Hip dance sides and Lowrider ballads from Darrow’s Chicago years.
From his career-opening smash The Pain Gets A Little Deeper, via Northern dancefloor classics like My Young Misery, Infatuation and Gotta Draw The Line, and ballads like Sitting There That Night and My Judgement Day, through to the new social consciousness of Now Is The Time For Love, recorded in 1971 for his step-dad Johnnie Haygood’s Genna label.

A never-before-released studio album!
Recorded on March 8 1959 in Rudy Van Gelder’s living-room studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, one month before the Birdland shows which produced the killer twin LPs Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers At The Jazz Corner Of The World, this features the same lineup: Blakey, Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Bobby Timmons and Jymie Merritt. Two tunes only show up here, including Timmons’ Quick Trick; besides three Mobley compositions.
The LP is an all-analogue 180g vinyl pressing.
Cor.

Startlingly accomplished new jazz from South Africa, teeming with ideas, influences and idioms.
Maybe you remember Asher’s drumming on Angel Bat Dawid’s The Oracle.
Hotly recommended.

Deluxe LP edition, with gold foiling on the sleeve, a four-page booklet, 140g vinyl.

The first album in thirteen years by this great trumpeter (and founder of Strata East).
A quintet — with US veterans Jesse Davis, Keith Brown, Buster Williams and Lenny White — joined by Binker Moses on a couple of cuts.

From 1977.
‘Music of extreme sophistication yet perfect lucidity… A Zen-like tranquillity pervades this album of duets’ (Richard Williams in Melody Maker).
‘Quite an achievement, balancing fantasy and friction with grace as a fulcrum… calm, lucid, colourful, and captivating’ (Art Lange in Coda).

‘With a new lineup including multi-instrumentalists Kwake Bass and Wu-Lu, who are also the producers and arrangers. Horns, played by Soothsayers’ founders saxophonist Idris Rahman and trumpeter Robin Hopcraft, are included on just two of the ten tracks…
‘McFarlane’s spellbinding, crystalline voice continues to be acoustically recorded and reproduced and the primary focus of attention. Her lyrics, as before, are strong on message and relate to the experience of being a black person in Britain, touching on race, identity and the legacy of colonialism.
‘McFarlane’s performances aside, what binds Arise and Songs of An Unknown Tongue together is her embrace of her Jamaican heritage. What makes them distinct from each other is how that heritage is referenced in the material, lyrically and instrumentally. Born and brought up in London, McFarlane made an extended trip to Jamaica in 2018, when she penetrated further into the country’s folk culture and spiritual traditions than she had been able to do on previous, shorter visits. She devoted much of her time to researching the African-derived rhythms that shape the country’s folk music. On her return to London she worked with Wu-Lu and Kwake Bass to present them in a modern electro-acoustic context…
‘It looks forward to a brighter future while acknowleding the past and confronting present. It is deep, immaculately crafted and beautiful.’
(Chris May, All About Jazz).

Limberly pulsating, dubwise and warmly intimate, open to the heavens but twinkling with avian detail, deftly shuffling melody and dissonance, rhythm and pause — and lit up up by the woody, breathy timbres of Clive Bell’s shakuhachi playing — this is life-affirming, smart, deeply pleasurable music, easy to dance to, with everything from Lee Perry to Noh Theatre via Karlheinz Stockhausen and King Sunny Ade in the electro-acoustic mix.

Benjamin Kilchhofer’s artwork peers through the vacuum of space, catching a rare glimpse of the mysterious alien biomes, fossils and silhouettes generated by dwarf planets, asteroids, Kuiper belt, and other trans-Neptunian objects.
Buckle up… needle to the groove… take the tour!
Warmly recommended.

‘Smalltown Superjazzz was a free-jazz subsidiary label of Smalltown Supersound from 2005-2012. Dormant then till 2019, it is now reborn as the AFJ-Series, named after a recording by Don Cherry & Krystzof Penderecki’s The New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra.
‘AFJ-Series is proud to release this compilation of music from forty releases, spanning almost twenty years of Smalltown Supersound, Superjazzz and AFJ. The idea is to bring the Superjazzz era into the AFJ-Series, but also to leave it behind — and start fresh. A requiem and rebirth combined, inspired by the 1964 ESP Disk sampler (also by its hard editing).
‘Lasse Marhaug spent months ploughing through the entire catalogue. Whilst the main goal was to survey Smalltown’s wide range of releases in the improvised/jazz/free music field, his choices and juxtapositions almost play as a new piece of music.
‘So here it is — forty tracks of total freedom. The universality of improvised music, as Derek Bailey called it.’