Piano
All records with piano · Solo piano only
Hannibal
Ludwigsburg, 1 and 2 July 1975. Hannibal Marvin Peterson's first record for MPS, with Diedre Murray's cello, Michael Cochrane's piano, Stafford James and Thabo Michael Carvin. Two modal originals, a version of Misty, The Voyage with Hannibal on koto, and the fourteen-minute Soul Brother for Malcolm X.
Hannibal In Berlin
Berlin Philharmonie, 3 November 1976. Hannibal with George Adams on tenor, Diedre Murray on cello, Michael Cochrane, Steve Neil and Allen Nelson. His own 23rd Psalm, Coltrane's Bessie's Blues and My Favorite Things, Willow Weep for Me, and Swing Low Sweet Chariot as a memory of the Texas cotton fields.
The Hip Walk
Villingen, 1965. Nathan Davis, the Kansas City tenor who had shared a Paris band with Eric Dolphy, records his second SABA album with a fellow Kansas Citian, Carmell Jones, just off Song for My Father, and the Clarke-Boland rhythm section: Francy Boland, Jimmy Woode, Kenny Clarke. Includes The Hip Walk.
Happy Girl
Nathan Davis's first record as a leader, cut at the SABA studio in Villingen on 31 January 1965 with a twenty-year-old Woody Shaw on trumpet, Larry Young on piano rather than organ, Jimmy Woode on bass and Billy Brooks on drums. Tenor, soprano and flute in the Paris expatriate style of the mid-1960s.
Touché
Studio Tempo, Montreal, 19 July 1996. Kenny Wheeler and Paul Bley, two Canadians who left for New York forty years earlier, in duo for the first time on record. Thirteen short pieces, seven by Wheeler and six by Bley, alternating; trumpet and flugelhorn against a piano that leaves most of the space empty.
Above And Beyond
Grand Rapids, Michigan, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, 28 April 2003. The Billy Bang Quintet with Frank Lowe on tenor, Andrew Bemkey on piano, Todd Nicholson on bass and Tatsuya Nakatani on drums. Lowe was playing with one lung. He died that September, and this is his last recording.
Bang and Lowe went back to the loft years and had made a run of duo and group records together. Justin Time, which had Bang under contract for Vietnam: The Aftermath and its sequel, released the tape in 2007…
Moon Child
Paris, Studio Davout, 12 and 23 October 1989. Pharoah Sanders with William Henderson on piano, Stafford James on bass, Eddie Moore on drums and Cheikh Tidiane Fall on percussion. Produced by Wim Wigt for Timeless, released in 1990.
The Penguin Guide called it the straightest jazz album Sanders had made for years, and heard what he was after: a hypnotic groove that lets the horn float almost at will. Steve Loewy at AllMusic writes that the results may have disappointed some fans at the time, but …
Africa
Studio 44, Monster, Holland, 11 March 1987. One day. Pharoah Sanders with John Hicks on piano, Curtis Lundy on bass and Idris Muhammad on drums, a band he kept for years. Produced by Wim Wigt for Timeless.
The record is built around Coltrane. Loewy at AllMusic writes that most listeners will prefer the originals to Sanders's imitations, but calls Africa a joyous and worthy tribute. AllMusic's survey of the Timeless years is warmer: it hears the title track's highlife melody undercut by Hicks's p…
Astral Traveling
Lonnie Liston Smith's first album under his own name, 1973, straight out of the Pharoah Sanders band and the Thembi sessions where the title track was born on a Fender Rhodes. Cecil McBee, Joe Beck, Badal Roy on tabla, Mtume on congas, a tamboura. Six pieces, produced by Bob Thiele for Flying Dutchman.
Spirits Known and Unknown
New York, 21 and 22 October 1969. Leon Thomas's first album under his own name, made months after Karma, with Pharoah Sanders credited as Little Rock, Lonnie Liston Smith, James Spaulding, Cecil McBee, Richard Davis and Roy Haynes. A shorter Creator Has a Master Plan, Echoes, and the Malcolm X elegy Malcolm's Gone.
