Jazz /
My Greatest Love
LP version. We Release Jazz present a reissue from Geneva's Boillat Thérace Quintet, the My Greatest Love album, featuring bebop and hard-bop legend Benny Bailey and available for the first time since 1975. Galvanized by the creation of the Montreux Jazz Festival in the late '60s and lively local scenes, jazz music was healthy and booming in Switzerland in the 1970s. One band that beautifully captured this energy was Jean-François Boillat and RaymondThérace's Boillat Thérace Quintet whose self-t…
Boillat Therace Quintet
LP version. We Release Jazz present its sixth release, a reissue of Boillat Thérace Quintet's self-titled album, available for the first time since its original limited private pressing in 1974. Full of prolific and inspired local clusters and boosted by the recently launched Montreux Jazz Festival, the Swiss jazz scene was vibrant and inventive in the 1970s, notably in the region surrounding Lake Geneva. This is precisely where jazz activist and brilliant pianist Jean-François Boillat and wind …
Hard Luck Soul
If musical accomplishment is anything to go by, the members of the Ohio Penitentiary 511 Jazz Ensemble would immediately be given their pardon. Their privately-pressed LP from 1971 is a legend in obscurity, and a master class in what can be achieved in the most trying of circumstances.
The 511 Jazz Ensemble was made up entirely of serving prisoners in the Ohio State Penitentiary. It was founded in 1971 to give those prisoners with a musical aptitude an opportunity to be productive and creative. …
Grant's First Stand
Grant Green's debut album, Grant's First Stand, still ranks as one of his greatest pure soul-jazz outings, a set of killer grooves laid down by a hard-swinging organ trio. For having such a small lineup, just organist Baby Face Willette and drummer Ben Dixon -- the group cooks up quite a bit of power, really sinking its teeth into the storming up-tempo numbers, and swinging loose and easy on the ballads. From the first note of "Miss Ann's Tempo," they establish a groove, and swing like hell thro…
Spirits Known and Unknown
Leon Thomas' debut solo recording after his tenure with Pharoah Sanders is a fine one. Teaming with a cast of musicians that includes bassist Cecil McBee, flutist James Spaulding, Roy Haynes, Lonnie Liston Smith, Richard Davis, and Sanders (listed here as "Little Rock"), etc. Thomas' patented yodel is in fine shape here, displayed alongside his singular lyric style and scat singing trademark. The set begins with a shorter, more lyrical version of Thomas' signature tune The Creator Has a Master P…
For Us All (Yoka Boka)
Invisible City Editions reissues a highly sought after and impossibly rare 1986 private-press spiritual jazz LP from Washington D.C. harpist Jeff Majors. Majors was a devoted personal student of Alice Coltrane’s for three years as a teenager, taking harp and spiritual instruction at her home in the Bay Area just before she established her renowned ashram in Huntington, California. Following his tutelage with Coltrane, he returned to the East Coast, joining Sun Ra acolyte Brother Ah's ensemble Th…
Pourquoi
"Pourquoi" originally released in 1978 on French Crypto label. It sounds like a new side of Cortex: songs are mainly composed around the voice and the various keyboards of the band leader, Alain Mion, who also played bass lines on synthesizer. Besides, the band gave up the live recording to use the beloved Stevie Wonder or Quincy Jones' technique of "re-recording". But, in spite of these changes, their groove remains as spontaneous and as powerful. Also, the band collaborated with great backing…
Black Fire
Matsuli Music is proud to announce the re-issue of Black Fire, the 1976 debut album of legendary Cape Town spiritual jazz funk band Pacific Express. The band was home to jazz musicians Chris Schilder, and Basil ‘Manenberg’ Coetzee as well as fusion and soul musicians Robbie Jansen, Issy Ariefdien, Paul Abrahams, Jack Momple and Zayn Adam.This album is hard evidence of that 1976 musical moment in which Pacific Express forged an entirely new South African sound and musical identity out of what was…