Prince Buster rumpus.

Red hot NTU Troop; recorded by Radio Bremen.
Firing versions of Ju Ju Man… Celestial Blues… an unmissable twenty-five minutes of I’ve Known Rivers…

Dexter Gordon (tenor sax), Bobby Timmons (piano), Victor Gaskin (bass), Percy Brice (drums).

A performance for Danish TV, never released on vinyl until now, with Kenny Drew, Niels-Henning Ørsted Petersen and Albert Heath. The title track is storming Afro-Cuban jazz (from the unmissable Blue Note LP A Swingin’ Affair).

Terrific recordings commemorating three nightclub engagements in 1964-66.
Horace is sparklingly excursive and dead funky; Joe Henderson is grooving, raucous, and reaching. The great Carmell Jones is here, subbed twice by Woody Shaw. Altogether the playing has an immediacy and abandon you only get live.
The repertoire is killer diller; cherry-picked from a string of stone classic LPs — Song For My Father, Tokyo Blues, The Cape Verdean Blues, Six Pieces, and Senor Blues. The sound is superbly restored to the label’s customary high standards by Michael Brändli.

‘Long before his death in 2014, Silver’s reputation had become occluded, or tarnished with the notion that he was a relatively slight figure, more of an entertainer than an innovator… His habit of quoting other songs in his solos, often dismissed as a shallow, crowd-pleasing trick, is a forerunner of sampling culture and hip-hop. It’s also an acknowledgement of how profoundly knowledgeable Silver was about the canon and its evolution. Here’s a line of mine, he might say, and here’s where it came from, but also here and here. His only mistake in this regard was to smile while he was playing… a challenge to the really rather recent notion that jazz should be deadly serious and played with a pained rictus.’

Warmly recommended. Do yourselves a favour.

From one of his most creative periods, leading the Vibration Society — Ron Burton, Dick Griffin, Jerome Cooper and co — through one-of-a-kind, freewheeling, radiant wonders like The Inflated Tear (about his going blind) and Volunteered Slavery. Stevie’s My Cherie Amour pops up, trailering next year’s Blacknuss LP.
Kirk called it all ‘black classical music’.

Solo in 1980.

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.

Sugar’s debut LP, from 1978: inspired, crafted voicings of all-time classic S1 rhythms, banger after banger, insouciantly announcing the rebirth of the greatest reggae label of all time, with vibes and panache to the max.
Hotly recommended. Crucial Studio One.

A precious glimpse of his undocumented New Jazzmen lineup, with Freddie Hubbard, Jaki Byard, Reggie Workman and Nathan Davis.
“Everywhere we’d go people would say, this is the best Jazz Messengers we’ve heard,” remembers Davis. “And because of the way Jaki would play and Reggie would go, it was like a semi-freedom thing… with Messengers heads, you know… but when we got to soloing…!”
It’s easy to take Freddie Hubbard for granted. One of the very greatest jazz trumpeters of all time; he kills it here. Check him on Blue Moon and the twenty-four-minute rendition of his own composition Crisis.