‘After releasing their Warner Bros. debut, the Herbie Hancock Sextet underwent a major transformation in the early ’70s. Over the course of a year, every member was replaced (except Herbie Hancock himself and bassist Buster Williams) and each adopted Swahili names. Hancock chose the moniker Mwandishi (‘composer’), and the Sextet became unofficially known as the Mwandishi Band.
‘The lineup’s first album reflects Hancock’s new aesthetic and spiritual directions. Stretching out from the r&b/jazz-fusion of Fat Albert Rotunda, the pianist would draw inspiration from his time with Miles Davis…
‘Dedicated to Angela Davis, Ostinato is an extended jam with stunning rhythmic complexity — enhanced by such studio effects as Echoplex delay. On You’ll Know When You Get There, Hancock’s tight arrangements are saturated in reverb, which gives an ever-shifting dimensionality. Side-long closer Wandering Spirit Song, written by trombonist Julian Priester, goes even further out: alternating between dynamic soloing and group improvisation, the Sextet fully manifests the radical potential of their collective identity/energy.
‘A bold and expansive statement, even after nearly fifty years.’

Timelessly killer, essential music, and a humongous commercial success, this is the key record bar none in the binding of jazz into funk.

‘A playful, joyous album in which Hancock clearly had a great time, this music was composed for the pilot of a children’s TV show, redirecting the post-bop of his five-year stint with Miles towards new r&b and funk styles. Flying high with three horn players — Joe Henderson, Garrett Brown and Johnny Coles — alongside Hancock’s soaring Fender Rhodes, the group could swing freely on a track like the rousing Fat Mama and emote precisely on the subtle Tell Me A Bedtime Story.’

This is the sublime, eleven-minute version, featuring vocalist Gavin Christopher.
Big Theo Parrish record.
Backed with the promo-only disco mix of Saturday Night, lavished with percussion by Sheila E.
Murders.

‘Classic Vinyl Series.’

After two years’ preoccupation with the Miles Davis Quartet, here is Herbie in 1968, ready for the seventies, the old, uptight bebop instincts melting into the balmy, open, innocent textures of fluegelhorn, bass trombone and alto flute, and his own lightly beautiful playing.
‘Classic Vinyl series.’

The shimmering brilliance of his post-bop Blue Notes, crossed with the JBs and the Family Stone; all of it bathed in Afrofuturism.
We must save jazz from itself, Herbie is saying. Future-shock-treatment; the same surgery pioneered by Miles Davis MD. 
Game-changing music, with the fizz and urgency of a live setting; beautifully recorded.
Speakers Corner always does the business.

It opens with HH alone on concert grand, in a lyrical variation of Maiden Voyage, finally reprised by the band, then startlingly segued with Actual Proof, from the new-out Thrust album: already, the zero-gravity glimpse of a transmogrified jazz standard, sixties dues paid; and Herbie perversely tearing up a fender-rhodes future-classic, on acoustic piano…. then straight into Paul Jackson and Mike Clark, one of the very greatest rhythm sections of all time, setting Spank-A-Lee on fire, with Bill Summers on congas, Herbie returning on electric keys, guitarist DeWayne McKnight (prior to locking onto the Mothership)... the unmistakable opening bars of Watermelon Man, ushering Bennie Maupin into full flight… a slinky, skittering Butterfly… a rowdy Chameleon, with Herbie giving it some Sun Ra… and finally a delirious, twenty-minute, desert-island-disc version of Hang Up Your Hang Ups, funky as anything.

Takin’ Off, My Point Of View, Inventions & Dimensions, Speak Like A Child, The Prisoner.

Classical, no-frills, piano-trio jazz, recorded in 1977 in San Francisco, though released only in Japan at the time. VSOP without horns; more hard-bitten and introspective.
With Ron Carter and Tony Williams in Milestones and four Herbies, including a gnarled Speak Like A Child.

His second LP, originally released by FMP in 1976. ‘Microtonal string investigations still beguiling and fresh four decades later.’

‘Originally released on FMP in 1973, the debut album by this legendary German guitar improviser and instrument inventor is a resonant and hilarious document of the nascent genius recording his peculiar and wondrous music alone in a studio. Acoustic and unfiltered electric guitars turned back into the supremely malleable instruments they were before they’d been firmly encoded as tools for rock or pop or jazz. Reichel uses a homemade 11-string guitar (with three pickups) for all the tunes except the first one. Reichel is like an improvising Harry Partch, investigating the genesis of lute music.’

