Exotica, a bossa, and real-deal British bebop from 1964: four unissued cues featuring The Hastings Girl Choir, and four cuts with Coleridge Goode and Bobby Orr.

Mick Goodrick guitar, Pat Metheny guitars, Steve Swallow bass guitar, Bob Moses percussion, Eberhard Weber bass.

Luminessence Series.

Top-notch mid-seventies spiritual jazz; steeped in Trane. Championed by Jazzman.
Billy — aka William X, nowadays Khalim Zarif — was a Jazz Messenger. Around the same time as this recording, he was one of the Cosmic Brotherhood supporting Jackie McLean on his New York Calling LP, also for SteepleChase; another lost classic.
Warmly recommended.

‘The same band as New Movements hit the stage a year and a half later, again for FMP, recording Pink Pong. Even more adventurous and tightly wired, this version of Gräwe’s fivesome plays more concise compositions, a total of eleven of them, spread out almost evenly amongst band members. The resulting album is one of FMP’s absolute classics, simultaneously a nod at precursors like Alexander von Schlippenbach’s early groups and Manfred Schoof’s killer mid-sized ensembles, but also indicating a new path for a younger set of players. Steeped in a love of folks like Lennie Tristano and Steve Lacy, the band’s points of reference were diverse enough to make them stand out against some of the more exclusively hard-blowing Germans of the era.’

His 1976 debut, for FMP.
‘A classic hard-bop configuration with trumpet, saxophone, and rhythm section. Though some vestiges of that hard-bop feel permeate the music, it’s been fractured and expanded in its ambitions to include post-bop, freebop, free jazz, and free improvisation, all with an overall set of structures that betray Gräwe’s deep interest in contemporary classical forms. It is an audacious debut, one of the most thrilling jazz-related European outings to emerge from the FMP program. Tenor and soprano saxophonist Harald Dau is spectacular, reminiscent in places of the great Gerd Dudek’s work with Manfred Schoof Sextett — tough as nails, free within a blues-oriented context, totally inventive. He’s matched by lithe trumpeter Horst Grabosch, and Gräwe’s rhythm team is impeccable, with Hans Schneider’s bass and Achim Kramer’s drums. The album kicks off with a 22-minute-long rollercoaster ride written by Gräwe, and continues with two more long tracks by Dau, all of them featuring thrilling interplay and brilliant tunes.’

Of all his albums, this was Stan Getz’ favourite. Ours, too.
Freed from the formal orthodoxies of small-group bebop, and revelling in the freedoms opened up by Eddie Sauter’s thrilling strings-based arrangements, lyrical improvisation pours out of the saxophonist (with Lester Young coursing through as per). The music shimmies devil-may-care through jazz, classical, soundtrack, show-tune, and the rest.
Try the dazzling opener. A theme from Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is mashed into skittering, paranoid funk, with a killer spot for Roy Haynes. And next up, something quite different, a quiet, complexly tender tribute to Getz’s mum, exquisitely proffered. Just a shame Bill Evans wasn’t sitting in.
Original, knockout; very warmly recommended.

‘Verve By Request.’

The Verve LPs Fusion and Thesis — intense, questing, game-changing masterworks.
Jesus Maria tears up funerals.

Utterly stupendous music from JG’s long wilderness years — radio recordings freshly dug out from 1965, three years after the austerely avant-garde brilliance of Free Fall kissed goodbye to any chance of a record deal for the best part of a decade.
Amazingly, more than anything — out of nowhere — you hear the quicksilver, stark brawn of fellow-Texan Ornette Coleman. Bill Meyer’s review in the Wire hits it on the head. ‘His liberal use of split tones and abrasive timbres underline his awareness of the advances of Albert Ayler’ — whilst in other passages ‘Giuffre’s quick fingering and elongated tones sound like the missing link between first generation free jazz and the advances in technique that Evan Parker presented on his solo albums ten years down the road’. Jazz On A Summer Day it ain’t.
‘Free counterpoint’ is a kind of collective improvisation which envisions the New Thing without bluster. ‘He wrote out full scores,’ recalls Joe Chambers in the excellent booklet, ‘with drum parts written as another voice. They look like Schoenberg and Webern scores, right in line with what I had been studying in college.’
The other players are awesome, too. Bassist Richard Davis is here, perfumed with masterpieces like Out To Lunch, The Space Book and Rip, Rig And Panic, all recorded within the previous year. (That’s him on Astral Weeks, by the way.) Chambers’ drumming is sensational.
Jazz fans, it’s a must. Hotly recommended.