Alone at the piano, feeling his way with the fewest moves right to the heart of a deadly selection of all-time-great jazz songs, plus a few of his own. Veteran of all those classic Horace Silver, Max Roach and Ntu Troop recordings, his baritone voice is mostly reined in here, but rivetingly, acutely soulful.

Slower and funkier than the Gary Bartz excursion a few years earlier — with Bad Wilbur Bascomb popping away on electric bass, not Ron Carter — this unmissable 1974 version of Celestial Blues was a game-changing revive in the early nineties, a cosmic crossing of Bill Withers, Sly and Brian Jackson, threading trip hop and Jazz Dance through to Madlib.
‘C’mon meditate! Let’s contemplate!’

Recorded in 2000, with more or less the same lineup as Shades Of Bey, and the same richness of repertoire and textures. There are two Milton Nascimento classics, standards like I’ll Remember April and Little Girl Blue, and the sultry original Tuesdays In Chinatown. Top-notch Bey, supported by Ron Carter, Geri Allen, Mino Cinelu and Steve Turre. First time on vinyl. Warmly recommended.

Nice, mid-tempo tune, Eek A Mouse style and fashion.

With Leadbelly, Ramblin’ Thomas, Charley Patton and co.

This is the summary

This is a great way into Partch, revisiting with gusto three well-known, relatively-compact works — a highly rhythmic dance piece, a cross-cutting film score, and Barstow, with HP intoning hitchhiker graffiti.

The original 1957 performance — kotos and marimbas alongside HP varieties like the Chromelodeon and the Harmonic Canon — with splendid artwork including rare documents and photographs.

‘A diary of eight months spent in transient shelters and camps, hobo jungles, basement rooms, and on the open road’. A collage of readings and musical fragments, this long-lost journal of HP’s wanderings during the Great Depression (from cleaning sewers to tea with W. B. Yeats) is ‘an extraordinary musical portrait of an American pioneer, chronicling his occasionally hilarious and often heartbreaking struggles to forge a new music system outside the classical tradition.’