‘Subtitled ‘some more guitar solos’; his fourth and final record of solo guitar works. Next Reichel would turn much of his attention to the bowed wooden-tongued instrument he created called the daxophone. Reichel recorded the six tracks at his home in Wuppertal in April, 1981, and in the process made what might be his masterpiece. These are not just some more guitar solos. Concentrating largely on acoustic guitar with no frets as well as his electric pick-behind-the-bridge guitar, he transforms tones into crystalline formations — patience with resonances, attention to silence, formation of symmetries around a common sonic point, jetting notes that arc and spread and then hover. One might look for other references to describe what Reichel is up to — the magic of Terje Rypdal, the aura of early William Ackerman, the eccentric multiple pickups of Fred Frith — but really this is unique in guitar repertoire. Reichel built his instruments as tools for improvised exploration, and then he dove deep into them, never so far as on tracks like Could Be Nice or the quivering Southern Monologue, or the two brilliant versions of the title track, Bonobo Beach. On Two Small Pieces Announced by a Cigar-Box, the titular box is bowed in a vocal manner that portends Reichel’s development of the daxophone.
‘A beautiful, essential document from one of the great outsider guitarists of all time.’

Big-hearted, wonderful album from 1972, which combines funk with Aylerized gospel and free and soul jazz, without any of them losing out.

Rufus Harley (bagpipes, soprano sax, tenor sax, flute), Oliver Collins (piano), James Glenn (bass), Billy Abner (drums).

The superb bebop pianist versioning the Jackson 5 — from his Greasy Kid Stuff LP in 1970, with Idris Muhammad, Lee Morgan, Hubert Laws and Buster Williams.
Sister Janie by Funk Inc on the flip — with James Brown’s Sex Machine its point of departure.

Fiery, bluesy, gospelized post-Coltrane bebop; blowing in from Texas, massive like Rollins. From 1975, this is one of the outstanding jazz records of that decade, and Harper’s best, with trumpeter Virgil Jones (who you know from sessions with Roland Kirk, Charles Tolliver and McCoy Tyner), pianist Joe Bonner (Pharoah Sanders, Harold Vick, Khan Jamal), David Friesen on bass and Malcolm Pinson on drums.

Two contrasting, early-1960s Lansdowne LPs: Movement (with Shake Keane) includes three JH free-forms, a Michael Garrick, and the haunting Morning Blue; High Spirits re-presents the Broadway musical.

Hard bop burners and heart-melting ballads by a crack band including the great drummer Phil Seamen, and bassist Coleridge Goode, an anchor-man of our own London Is The Place For Me series.
‘Joe plays so fiercely on the record that at times it seems as though he’s about to blow his alto apart’ (Coleridge Goode).
‘Shepherd’s Serenade… always a big one! Great reissue’ (Gilles Peterson).
Newly mastered; with extended notes.

‘Absolutely essential,’ says All About Jazz.

‘Perhaps the best representation of a typical Joe Harriott Quintet gig of the period, combining as it does straight-ahead tracks with his free-form work… it opens with the easy swing of Morning Blue with Harriott’s alto warm, sunny and optimistic and Shake Keane’s flugelhorn light as air… Count Twelve is pure bebop rooted in the blues with some simply lovely flugelhorn from Keane and delightful piano from Pat Smythe. The relationship between Goode and drummer and Bobby Orr here is almost symbiotic, while Harriott’s own solo is wild and free-flowing.
‘Michael Garrick’s quirky Face in the Crowd follows. It’s a fine, angular performance that sits well with Harriott’s own more abstract writing. Revival is one of the saxophonist’s most Caribbean-inflected tunes and is perhaps the record’s highlight, whilst Garrick’s Blues On Blues reveals perfectly how very, very good this group really was.
‘The album concludes with three tracks: Spaces, arguably the most abstract piece Harriott ever recorded; the fine, if mainstream bop Spiritual Blues, with some great bowed bass from Goode and excellent drums from Bobby Orr; and the album’s title track has an intensity not found in all of Harriott’s free form work. It’s a stunning group tour de force, again building from comparatively simple melodic materials into something that is dark, brooding and even slightly unsettling.’