‘Classic Vinyl’ series.

Dewey Redman (tenor sax), Charles Eubanks (piano), Mark Helias (bass), Ed Blackwell (drums).

‘Classic Vinyl Series.’

Funky soul jazz from 1969, featuring guitarist Melvin Sparks, and including covers of Knock On Wood and Twenty-Five Miles.

A terrific album by the Hen Ogledd conspirator, and collaborator with the likes of Derek Bailey, Bill Orcutt and Jon Butcher.
A telyn rawn is a harp strung with wound and pleated horse hair. (Tristram Shandy would have a field day.) It’s maybe a millennium old; passing into obscurity around two hundred years ago.
“All the music on this album is improvised. I designed and built a long forgotten instrument, engaged with historical texts and poetry, learnt the techniques and music from the Robert ap Huw manuscript and researched the importance of the horse and horse cults in Welsh culture. All these interventions were a means to improvise historically informed music and re-evaluate the legacy of the harp in Wales but ultimately served as a jumping off point so as to create new possibilities.”
The music is warmly compelling: polyphonic, convivial, rootsy, evocative, often mesmeric, sometimes banging.
Ancient Welsh folk veers into koto and kora, Appalachian dulcimer and Norwegian langeleik; the wheezing, wailing, rocking traditions of drones and sawing from Louisiana to Albania are streamed into the Valleys, and out again, changed.
Handsomely presented, too. Hotly recommended.

Terrific, grooving Black History from the Roy Ayers camp.
‘Remember to remember, to never forget. How long… how long… how long will it take?’

With Barry Guy and Tony Oxley in 1971. Gatefold sleeve.

With Freddie Hubbard trumpet, Herbie Hancock piano, Ron Carter bass, Joe Chambers drums. 1965. Miles Smiles kind of thing.

Fresh from his stint for Miles, the saxophonist with Tony Williams, Ron Carter and Jaki Byard in 1964 — meshing the great jazz tradition and the avant-garde in his own path-breaking way.
‘Classic Vinyl Series’.

‘Classic Vinyl’ series.

‘Verve By Request.’