Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra / Nimbus West legacy
The Call
For nearly two decades, Horace Tapscott and his Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra made music without making records. They played in parks, on street corners, at fundraisers, churches, community centers - anywhere the people needed them. While the rest of the jazz world chased contracts and critics, Tapscott was building something else entirely: an ark for the Black arts in the heart of Los Angeles.
The story of The Call is inseparable from this larger project. When long-time jazz devotee Tom Albach f…
Desert Fairy Princess
There's a particular light in the music of Los Angeles's spiritual jazz community of the late 1970s - something warm, searching, unpretentious. Adele Sebastian's sole album as a leader catches that light perfectly. Recorded in 1981 and released on the legendary Nimbus West imprint, Desert Fairy Princess stands among the finest documents of West Coast creative music from the period.
Sebastian was born in Riverside, California in 1956 into a musical family - her mother played piano with the Albert…
The Creator's Musician
Solo bass albums constitute a rare and demanding genre. The instrument's resonance, its sustain limitations, the absence of harmonic support - all conspire against extended solo statements. Yet Horace Tapscott's longtime bassist approaches the challenge with a structural intelligence that transforms apparent constraints into compositional architecture. Roberto Miranda's arco work on "Evolution On The Life Of Moses" demonstrates a command of overtones and microtonal shadings that recalls the medi…
Thomas Tedesco And Ocean
The Tommy Tedesco case is singular in California jazz history. A session guitarist among the most sought-after in Hollywood - thousands of recordings, film scores, pop records - chooses for his most personal statement the company of Bobby Bradford on trumpet and Roberto Miguel Miranda on bass, with Onaje Sherman Ferguson on drums and Sartuse on percussion. Not exactly the context of those Sinatra dates.
The result is a structurally sophisticated free jazz document. "The Doubleness of Three" supe…
Phantasmagoria
Curtis Clark's Nimbus debut - and he brings the whole Los Angeles underground with him. Miranda and Theus: the rhythm section that powered Horace Tapscott's Arkestra, that held the floor at UGMAA meetings, that knew how to make a piano trio sound like a congregation. This is the connection - Chicago kid studies with Tapscott, absorbs the lesson, makes his first record with the master's own people. Side A: "Phantasmagoria" - one long piece, the title track eating up the whole side. Side B: "Bouqu…
Deep Sea Diver
Just two people. Piano. Voice. Nothing else. No bass, no drums, no safety net. This is where Clark strips everything away - no Amsterdam quintet, no Dutch improvisers, just 88 keys and one voice diving deep. "Rainbow Over Harlem" opens and closes the record. "Cosmic Minstrels." "Deep Sea Diver." "Farewell Gentle Spirit (For Rev. Frank J. Harper)" - a dedication that tells you where this music comes from. "Broken Mirror Reflections." "Amy Yvonne." Titles like chapter headings in a book of hours.
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Amsterdam Sunshine
Bomb! Drop the needle. Thirteen minutes and twenty seconds. "Daniel/Amsterdam Sunshine" - dedicated to Daniel Halifee - opens this record like a prayer. Not a quick prayer, not a polite prayer. The kind that takes its time, builds in waves, lets the spirit enter the room. Clark's piano states the theme, Moore's alto answers, Reijseger's cello pulls you deeper. This is spiritual jazz in the truest sense - music as ceremony, music as offering.
A man from Chicago who studied with Horace Tapscott in…