Solid Records: MPS & More
Solo
Paul Bley was born in Montreal in 1932 and left for New York at the start of the 1950s. He had already taken over Oscar Peterson's chair at the Alberta Lounge as a teenager. In December 1987 he came home, sat down at Studio Tempo, and recorded ten improvisations for a local label that was then four years old.
Solo was the first of the dozen or so records Bley made for Jim West's Justin Time over the next twenty years, a run that ended with About Time in 2008. It is also a digital recording from …
Requiem For Julius
Five years after Julius Hemphill's death, the World Saxophone Quartet records its farewell to him: four horns alone, no drums, at Studio Victor in Montreal in 1999. David Murray's title piece, three Oliver Lake tunes, a Jack DeJohnette opener. The Penguin Guide calls it one of the group's most accessible records.
Steppenwolf
Chicago, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1 March 1999. The World Saxophone Quartet plays a full concert and the tape stays in a drawer for three years. Justin Time released it in 2002 as Steppenwolf, and it turned out to be the last record John Purcell made with the group.
The WSQ mostly recorded in studios. A live album from this period is a different animal: the pieces stretch out, the four players introduce their own tunes at the microphone, and Oliver Lake reads a spoken narrative. Jim Santella at All …
Experience
Eight Jimi Hendrix songs for four saxophones, plus trombone, violin, electric bass and drums. Experience was recorded over three days, 13 to 15 March 2003, and released by Justin Time in 2004.
By then the World Saxophone Quartet had a new fourth voice. Bruce Williams, on alto and soprano, had replaced John Purcell alongside the three founders, Hamiet Bluiett, Oliver Lake and David Murray. For the Hendrix material they brought in a rhythm section: Matthew Garrison on electric bass, Gene Lake (Oli…
Plays Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus died in January 1979. Nineteen months later, on 18 August 1980, his drummer of more than twenty years took what was left of the last Mingus band into Fonoprint Studio in Bologna and recorded six tunes for the Dutch label Timeless.
Dannie Richmond had rarely led a date. Here he heads the quintet that had backed Mingus at the end: Ricky Ford on tenor, Jack Walrath on trumpet, Bob Neloms on piano, and Cameron Brown in the bass chair the leader had vacated. The record was co-produced …
I Didn't Know About You
Munich, Studio Meilhaus, 6 November 1990. Archie Shepp on tenor and alto, singing on three tracks, with Horace Parlan on piano, Wayne Dockery on bass and George Brown on drums. One day of work for the Dutch label Timeless, released the following year.
Shepp and Parlan had recorded the spirituals of Goin' Home and the blues of Trouble in Mind as a duo for SteepleChase in the late 1970s. This quartet session comes out of the same relationship, a decade on, and the material tells you where Shepp wa…
The Rise Of Atlantis
The only album under Carter Jefferson's name, produced by Woody Shaw and recorded in New York over two days in December 1978. Terumasa Hino, Harry Whitaker and Steve Thornton on the first side, Shunzo Ono and John Hicks on the second, Clint Houston and Victor Lewis throughout.
Paradise Space Shuttle
George Adams' first record under his own name for a US audience, cut in one day in New York, 21 December 1979, with Ron Burton, Don Pate, Al Foster and Azzedin Weston. Hard bop, a Sondheim ballad, a Mingus tribute, and the fourteen-minute Funk-a-Roonie Peacock with Adams on flute and voice.
Live At Montmartre
Jazzhus Montmartre, Copenhagen, 4 and 5 April 1985. The George Adams - Don Pullen Quartet with Cameron Brown and Dannie Richmond, and a guest who changes the sound: John Scofield on guitar.
This was the rhythm section of Mingus's Changes One and Changes Two, minus Mingus, and between 1979 and 1989 it was one of the best working bands in jazz. JazzTimes, looking back, wrote that no group before or since bridged avant-garde abandon and gutbucket groove so convincingly, and that everyone who heard …
Earth Beams
The first studio album by the George Adams - Don Pullen Quartet, recorded at Fendal Sound Studio in Loenen aan de Vecht, in the Dutch countryside, between 3 and 5 August 1980, and produced by the two leaders themselves for Timeless.
