With Lee Konitz, Bill Frisell, and Dave Holland.

With John Abercrombie, John Taylor, Dave Holland, Pete Erskine.

The last recording by the late Canadian trumpeter — such a mainstay of contemporary UK jazz — stamped with his trademark melancholy… lyrical, sly, sinuous. ‘As a graceful coda to a wonderful career, not to be missed by anyone who ever fell under Kenny’s spell, however belatedly’ (Richard Williams).

A ‘Luminessence’ audiophile pressing, handsomely sleeved.

Inspired, free, luminous music-making. An outernational holy grail and a stiff tonic for all citizens of nowhere.
Already the great French jazz saxophonist had made monumental records alongside all-time legends like Monk, Blakey, Bud Powell and Miles — that’s Wilen on Lift To The Scaffold — before cutting loose at the end of the sixties on a two-year journey through Morocco, Algeria, Niger, Mali, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and Senegal, with a team of film-makers, technicians and musicians. 
Moshi means trance utterance — the moshi is a demon invoked by the Fulani Borogi of Niger, to chase away angst and depression — and this is a shamanistic bricolage of smoky musical spells and scraps of intimate, outdoors ambience, full of love, good vibes and gritty musical wonder, drawn from more than fifty tape reels recorded en route: desert blues, space-jazz, street-funk, acid rock, polyphonic rhythms and new-thing influences like Shepp and Sanders; buzzing, extended ensemble sessions, like alternative Bitches Brews, crossed with diverse snippets of magic grabbed on the wing, like Algerian gnawa, or solo mbira, or just people laughing together, or a Bamako griot… 
Beautifully presented, with a twenty-page booklet, and the DVD of Caroline de Bendern’s vivid, freewheeling film A L’Intention De Mlle Issoufou A Bilma, about the trip.
Fervently recommended.

The Nordan Project, combining Swedish folk and jazz improvisation. With Palle Danielsson on bass, from various Charles Lloyd, Keth Jarrett and Jan Garbarek lineups.

‘Classic Vinyl’ series.

Parker playing doson ngoni, dudek, and flutes of bamboo, cedar & walnut; Cooper-Moore on his hand-crafted ashimba and harp; Hamid Drake on frame drum and drum kit.

‘Balancing music, antithetical to destruction. Music to draw sustenance from. Some measure of fortitude, at least, for compassionate souls in the elevating struggle against increasingly inextricable imposed realities that parse a human being’s value solely on what they are able to consume.
‘This is music for sunrise and sunset. Daily music. Healing, centering, mantra, heart music.’

As Parker puts it in his sleevenote: ‘The theory behind this music is the music itself. Empty and fill the heart and soul with sound, letting it dance. Without pretense. We are trying to get to a flow - earth, sky, and flowing water sounds that jump out of the painting… The story, the plot is, life is beautiful. Must be to be life. War is death fueled by hate. How do we stop war? Never start one.’

With Wayne Shorter, Sam Rivers, Herbie Hancock and Gary Peacock.
Classic Vinyl series.

Her funky, spiritual jazz masterpiece; our favourite of her albums.
This LP is a facsimile edition of the original release on Mary Records.

Hippie dippy Indo-Jazz, aka Take Off Your Clothes To Feel The Setting Sun, complete with fuzz guitar and sitar courtesy of Siegfried ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ Schwab, and reverbed chant-along vocal chorus. Plus a reined-in, blues-rock cover of The Beatles’ A Day In The Life.
From 1969, with Eberhard Weber playing bass and electric cello.
New transfers from the master tapes; cut at Abbey Road; pressed at Pallas; handsomely sleeved.

With the arrival of clarinettist-saxophonist Louis Sclavis in 1973 (and the departure of trumpeter Jean Mereu in 1975), the Workshop De Lyon was born of the Free Jazz Workshop.
A warmly accessible, beautifully performed, joyous mixture of wailing improv and propulsive, rootical preparations, this second album derives its upful, digressive theatricality from the Arts Ensemble Of Chicago, and its urgent sublimification of vernacular rhythms and melodies from Albert Ayler. Wild and free, but grounded in stuff like Bechet, Monk and George Russell.
Terrific.

His 1966 debut (with Henry Grimes on bass), after ESP founder Bernard Stollman saw him play as John Coltrane’s guest at the Village Vanguard.
Clifford Allen commented in All About Jazz: ‘Wright was one of the forerunners of the multiphonics-driven school of saxophonists to follow the direction pointed by Ayler, but with a more pronounced bar-walking influence than most of his contemporaries. Whereas Ayler’s high-pitched wails, wide vibrato and guttural honks all belied an R&B pedigree, his solos still contained the breakneck tempos and facility of bebop… Wright, on the other hand, offers his honks and squawks with a phraseology derived from the slower, earthier funk of R&B and gospel music… The opening The Earth starts with a brief vibrato-heavy and bluesy slow theme on unaccompanied tenor that quickly erupts into a frantic screamer of a solo, a mix of buzzing upper-register cries and low bleating honks, occasional recognizable stock R&B phrases making their way into the melange… Unlike Ayler, there is not a significant amount of solo construction, for it appears Wright was throwing together ideas in a spirit of jubilation.’