A live recording of three jazz masters in transitional phases of their careers, The Third World-Underground captures Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand), Don Cherry and Carlos Ward embarking on a joyous, lyrical and profoundly stomping set of tunes, teeming with fanfares, shouts and unruly dances. Newly reissued and remastered, this once Japanese-only release is ready to find its rightful audience. Where Ibrahim, Cherry and Ward are going, they don’t need bass or drums.
Category: Jazz
Secular Music Group :: Volume 3
Since emerging out of the wilds of Connecticut a few years back, SMG have released three LPs worth of rapturous sounds, each moment filled with pure melody, meditative rhythm and immersive textures, all captured wondrously on vintage 4-track ¼” tape. It’s like Gil Evans arranging an album by Natural Information Society, finding a perfect blend of gorgeously pastel hues and minimalist restraint.
Walt Dickerson :: To My Queen
An unsung pioneer of the jazz vibraphone, the elusive Philadelphia-born musician Walt Dickerson is best known for his collaborative seventies album Visions with Sun Ra. With a dynamite quartet featuring a young Andrew Hill on piano and drummer Andrew Cyrille, 1962’s career highlight To My Queen is a tender, lovingly crafted suite showcasing the vibraphonist’s asymmetrical and self-proclaimed plush metallic tones.
Rão Kyao :: Malpertuis
Rão Kyao’s 1976 debut album Malpertuis can be seen as a direct offspring of Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution that ended four decades of dictatorship and allowed the country to breathe again—especially in terms of its cultural outpouring, which had been heavily conditioned by a suffocating censorship and recurrent attempts at blocking any external influences that might instigate dangerous ideas of subversion.
Stanley Turrentine & The Three Sounds :: Blue Hour (1961)
Blue Hour (1961) by Stanley Turrentine & The Three Sounds is a fleeting collaboration that’s perfectly captured by its title. Like the blue light that exists between day and night, Blue Hour captures a brief moment when four like-minded musicians’ paths intersected, seared brightly for a short while, and then faded into jazz history.
Chet Baker :: Daybreak (Jazzhus Montmartre, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1979)
There is something uncanny about late-career Chet Baker. In Europe, the mythology receded, leaving room for something stranger: space, spontaneity, and 48 minutes of suspended time on Daybreak, recorded live at Copenhagen’s Jazzhus Montmartre in 1979.
Akusmi :: Terra Incognita
On his second album as Akusmi, Pascal Bideau mostly jettisons the short interlocking patterns of his earlier work for a wealth of wider, more colorful and free-ranging compositions. Working with several international musicians and a staggering array of eclectic instruments, Bideau has made a wide-ranging, expertly blended and comfortably eccentric album of streamlined world jazz. The territory he's exploring might not be totally unknown, but the unfamiliar and unexpected has never sounded so approachable.
Don Cherry & Okay Temiz :: Music for Turkish Theater 1970
In 1969 Istanbul, James Baldwin brought Don Cherry and Turkish percussionist Okay Temiz together to score Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a controversial play about gay love in an Istanbul prison. The resulting music—a hypnotic, unruly weave of drums and flutes, somewhere between free jazz and a fever dream—vanished for more than 50 years. Now, Caz Plak has finally unearthed it.
Alden Hellmuth :: Tether
The second album from Alden Hellmuth doesn’t deal in aura, vibe or chill. Instead, the evocatively named NYC alto saxophonist brings in a remorseless funk drummer and two bassists, delivering a burly, sharp-cornered album of aggressive, punk-informed jazz that still makes room for melody and introspection. You could call it Blitzkrieg Bebop, if you wanted. Just don’t call it ambient.
The Tomeka Reid Quartet :: Dance! Skip! Hop!
The Tomeka Reid Quartet has been together for twelve years. And it shows. Released earlier this year via the Richmond, Virginia based Out Of Your Head Records, Dance! Skip! Hop! finds Reid, Mary Halvorson, Jason Roebke, and Tomas Fujiwara moving through five compositions where written form and improvisation become nearly indistinguishable.
John Coltrane Quartet :: Ballads (1963)
The central mystery of Ballads is how an album of standards, recorded during one of the most radical periods in jazz history, feels every bit as profound as Coltrane’s more adventurous work. In this installment of the Midnite Jazz column, we explore the mystery of John Coltrane’s Ballads, its place in his discography, and the power of restraint.
Victor Vieira-Branco’s Bark Culture :: The Giant Is Awkward
A new voice enters the conversation. Enthralling, mysterious, and beautifully disorienting, The Giant is Awkward finds Bark Culture widening its range and sharpening its identity as pianist Sam Yulsman opens new possibilities within the group’s sound. It’s a significant step forward for a band already operating from a position of uncommon chemistry.
Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes :: Unrelated
On their fourth LP together, Unrelated, the West Coast duo trades saxophone and bass for synthesized textures, artificial tones, and strange tropical pulse. A wobbly set that ventures deeper into the Uncanny Valley.
SML :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
With Spontaneous Music Live, their new album for International Anthem, SML finally documents that experience in full: two sprawling, unedited performances recorded at Zebulon that capture the band shape-shifting in real time. Ahead of SML’s June 26th and 27th performances at Teragram Ballroom celebrating Aquarium Drunkard’s 21st anniversary, we gathered all five members together to discuss improvisation, groove mechanics, communication, martinis, and more.
Stolen Moments From A Life Well-Lived :: Sonny Rollins, 1930-2026
From Birdland broadcasts and bridge-side practice sessions to late-night television, Leonard Cohen collaborations, and a final summit meeting with Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins spent nearly seven decades treating improvisation as a form of spiritual inquiry. In the wake of his passing at 95, we revisit a handful of essential films, broadcasts, and performances that capture the humor, velocity, deep concentration, and eternal forward motion of a musician who never stopped searching for the unknown.