‘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.

Scintillating recordings by Giuffre, Swallow and Bley, in the early winter of their annus mirabilis; mostly drawn from studio work earlier in the year, but exhilaratingly transformed, freshly spontaneous.
Hotly recommended.

Dazzling abscondments from bebop, as fresh and challenging now as then.
Microtonal and pointillistic; formally forensic and equal handed; freely and limpidly expressive. Strictly no going through the motions; no cliches; no posturing, or emotional bluster.
‘What comes out is an investigation of sound from the inside out, textually, tonally, spatially’ (as Pitchfork describes a much later session).
Clarinet solos, and duos and trios with Steve Swallow and Paul Bley. 
Amazing stuff.

Including two recordings from the same legendary 1965 Town Hall concert as Albert Ayler’s Bells. Sensationally, this edition adds previously unissued music retrieved from the end of the Bells master tape, doubling the length of Shebar to nineteen minutes.
With Don Pullen and Milford Graves.

Featuring Grant Green, and engineered by Rudy van Gelder, in the manner of classic Blue Note organ jazz, this is an ‘underappreciated gem’, according to AllMusic. Leo Wright plays a blinder.
Here is a lovely photo of drummer Pola Roberts performing in the fifties. Nice name, the Pixie Bongo 4 Jewel’s.
Pola and Gloria had an all-women band together in the early sixties. George Coleman is Gloria’s old man.
‘Verve by Request’.

George Butler was head of A&R at Blue Note during the seventies. He co-produced Black Byrd with the Mizells; he signed Bobbi Humprey. When Blue Note closed in 1978, one of his first projects for Columbia was a disco-funk project with the legendary bebop saxophonist Benny Golson, on the cusp of his own comeback.
Golson was at high school with John Coltrane. He featured in a deadly late-fifties Jazz Messengers lineup; also Art Farmer’s Tentet. He wrote I Remember Clifford and Whisper Not.
It’s telling, how the jazz establishment has always despised this record. The title track was a humungous rare groove anthem, guaranteed to tear up a dance with its swinging, swaggering, musically-inspired upfulness, school of Walking In Rhythm and Music Is My Sanctuary.

Highly recommended memoirs of the longtime Ladbroke Grove resident — sixty years — and Harriott associate, revealing his huge contribution to the British jazz scene.

Kicks off with the rollicking samba Soy Califa; then a ravishing, bittersweet ballad.
Key Dexter.
Recorded the same week as Go!, with the same crew, including Sonny Clark on top form throughout.
Don’t miss Don’t Explain.
In the Blue Note 80 Vinyl series.