Exploring vintage jazz vinyl with a focus on label and pressing details, discographical information and critical musings on the music found within the grooves.
Conference Of The Birds is rightly considered a masterpiece of avant-garde jazz, due in no short order to the giant talents of the musicians involved, and it remains an immensely pleasurable and listenable album to this day.
Read MoreFor many years I figured Pre-Bird was a compilation of early recordings by Mingus, made in the years before he hit the big time on his own. Man, was I ever wrong on that one. The wonderful music on the album was recorded in 1960 and is every bit as fantastic as one would expect from Mingus during this period of his illustrious career.
Read MoreOrnette Coleman's radical ideas about melody and pitch in jazz have been so thoroughly absorbed by the jazz establishment that his early musical explorations simply seem like a natural progression of where jazz was headed at the time, and where much of it is today. There is, of course, one glaring exception to this rule, an album by Coleman that even today defies categorization and eludes easy explanation: Free Jazz.
Read MoreIf not for the title track that opens the album, 1984 would be remembered as an excellent example of post bop as it was emerging in the mid-1960's. But, oh man, that title track: an 8 minute foray into another realm altogether, with Lateef blowing a whole array of wind instruments - some of his own making - and muttering low utterances through the large end of a cow's horn that lends the track much of it's otherworldly feel.
Read MoreI always find myself conflicted about late-period Coltrane recordings: are they pure brilliance or just a whole bunch of noise? Meditations finds a middle ground for Trane's forays into the free jazz that he was beginning to explore towards the end of 1965. What makes it accessible to the less adventurous listener are the passages of quiet and relaxed beauty.
Read MoreJackie McLean's career during the golden age of jazz is practically a roadmap to how the genre moved from hard bop to post bop and finally ended up at the avant garde that was to become the "new thing" in jazz. In 1967 McLean would complete the circle by teaming up with none other than Ornette Coleman, the innovator of the Free Jazz movement that shook up the jazz establishment.
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