jazz, this trio of new vinyl pressings should shake loose any such pigeonholing.

(That’s the storied, forward-thinking jazz label, founded by trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell in 1971, whose new affiliation with Mack Avenue produced that Izipho Zam (My Gifts) reissue — read all about it.

As the newly partnered Stata-East’s first salvo for Record Store Day, Izipho Zam highlighted the more esoteric, volatile side of their output. But that was just one shade of it. “[The Strata-East sound] happened organically. It wasn’t really an artist’s label; it was a producer’s label,” the late Cowell once explained. “But a lot of African Americans at the time were eschewing the cultural trappings of European elements in jazz, trying to focus on elements that were Blacker.”

Those elements are manifold, as this first vinyl triage of 2025 bears out. Cowell’s 1974 album Musa: Ancestral Streams is, for the most part, a solo piano album. “That same year, Charlie Rouse — long associated with Thelonious Monk — re-emerged as a leader with Two is One, his first solo LP since Bossa Nova Bacchanal in 1962. And Live at Slugs’, Vol. I & II captures Tolliver’s Music Inc. ensemble at full tilt. Here’s how each translated to wax this time around.

Listening on Tracking Angle editor Michael Fremer’s superlative system — an Origin Live Sovereign turntable with an Ortofon MC 90X phono cartridge, connected to a Sutherland Dos Locos transimpedance phono preamp — this was clearly the way to hear Musa: Ancestral Streams.

(Full disclosure: Fremer is on board with this Strata-East promotional campaign as an “audiophile liaison" and therefore will not/cannot review any of the albums in this first batch of Strata-East reissues.)

Exploratory while fundamentally funky and rhythmic, with abundant personality and touch, Musa: Ancestral Streams is by far Cowell’s most acclaimed solo piano work. (For other examples of the maestro alone, check out 1977’s Waiting for the Moment; 1990’s Live at Maybeck Recital Hall, Volume Five; 1993’s Angel Eyes; and 2015’s Juneteenth.)

Pressed at RTI, mastered by Kevin Gray, transferred from the original tapes, you can really hear Cowell’s pianism breathe; the sound is sonorous and complete.

Each note’s decay is immaculate, in all registers and octaves. If you’re a vinyl head — or just a jazz piano fan who recognizes game — you owe it to yourself to hear Cowell this way. (Especially on his signature tune, “Equipoise.”)

Despite making his name in Thelonious Monk’s group from 1959 to 1970, Rouse had led records even earlier. In 1957, he and fellow tenorist Paul Quinichette led The Chase Is On. 

Bossa Nova Bacchanal marked a detour into the titular Brazilian genre — which was just picking up as an American sensation. In the early ‘80s, he’d co-found the band Sphere with pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Buster Williams, and drummer Ben Riley.

Two is One is a foray into the soul jazz aesthetic of the time, with guitarists George Davis and Paul Metske, bassists Stanley Clarke (pre-Return to Forever) and Martin Rivera, cellist Calo Scott, percussionists Azzedin Weston and Airto Moreira, and drummer David Lee. The results are commercial, CTI-like — a product of its time, enjoyable on its own terms.

A great pressing does much to elevate an album like Two is One. While similar releases of the era abound, it’s gratifying to hear previously hemmed-in sound blossom, with even the individual reverb trails standing out. And, yes: this too was reviewed on the Origin.

This is what it’s all about. Recorded at the long-defunct East Village club, where the legendary trumpeter Lee Morgan was fatally shot on stage 1972. The trumpeter and Strata-East co-founder Charles Tolliver burned it up with pianist Cowell, bassist Cecil McBee, and drummer Jimmy Hopps.

Simply put, this band is dynamite — economical heads giving way to incendiary improvisations. And in this reissue, the dynamics are clean and strong; Tolliver’s trumpet is clear and bright; and as with Strata-East’s other offerings as of late, the packaging is high-class, and beautiful.

So far, these folks haven’t missed — which means a lot, as per this niche, historically sensitive, always nourishing body of work. These are documents of a creative Black-owned label firing on all cylinders, newly rendered on vinyl with the fidelity they always deserved.

To purchase: Live at Slugs, Musa:Ancestral-Streams, Two Is One