1965 could’ve easily been the end of the road for Miles Davis. Having spent much of the year laid up in a NY hospital, he returned to the stage with a quintet whose virtuosity had grown formulaic. En route to a two-week run at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel, drummer Tony Williams hatched a plan for a renewed language. “What if we made anti-music?” The results, documented on the newly reissued Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel, changed the landscape of modern jazz.
Category: Jazz
Steve Tibbetts :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Close, guitarist Steve Tibbetts latest album, might be his most rewardingly mysterious yet. In conversation, Tibbetts balances consideration with openness, talking about his Buddhist practice, having lunch with Joe Boyd and Leo Kottke, working as a nurse and a record store clerk, the Grateful Dead, the wonders of fellow ECM artists and much more.
Dexter Gordon :: Ballads
Ballads finds Dexter Gordon at the apex of his career, doing what he does best: playing ballads. The collection is filled with choice cuts that find Gordon and company locking into sleepy pockets where each phrase is given room to dally in the space between beats. Gordon’s tone is sultry and warm, as if his tenor sax had polished off a few glasses of scotch before each take. When he takes the lead, there’s nothing provocative or flamboyant happening — he knows that the key to ballads isn’t the number of notes in any given measure, but the quality and character of each one.
Makaya McCraven :: Off the Record
On his first proper offering since 2022’s career highlight In These Times, jazz drummer and composer Makaya McCraven compiles a set of four new EPs into one for Off the Record. Hence the package’s namesake, each set of songs takes the organic improvisation from various previous live recordings. There’s an aural alchemy in McCraven’s post-production wizardry, the fervent compositions feeling like fresh studio iterations as much as previous live experiences culled from the archives; each set uniquely featuring a different live lineup with plenty of the musician’s collaborators and International Anthem labelmates.
Phil Yost :: Bent City
… Bent City is a spectral album unfolding a multi-tracked mirror house of sonic fantasias, with each wondrously bizarre corridor becoming an entire dimension unto itself. It’s a mesmerizing work of “sound-on-sound” composition, Yost’s intricate method of weaving home-recorded tape loops together, which allowed him a canvas for improvisation á la Sandy Bull, using “various combinations of soprano saxophone, flute, electric guitar, bass, maracas and tambourine.”
Ramsey Lewis :: Them Changes
For anyone who frequents their local record store, the term “cheap heat” is likely a familiar one. Often its own section, the cheap heat bin usually contains copies of iconic records in dubious condition, lesser-known titles by major artists, and maybe most importantly, overlooked records that either never fully caught on, or for one reason or another, never found their audience. The problem with some of these titles is that while the cheap part is generally accurate, the ‘heat’ is sometimes over-promised. Not the case with Ramsey Lewis’ 1970 funky soul jazz gem Them Changes, a record we’ve never seen priced higher than $10 that burns hot.
Door of the Cosmos: Sun Ra’s On Jupiter and Sleeping Beauty
Between 1978 and 1982 Sun Ra parked his roving musical spacecraft at New York’s Variety Arts Studios for a series of rigorous and inspired marathon sessions between frequent gigs in the city. On the heels of their stellar Lanquidity reissue, Strut continues their deep dive into this phase of Ra’s career with the twin 1979 masterpieces On Jupiter and Sleeping Beauty, offering a fresh glimpse at some of the most revered and beautifully spacious music the Arkestra ever cut.
Mal Waldron :: Candy Girl
A rare 1975 Mal Waldron session with the Lafayette Afro Rock Band finally gets a proper reissue, clarifying some of the album’s many mysteries and deepening its still-ambiguous message. Playing electric piano, the always laconic Waldron gives lots of space to the funk band, space that’s not taken up in the traditional sense. Instead, the songs explore relentless repetition and intense stasis, forming ruts so deep they become portals to different worlds, or at least altered frames of reference.
Chicago Underground Duo :: Hyperglyph
The throughline of their vast body of work is Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor’s commitment to the Chicago Underground project, the origins of which date back to 1998. Sometimes morphing into Chicago Underground Trio, or most recently as Chicago Underground Quartet with guitar player Jeff Parker and saxophonist Josh Johnson on 2020’s jazz-centric Good Days, Mazurek and Taylor inevitably return to each other as simply Chicago Underground Duo with Hyperglyph.
Smoke on the Skyline: Bohren & der Club of Gore’s Sunset Mission and the Art of Doom Jazz
Some albums don’t so much arrive as materialise – like a wisp of cigarette smoke caught in a streetlamp’s beam after rain. Bohren & der Club of Gore’s Sunset Mission (2000) is one of them, unfolding at a pace that leaves room for the scent of petrichor to linger in the air. There’s a European lineage here, from the melancholy of Tomasz Stańko’s Polish jazz to the urban fog of Miles Davis’ Ascenseur pour l’échafaud soundtrack. But the pacing belongs to Bohren alone – glacial, immersive, and attentive to the silence between notes. Like David Lynch’s best work, the music makes beauty and menace share the same room; a brushed cymbal could be a velvet curtain’s hush or rain on a car roof while you wait for someone who might never come.
Johnny Hartman :: I Just Dropped by to Say Hello (1964)
It’s near impossible to discuss midcentury crooners without mentioning Johnny Hartman. His tender approach to balladeer vocals epitomizes the post-war era of American jazz singers; his rich baritone is the sonic wallpaper to smoky lounges and amber-hued clubs, where night owls relax on the axis of the wheel of life, “to get the feel of life from jazz and cocktails.”
Smoke :: Everything
In this day and age, very few albums are truly lost. Some just get misplaced. Take Bay area jazz band Smoke’s 1973 album Everything, an album that should be universally acknowledged as a stone-cold classic of groove music and proto-acid jazz and yet seldom gets mentioned. A half-century later, it still sounds fresh. Spacey, funky and ambient in turn, Everything managed to anticipate so much of where twenty-first century jazz has recently wound up.
Kenny Barron :: Lucifer
Word that pianist Kenny Barron’s 1973 debut as leader Sunset to Dawn was getting a welcome reissue this year sent us back to some of his other releases from that period. Most intriguing among them is his ultra-rare, never-reissued 1975 fusion experiment Lucifer, an album that mixes acid funk, sensitive balladeering, synthesizer experiments and queasy psychedelia. Practically impossible to acquire but eminently worth hearing, Barron never sounded as freaky as he does here.
You’re Future’s In Space: Eddie Harris on Atlantic (A Mixtape)
From the late 60s through the mid-70s, Eddie Harris indulged in a string of progressively freakier, beautifully executed records that smeared boundaries, blew minds and sold poorly. This mixtape collects two and a half hours of the most adventurous moments from those heady Atlantic days.
Jimmy Rowles Trio :: Rare-But Well Done (1954)
At a time when the musical acrobatics of hard-bop jazz were in full swing on the East Coast, Rowles showed little interest in the dazzling technical feats or subversion of form that many of his contemporaries were partaking in. Instead, the unfettered Rowles chose to color within the lines, forming elegant arrangements that drift along like blue smoke curling around an after-hours lounge. On his first solo release, Rare, But Well Done (1954), Rowles’ approach is warm and classy, containing the understated sophistication of a well-tailored black suit: no loud colors, garish patterns, or ostentatious branding — just impeccable fit, fine stitching, and classic style.