Music Reviews: Jazz

Powerful blasts of syncopated big band brass driven by the core quartet's sinewy rhythmic thrusts deliver an album's worth of adrenaline inducing musical aggression that resonates as appropriately today as it did in 1971 when this Strata-East label's debut album was originally released. As annotator Syd Schwartz points out, the album was a "musical project, self-powered, self-funded and done 100% on their own terms", but others saw it as... Read More

• Officially Sanctioned Concord Music Group, Inc.
ALL VALVE Heritage pressing cut directly from the original analogue master tapes.
• No equalization, compression or any other processing undertaken during the cutting process.
• Cut in TRUE monaural using 1960's Lyrec SV8 all valve cutting system and Ortofon DS522 mono cutter head.
• Hand-crafted sleeve artwork faithfully recreated using a vintage letterpress procedure.
• Released in strictly limited, individually - numbered edition of 345.

Recorded in 1957 and released in 1959 on Norman Granz's new Verve Record label, this makes a fitting debut for the new Verve Vault series produced by Verve exec Ken Druker. It arrived a while back along with a Antonio Carlos Jobim The Composer of Desafinado Plays and I'm finally getting around to writing about it Two more disparate albums from the Verve catalog I cannot imagine, which is why they made such a good choice to inaugurate the new Verve Vault... Read More

When the audiophile houses started reissuing Blue Note jazz albums on vinyl (Classic Records in the late 1990s, Analogue Productions and Music Matters Jazz 20 years later, a decade after Classic had gone out of business), they focused almost exclusively on the storied label’s mainstream titles from the 1950s and early ‘60s, by the likes of Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd, Dexter Gordon, early Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis, and, of course, John Coltrane’s sole... Read More

A deep dive into one of the most original - now classic - records of its era, here receiving a stunning, deluxe vinyl reissue. Plus an interview with the owner of Analogue October Records, Craig Crane, who reveals some of the exciting titles he's going to be releasing in 2026.

Grafting lyrics onto instrumental classical music has a rich history of success in the pop world. Most listeners happily hum Elvis and Perry Como tunes like "It's Now Or Never" and "Hot Diggity, Dog Diggity..." not having a clue about from where they originated. "Jazzed up" versions of popular songs are a well worn path down which many jazz arrangers and singers go. Here, jazz singer Tessa Souter does something far more audacious,... Read More

Art Pepper’s music is not typically described as an acquired taste. For many, his melodic cool jazz compositions and brilliant alto sax solos are some of the most easily accessible jazz recordings that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, Pepper’s playing is the opposite of smooth jazz. It is emotional heartfelt stuff from the school of hard knocks. One reading of his autobiography “Straight Life” will convince you of that.Born in southern... Read More

When you flip over a new vinyl copy of 25-year-old pianist Caelan Cardello’s 2025 debut album, Chapter One — his first studio release following 2023’s Rufus Reid Presents Caelan Cardello, recorded live at the 40-seat West Side showroom Klavierhaus NYC — you encounter an intriguing caveat.Despite being executive produced by Michael Fremer — audiophile leader and Tracking Angle editor-in-chief — and despite a no-corners-cut production chain that includes Duke Markos as... Read More

Hair and beard turned white and wearing the same sunglasses as on 1993's Joe Harley produced The Old Songs (Audioquest AQ 1017) and otherwise looking remarkably unchanged, tenor saxophonist Bennie Wallace and friends turn in a sensual, moody set, beginning with an unusually slinky, conga line take on the old gospel warhorse "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho".With a pair of Bossa Nova classics—"How Insensitive" and "Desafinado" and... Read More

Vibraphonist-composer Patricia Brennan is a rare musician: a child prodigy (she started studying music in her native Mexico at age 4) who advanced through the classical world (selected to tour with the Orchestra of the Americas at 17), then won a scholarship at the Curtis Institute of Music while also playing with the local Philadelphia Orchestra—and then, when she moved to New York and took up jazz, turned out to have a flair for sophisticated composition and a... Read More