Search For Tomorrow
Berkeley Jazz Festival, 1974. Prince Lasha, the Fort Worth altoist and flautist who had made The Cry! with Sonny Simmons and Iron Man with Dolphy, with Hubert Eaves on piano, Ron Carter on bass, Roy McCurdy on drums and Kenneth Nash on percussion. Three pieces, including the sixteen-minute Mayflower.
What It Is
Vanguard Studios, New York, 15 November 1981. Mal Waldron with Clifford Jordan on tenor, Cecil McBee on bass and Dannie Richmond on drums, two weeks after the same quartet had played a Columbia University concert. Produced by Horst Weber for Enja, released in 1982.
Three pieces. Jordan's Charlie Parker's Last Supper; Waldron's Hymn from the Inferno, twelve minutes; and the title track, eighteen minutes, which takes the whole second side. Ron Wynn at AllMusic gives it three stars and two words: d…
Black Glory
One of the first Enja records, the fourth in the catalogue according to AllMusic, recorded live at the Domicile club in Munich in June 1971. Mal Waldron in trio with Jimmy Woode, the former Ellington bassist, and the Swiss drummer Pierre Favre. The same trio made Mal Waldron Plays the Blues for the label the same year.
Four Waldron originals (Sieg Haile, La gloire du noir, The Call, Rock My Soul) and Woode's brief M.C.. AllMusic's note describes a master of repetition and brooding chords in exce…
Destination Unknown
Moonwalker, Aarburg, Switzerland, 29 March 1992. Sun Ra, fourteen months from the end, at synthesizer and piano with a ten-piece Arkestra: Marshall Allen, Michael Ray, Ahmed Abdullah, Tyrone Hill, Buster Smith. Ten pieces in fifty-six minutes, mostly repertoire, groove over improvisation. Released by Enja.
Berlin Concerts
Berlin, 30 August 1961, two Südwestfunk sessions: Eric Dolphy at 33, on his second European trip, with Benny Bailey, Pepsi Auer, George Joyner and Buster Smith. Hot House, Hi-Fly, God Bless the Child on bass clarinet, and Dolphy's own G.W. and 245. Unheard until Enja issued it in 1978. Christgau gave it an A.
Transfiguration
1967. Joachim Kühn had left the GDR the year before and settled in Hamburg; Rolf Kühn, his elder brother, had come back from six years in New York (Benny Goodman, the Tommy Dorsey band) to run the NDR television orchestra. They had already played Newport together. Transfiguration, on SABA, is the Rolf + Joachim Kühn Quintet with Karl Berger as guest on vibraphone, made in the months before Joachim moved to Paris for good.
It sits between two records the brothers made the same year: Re-Union in B…
A Path Through Haze
Berlin, Teldec Studio, 7 November 1971, the same day Terumasa Hino was cutting Vibrations for Enja across town. Joachim-Ernst Berendt, who had brought Masahiko Satoh's trio to the Berliner Jazztage, put them in a studio with the Hungarian guitarist Attila Zoller: Satoh on piano, Yasuo Arakawa on bass, Masahiko Ozu on drums, Zoller on guitar. MPS released it in 1972.
Six pieces. Meet, nine minutes, opens; Sazo is short; the traditional Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair is the ballad; Clos…
Chiasma
Heidelberg Jazztage, 6 June 1975. The Yosuke Yamashita Trio with Akira Sakata and Takeo Moriyama in its second European season, recorded by Carlos Albrecht for MPS. Piano and drums duets, a Moriyama drum solo, and the fourteen-minute Hachi. Forty minutes of the loudest trio of the decade.
New Call From France
Jef Gilson (born Jean-François Quiévreux, 1926) had played clarinet with Claude Luter in Boris Vian's band, switched to piano in 1947, and in 1963 formed the big band through which half of French modern jazz would pass. In 1965 he was musical director of Les Double Six. That year Woody Shaw and Nathan Davis played in his orchestra. New Call From France, released by SABA in 1966 and credited to the Jef Gilson Nonet with Jean-Louis Chautemps, is the record he made for the Black Forest label at the…
Heartplants
Gunter Hampel's first record, 1965, on SABA: a quintet with Manfred Schoof on trumpet, Alexander von Schlippenbach on piano and Buschi Niebergall on bass, a year before Globe Unity. Down Beat gave it five stars. Hampel on vibes and flute, Dolphy and Ayler in the room, nobody screaming.