‘The significance of Alice Coltrane’s presence in 20th century music cannot be overstated. Andy Beta’s Cosmic Music is a remarkable detailing of this visionary woman’s vocation in devotion to a sanctified art. From her childhood playing piano in the community of Pentecostal and Baptist churches, where ecstatic transcendence was at the heart of practice, to her engagement with the Detroit Jazz scene, and finding a kindred spirit in a life shared with the great John Coltrane, her music expressed a timeless expression of both divinity and dignity’ (Thurston Moore).
‘Alice Coltrane was co-architect of some of the most spiritually profound and formally challenging music ever made. The way Andy Beta tells it, it is one of the greatest adventures of the 20th century’ (David Keenan).

‘If Alice had been the wife of a Detroit auto worker, she’d obviously be a nonentity’; ‘a sincere but virtually talentless lady who married the right man’ (Down Beat, 1977).

Clearly written and thoroughly researched — wide-ranging and stuffed with interest — it’s a must. Warmly recommended.
Hardback; 450 pages.

Aka Counceltation — pimped with a new sleeve and title straight out of the treacherous Hefner-Jazz nexus — featuring a hefty West Coast lineup: Jack Sheldon, Curtis Counce, Harold Land, Carl Perkins and Frank Butler.
Easy swinging and elastic, limpid and lyrical, with brilliant playing all round. Perkins is always a pleasure; Land another HJ legend, lethal in ballads; Butler bosses, as per.

Poetic ballads for piano, cello, saxophone and accordion, taking inspiration from the Russian film-maker (and nodding to Bach, Pergolesi and Shostakovich).

Another key document of the Los Angeles radical jazz underground, by way of Outernational Sounds.
A tour de force of spiritually energised independent jazz music, this is pianist and composer Kaeef Ruzadun Ali’s debut recording as leader of the Creative Arts Ensemble, as it emerged from Horace Tapscott’s legendary Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra,
PAPA mainstays like reedsman Dadisi Komolafe, drummer Woody ‘Sonship’ Theus and altoist Gary Bias are here; besides such veterans as Henry ‘The Skipper’ Franklin on bass, and George Bohannon on trombone. Kaeef’s sister B.J. Crowley provides visionary, sanctified singing.
Classic spiritual jazz, available again as an LP for the first time since 1981; with the recordings at full length on vinyl for the first time ever.

Piano duets with David Rothenberg, playing clarinet and bass clarinet.

Scorcher!
Just cop the opener. Such a knockout!
Six Horace Tapscott compositions and arrangements. Swirling, passionate, raging, valedictory, richly allusive music.
Teddy Edwards is here; Tommy Flanagan. Criss is on fire.
Hotly recommended. Something really special.

Always hard-sought-after for the jazz dance gem Tabu, and the overall blend of Cal Tjader, Les Baxter and Luiz Bonfa. “In a way it’s world music,” says Don. “Polynesian, samba, Brazil, jazz, West Indian. It has the energy of Latin and funk records.”

Outstanding modal set for Futura in 1971, with the superb French trio Georges Arvanitas, Jacky Samson, and Charles Saudrais, expertly proliferating Mingus and Trane.

Farsi love songs, including a tribute to Norma Winstone, from the German-Iranian singer Cymin Samawatie.

Cymin Samawatie and her trio, joined by violist Martin Stegner as a kind of second singer, deepening the sense of East/West dialogue in the music. Settings of the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzaad — to whom the album is dedicated — besides Cymin’s own lyrics, classic Sufi poetry by Hafiz, and the verse of Nima Yushij.

The great drummer with Wadada Leo Smith (who chips in a seventeen-minute tribute to Alice Coltrane) and Bill Frisell.

With Bill Frisell and Ben Street carrying on from the Declaration Of Musical Independence line-up, plus pianist David Virelles.

Legendary jazz fusion of Indian, Caribbean and Eastern influences, from 1969.
With Joe Harriott, Ian Carr, Bryan Spring, Dave Green and Norma Winstone.

Recorded at the tail end of summer 2020, in the garden behind Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio, by this collective of artists, musicians, singers, and dancers, including Angel Bat Dawid and Ben LaMar Gay.
“It was about offering a new thought,” says Locks. “It was about resisting the darkness. It was about expressing possibility. It was about asking the question, ‘Since the future has unfolded and taken a new and dangerous shape… what happens NOW?’”

Another reaching, cosmic, old-to-the-new foray by saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter, pianist Leo Genovese, bassist William Parker (also playing gralla and shakuhachi here), and drummer and vocalist Francisco Mela (singing snatches of traditional Cuban music).