The enduring charm of this soundtrack and the 1/2 hour animated special associated with it—the one that everyone loves no matter age or religion—had an unusually troubled beginning. It almost wasn't produced. No one at the three networks was interested in an hour long Charlie Brown special having nothing to do with Christmas so it was trimmed to a half hour version but still in 1964 no one wanted it. But Fantasy had commissioned Vince Guaraldi to produce a... Read More

Spins of Ray Charles's Ingredients In a Recipe For Soul—original ABC-Paramount pressing followed by a new Tangerine Records reissue appropriately pressed on orange vinyl— preceded a first play of Jerome Sabbagh's latest album of 8 originals each dedicated to a different individual, a few with whom he's crossed career paths, but others not. Coincidentally, the bluesy opener "Lone Jack" dedicated to both Ray Charles and Sabbagh's producing... Read More

Mode was a '50s era west coast jazz label with a distinctive look thanks to Eva Diana's colorful portraits but more importantly, the label, in its 6 months of operation produced 31 albums and managed to release 29 of them. And of equal importance to TrackingAngle readers, the sets were recorded at Radio Recorders and engineered by a then just starting out Dayton "Bones" Howe! As you'll hear unless you already have some of the '80's... Read More

Every album by tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd these past few years is a voyage of sorts, his latest, Figure in Blue, more than most, and not just because he turned 87 while recording it this past March, though every birthday at that point is a milestone, and every creative endeavor is both a reminiscence and an ambitious plunge into the now. This double-LP—98 minutes of starkly revealing music, Lloyd blowing front and center, backed only by Jason Moran on piano and... Read More

It's been almost 20 years since guitarist/arranger Anthony Wilson released a nonet record. That one was Power of Nine (Groove Note GRV1035-1) and it's certainly highly recommended but that was then and this is now. And now is a very good time for Anthony Wilson. Over the past few years he's released a series of musically thoughtful and intriguing albums including Songs and Photographs and Frogtown. Worth checking out.Wilson is now back with a live nonet... Read More

Of course Art Pepper, 31 when this album was recorded, doesn't really "meet" the rhythm section on the January 19th, 1957 recording, which puts the alto saxophonist hard left channel and the rhythm section hard right with little but open subtle ambient space between the two. Bernie Grundman explains in the booklet accompanying Contemporary Analogue Productions UHQR titles that the passive board didn't feature a center panning pot so it resembles... Read More

Back in 2016, while interviewing her for a New Yorker profile, I asked Cécile McLorin Salvant, who was 28 years old and just emerging as the era’s greatest jazz singer, whether she might cover contemporary pop tunes. The question made her wince. “There are some new songs that I really like,” she replied, “but I never think, ‘Maybe I’ll sing this song.’ I don’t care whether what I do is modern or of our time. I want to sing songs that have this timeless quality… I love... Read More

Jazz Patterns is a live album recorded in 1970 by the same great Joe Henderson band that recorded the classic Milestone album, If You’re Not Part Of The Solution, You’re Part Of The Problem. Since its release in 1982 on the Everest Archive of Folk and Jazz Music label, Jazz Patterns has always been an elusive and mysterious album. Everest, once highly regarded by audiophiles, had by 1982 long fallen into the deepest depths of the budget label netherworld and... Read More

Our reissue story starts May 27th 2015 at Bernie Grundman mastering, Gower Avenue, Hollywood, CA. Chad Kassem is there, Contemporary Records founder Lester Koenig's son John is there, I am there. Most importantly the master tape of Sonny Rollins' Way Out West is there.

Amina Claudine Myers should be a lot more famous than she is. A composer-pianist-organist-singer of spiritual depth and grand virtuosity, she has been recording, as a leader or accompanist, for nearly a half century, but mainly for small labels and as a member of an alliance—the avant-garde Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which also spawned the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, and many others—that didn’t (and... Read More