Outstanding, spiritualised jazz-funk; keenly focussed but free and warm; steeped in post-bop and wide-open to r&b; somewhere between Lonnie Liston Smith’s Cosmic Echoes and Roy Ayers’ Ubiquity. Plenty here for dancers, chin-strokers and dreamers all.
The personnel discloses generous musical co-ordinates… Marvin Blackman from the Rashied Ali Quartet is here, and Ryo Kawasaki. James Mason and Justo Almario were later collaborators. Just a couple of years before this, Tarika Blue leader Phil Clendeninn was playing in a New York funk outfit alongside Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards…

‘Recorded at home in 2012, early acoustic guitar improv performances from the Bhutanese expat, who’d come to Asheville, NC to study in 2000 and discovered worlds of anarcho-punk and avant garde such as he’d only dreamed. Having made recordings of his newly-located improvisational conception, he intuited a desire to go deeper in his explorations of the recorded sound of the guitar, melding and colliding traditional music with his feeling for the range of textures within.’

‘Watching a Tati movie is a surprising experience. Sound and music are more lucid than words, supplanting the conventional discourse — and boredom — of adulthood. Hulot remains silent, or mumbles, amidst the cacophony of the modern world: beeps, rings, crackles, pneumatic drill, cars, mechanical, electrical and rubbery sounds, the high heels of secretaries and typewriters, factory noises, creaking doors, sighing chairs, machines and technical machines, franglais, vacuum cleaners and the whole range of small appliances, plastics of all sorts, linoleum and formica…
‘Tati delights in our disorientation. Hearing Mon Oncle, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Play Time changes one’s outlook onto the world — never again will you perceive the noises of towns and villages in the same way. The modern city is Hulot’s playground — he draws from it a totally new soundscape. Then there’s the organic, the countryside, the barking dogs, the wasp bothering François on his bicycle, the postman falling into the river… Tati masters the art of tempo: not one sound, one note, one silence is superfluous. Pure sophistication.
‘So try it tonight. Put the record on, lie down, close your eyes and listen… Even if you are unfamiliar with Tati’s brilliant films, his footwork and melancholy jokes, and new to Hulot’s poetic, comic perdition, then you’re still in for a trip… From music hall he derived sound effects; from the villages he brought back the funfair and the accordion; from the modern town he pulled music the American way, jazz, certain intrinsically Parisian tunes…
‘Even without the images, it’s still cinema!’

This debut solo recording of the Hot Chip is a scrapbook of fifteen songs and instrumentals, made in planes, hotel rooms and at home, with bags of charm and inventiveness.

With Sonny Murray in 1996.

Late 1966 recordings for Blue Note and BYG.
With Jimmy Lyons, Alan Silva, and Andrew Cyrille throughout; plus Bill Dixon and Henry Grimes on the opener (from the Conquistador sessions).

A killer Unit: with Jimmy Lyons, Ramsey Ameen, Alan Silva, Jerome Cooper, & Sunny Murray.
Documenting the third of their performances during a residency in New York City, this release follows on from the classic HatHut album It Is In The Brewing Luminous, and the recent Ezzthetics CD Live At Fat Tuesday’s, February 9, 1980.
Wonderful music.

We love this LP; it’s an old favourite. You can hear Teddy adjusting the influences of Hawk and Bird to meet the challenge of Rollins and Coltrane. You can’t go wrong with any of his West Coast albums from 1960-67, for Pacific, Contemporary and Prestige. Classy, bluesy, no frills West Coast jazz; cultured but tasty and with-it. This one has the warmth, purposefulness and swing of a classic Blue Note. Phineas Newborn plays a blinder, too.
Here’s the Penguin Guide: ‘One of the best mainstream albums of its day… beautifully and almost effortlessly crafted.’

Free-flowing recordings made in Pakistan with members of the instrumental quartet Jaubi (including Zohaib Hassan Khan on sarangi).

A new pressing of just three hundred copies.
Numbered; signed by Tenderlonious; transparent blue vinyl.

Mumbles, taking a break from Ellingtonia for his first recording session as leader, in 1955. Killer band, including Horace Silver, Oscar Pettiford and Art Blakey; swinging arrangements by Quincy Jones. The title track is absolute first-degree murder. Don’t miss it.