Adams on tenor and flute, Pullen on piano, Cameron Brown on bass, Dannie Richmond on drums. Neil Tesser, in the Playboy Book of Jazz, wrote that the presence of Richmond, Mingus's drummer and protégé for over two decades, made it clear that this band saw itself as ca…
Cosmic Funk
Lonnie Liston Smith's second Flying Dutchman album, April 1974, and the first with the Cosmic Echoes and his brother Donald's voice. Produced by Bob Thiele. Electric piano funk on the title track, Shorter's Footprints, Mtume's Sais, and a sung version of Coltrane's Naima to close.
Are You Ready?
Three long tracks, thirty-six minutes, cut live in front of a Montreux crowd. Are You Ready? is Harold Alexander's second and last record for Bob Thiele's Flying Dutchman, released in 1972.
Alexander, from Charlotte, North Carolina, had played with Big John Patton and with Elvin Jones before Thiele signed him. His flute is the main voice here, with soprano saxophone in reserve, and the band around him is the New York session pool of the period: Neal Creque on piano, Cornell Dupree on guitar, Vic…
Under Fire
Recorded in New York in 1971, held back by Flying Dutchman until 1973, Under Fire sits between the Montreux live album and Bolivia in Gato Barbieri's run for the label, the years when he was moving away from free jazz and toward the folk material of his continent.
The band is the one AllMusic calls stellar: Lonnie Liston Smith on piano and electric piano, John Abercrombie on guitar, Stanley Clarke on bass, Airto Moreira, James Mtume and Moulay Ali Hafid on percussion, and Roy Haynes on drums for…
El Pampero
Montreux, 18 June 1971. Gato Barbieri on tenor, Lonnie Liston Smith on piano, Chuck Rainey on electric bass, Bernard Purdie on drums, Sonny Morgan on congas and Naná Vasconcelos on berimbau and percussion. Bob Thiele produced, and Flying Dutchman issued it the same year.
Four pieces and forty-one minutes. The title track, Barbieri's own, runs almost fourteen. Then a Carlos Gardel tango, Mi Buenos Aires Querido, a Brazilian standard, Brasil, and twelve minutes on Atahualpa Yupanqui's El Arriero, …
Free Will
Gil Scott-Heron's last album for Flying Dutchman, cut over two days in March 1972 at RCA Studios. One side of songs with Brian Jackson, Hubert Laws, David Spinozza and Pretty Purdie; one side of poems over hand percussion, including No Knock and The King Alfred Plan. Bob Thiele produced.
Blues And The Soulful Truth
One day at RCA Studio A, 13 November 1972. Leon Thomas singing, with Pee Wee Ellis, James Brown's former arranger, running the session on saxophones, keyboards, marimba and, per the credits, coat hangers and firecrackers.
The title nods to Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth, and AllMusic's Thom Jurek says the echo is in the vision as well as the name: a tour through the range of Black American music Thomas could sing, proof that he was far more than the free jazz voice of The Creator H…
The Leon Thomas Album
Leon Thomas's second album for Bob Thiele's Flying Dutchman, 1970: a horn section arranged by Oliver Nelson, Billy Harper, Howard Johnson, Billy Cobham and Roy Haynes, and two live spiritual jazz pieces, the eleven-minute Um, Um, Um and the side-long Pharoah's Tune (The Journey).
In Antibes
Antibes Jazz Festival, 20 July 1977. Hannibal Marvin Peterson's trumpet, George Adams on tenor and flute, Diedre Murray's cello, Steve Neil on bass, Makaya Ntshoko on drums. Two pieces of about twenty minutes each, Ro and Swing Low Sweet Chariot, recorded for Enja.
Mingus In Europe Volume I
Wuppertal Stadthalle, 26 April 1964: the Mingus sextet with Eric Dolphy, Clifford Jordan, Jaki Byard and Dannie Richmond, two months before Dolphy's death. A 37-minute Fables of Faubus, the Dolphy-Mingus duet Starting, and Meditations. Issued by Enja in 1980; the CD adds Meditations.
Lotus Flower
One day at Vanguard Studios, New York, 7 January 1982. Woody Shaw on trumpet with the band he had by then been working with for a couple of years: Steve Turre on trombone, Mulgrew Miller on piano, Stafford James on bass, Tony Reedus on drums. Produced for Enja by Horst Weber and Matthias Winckelmann.
Shaw had come off a run of Columbia albums and was six weeks away from the Jazz Forum concerts that Elektra Musician would issue as Master of the Art and Night Music. This is the same quintet in the…