Exploring vintage jazz vinyl with a focus on label and pressing details, discographical information and critical musings on the music found within the grooves.
While he is better known for his later releases on the CTI Label, Hubert Laws actually started off his career with a run of straight-ahead jazz records that find him and his quartet (which included a young Chick Corea) in a nice hard bop setting.
Read MoreA wacky space-age cover hides a fantastic album of cool jazz within, with Rogers leading a group of talented and legendary players from the 1950s through an array of settings and sounds that results in an extremely satisfying LP that rewards repeated listening.
Read MoreLonely Woman is the last of a string of classic studio records from The Modern Jazz Quartet, a record that shows off the group's talents as both composers and outstanding musical talents.
Read MoreAfrican Cookbook is the 1973 commercial release of an album Randy Weston recorded in 1964 that he originally had to release on his own due to a lack of interest from any record labels. It's an excellent advanced hard bop LP that shows off the full range of Weston's musicianship, compositional skills, and talent as a bandleader.
Read MoreEuropean Encounter is a crash course in what the violin can bring to jazz when it sits in the right hands. Add in the musicianship of a jazz giant like John Lewis and you've got all the makings for a truly underrated gem of an album.
Read MoreThe innovative and adventurous Modern Jazz Quartet team up with the like-minded Jimmy Guiffre to create an original album that remains under-appreciated even today.
Read MoreThe concept behind Layers is simple enough: McCann wanted to make an album of the sounds he was hearing in his head using only electronic keyboards, synthesizers and overdubbing. He recorded over rhythm tracks laid down by a group of percussionists who had previously accompanied him, and the resulting jazz record is quite unlike anything that had come before it.
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 MoreTeddy Charles had an important place in jazz in the 1950's before essentially disappearing from the music business altogether from the 1960's onward (before a brief comeback in 2012). His lasting reputation will always lie with The Teddy Charles Tentet, an influential album that took an adventurous take on jazz that was quite ahead of it's time.
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