Reissues
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…
With Silence
Munich, Studio 70, 24 June 1972. Four players who would otherwise never have been in the same room: Karl Berger on vibraphone and marimba, the Japanese pianist Masahiko Sato (the trio Trinity for Enja dates from the same period), the Austrian bassist Adelhard Roidinger, and Allen Blairman, the Pittsburgh drummer who had played with Albert Ayler and was then Mal Waldron's regular in Germany.
Berger had been in Don Cherry's Paris band, had recorded for ESP and Milestone, and in 1972 was founding t…
Vibrations
Berlin, 7 November 1971, the week of the Berliner Jazztage. Terumasa Hino on trumpet and flute with the Frankfurt tenor Heinz Sauer, Peter Warren on bass and Pierre Favre on drums, for Enja's second year. Five long pieces, free and arranged in turns, including Into the Heaven and Dig It.
A Tribute To Mal Waldron
Yosuke Yamashita and Mal Waldron knew each other from Waldron's years of touring Japan; in 1985 they would record as a piano duo at the Pit Inn. A Tribute To Mal Waldron comes five years earlier, recorded at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg on 17 and 18 June 1980 and released by Enja the same year.
This is the trio Yamashita formed after the Sakata-Moriyama years: Katsuo Kuninaka on bass, Shota Koyama on drums. Four pieces. Three Waldron compositions, Trane's Soul Eyes, a twelve-minute One-Upmansh…
A Touch Of The Blues
Nuremberg, East-West Jazz Festival, 6 May 1972. Mal Waldron's trio with Jimmy Woode, the former Ellington bassist, and Allen Blairman on drums. Three long pieces, all by Waldron, taped live and issued by Enja only in 1975.
Waldron had settled in Europe in 1965 and rebuilt his playing from scratch after a breakdown. By 1972 the new style was fully formed: dark, insistent, built from a few repeated cells that tighten over long stretches. The Enja records from these years (Black Glory, Plays the Bl…
Hard Talk
Nuremberg, East-West Festival, 4 May 1974. Mal Waldron's quintet with Steve Lacy on soprano, Manfred Schoof on cornet, Isla Eckinger and Allen Blairman. Four Waldron compositions, live; AllMusic gives it four and a half stars and calls it a strong set where Schoof often steals the solo honours.
Live In Ruvo Di Puglia 2000
Cecil Taylor solo at the Talos Festival, Ruvo di Puglia, 10 September 2000: one continuous improvisation, unreleased for twenty-one years and issued by Enja in 2021 for its fiftieth anniversary. From the same week as the Willisau concert and the same trip that produced The Owner of the River Bank.
Vintage Dolphy
Eric Dolphy live in 1962-63, in Gunther Schuller's Twentieth-Century Innovations series at Carnegie Hall and in Syracuse: his own quartet with Richard Davis and J.C. Moses, three Schuller third-stream pieces with strings and Jim Hall, and a Donna Lee jam with Phil Woods, Benny Golson and Don Ellis.
Noisy Silence - Gentle Noise
One day at the MPS studio in Villingen, 21 January 1969. Dave Pike on vibes, Volker Kriegel on guitar and sitar, Hans Rettenbacher and Peter Baumeister, produced by Joachim-Ernst Berendt. The Dave Pike Set's debut, with the sitar piece Mathar and Kriegel's rework of Zappa's Mother People.
Haiku
No big band. Haiku, recorded over four days from 1 to 4 June 1973 and released by MPS in 1974, puts Don Ellis's trumpet in front of a twelve-piece string orchestra and a small rhythm group, on ten of his own pieces, each named after and written from a Japanese haiku.
It came right after Soaring, the album with Whiplash, and it is the opposite record. Scott Yanow at AllMusic calls it a very different Don Ellis, the trumpet well showcased over strings on ten moody originals, much of it mellow, a d…
Katcharpari
Milan, January 1973. Enrico Rava's second record as a leader, with John Abercrombie on guitar, Bruce Johnson on bass and Chip White on drums, released by MPS/BASF. Rava has called it his breakthrough: the album that got Manfred Eicher's attention. Seven tracks, from Trial N. 5 to the Don Cherry tribute Cheerin' Cherry.
Triloque
Berlin Jazz Days, 6 November 1976. Albert Mangelsdorff's trombone, alone at the front, with Jaco Pastorius on electric bass and Alphonse Mouzon on drums, a year after Pastorius's debut. Five long pieces, recorded live, released by MPS in 1977. The trombone multiphonics against a fusion rhythm section.
The Wide Point
Walldorf Studio, near Frankfurt, 1 and 2 May 1975. Albert Mangelsdorff on trombone, Palle Danielsson on bass, Elvin Jones on drums. Seven pieces, thirty-nine minutes, released by MPS the same year.
Mangelsdorff had recorded with Jones once before, on the 1968 duet album Albert Mangelsdorff and His Friends. The Wide Point is the first of his trombone-bass-drums trio records, the format that would produce Trilogue with Pastorius and Mouzon the following year and the Montreux album in 1980. The ban…
Between Or Beyond
Villingen, 29 June 1970. Mike Nock, the New Zealand pianist who had come up through Yusef Lateef's and Art Blakey's bands and was then leading the San Francisco fusion group the Fourth Way, records a session for MPS with the Fourth Way rhythm section, Ron McClure on bass and Eddie Marshall on drums, but without the violinist Michael White. Produced by Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer and Joachim-Ernst Berendt, credited to the Mike Nock Underground.
The cover carries a quote from Bill Evans, from a Down…
Total Space
Cologne, Cornet Studios, January 1975. Rolf Kühn on clarinet with a band that reads like a German jazz roll call: his brother Joachim Kühn on piano and electric piano, Philip Catherine on guitar, Gerd Dudek on tenor and soprano, Albert Mangelsdorff on trombone, Bo Stief on bass, and two drummers, Daniel Humair and Kasper Winding.
Kühn chose not to record in the MPS studio in the Black Forest and brought in the engineer Wolfgang Hirschmann instead. In his own account, quoted in MPS's reissue note…
The Day After
Rolf Kühn and Phil Woods had worked together in New York in the late 1950s, when Kühn was there with Benny Goodman and the Tommy Dorsey orchestra. The Day After, released by MPS in 1972, is their reunion: Woods on alto, Kühn on clarinet, Joachim Kühn on piano, Peter Warren on bass, Oliver Johnson (Steve Lacy's drummer for a decade) on drums, and Naná Vasconcelos on percussion and berimbau.
Five pieces, forty-one minutes. Ca. 1-9-5-2 looks back to the bop era but is played modally. The title trac…
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.