In jazz as in life, you’re sometimes only as good as the people you work with. John Coltrane, for instance, made some amazing music in his career, but did some of his best work with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones, as best heard on such classic albums as Ballads, Crescent, Afro Blue Impressions, First Meditations, Sun Ship, and, of course, A Love Supreme.
Though it shares the same name, was recorded a few months later during the same concert series, and is a collection jazz that runs from the atmospheric to the noisy, the second Live At Okuden album (CD, digital) by jazz maestros Mat Walerian and Matthew Shipp — on which they’re joined, this time around, by Hamid Drake under the name Jungle — is anything but a rerun. Well, except in how good it is.
With three people playing nearly a dozen different instruments, you might expect the jazzy album Intuit from multi-instrumentalist Kali Z Fasteau to be a bit overwhelming, aurally speaking. Especially since those instruments include a nai flute (which she describes as being an “oblique end-blown reed flute”), a mizmar (“a type of flagolet”), a djembe (a West African drum), a shaker (another African percussion instrument) and a aquasonic (“a metal bowed instrument with metal prongs”). But by having every song but two just be two people playing one instrument each, Fasteau keeps the music on Intuit rather simple but no less evocative.
Though there are some jazz musicians who can get the best out of anyone they play with — most notably Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon — many do their best work when they have a solid and consistent band behind them.
The latest example of this is Andando El Tiempo (CD, digital), the second and slightly better album from the trio of pianist Carla Bley, saxophonist Andy Sheppard, and bassist Steve Swallow.
While I may love jazz when it’s dark and moody, and find that it gets darker and moodier when you have fewer people playing it at the same time, solo piano collections have ironically never really grabbed me. But by adding some sound effects here are there, sometimes to great effect, Jon Balke’s Warp (CD, digital) has, for the most part, caught my attention. It didn’t keep it the whole time, but it certainly caught it.
When I first saw that the Anat Fort Trio’s new album Birdwatching (CD, digital) featured alto clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi alongside double bassist Gary Wang, drummer Roland Schneider, and Fort on piano, my first thought was that it would probably sound like the wonderfully evocative albums Currents and Post Scriptum by the similarly configured Wolfert Brederode Quartet. And while it does at times, the overall tone of Birdwatching actually sets this album apart.
While he’s considered one of the better jazz piano players around these days, Matthew Shipp is mostly thought of as being one of the best free jazz musicians in New York City’s avant-garde scene. But on The Conduct Of Jazz (CD, digital), he pulls back a bit for a more conventional but still edgy-adjacent collection.
In July of 1962, saxophonist Sonny Rollins was joined by cornetist Don Cherry, bassist Bob Cranshaw, and drummer Billy Higgins for a four night stand at New York City’s Village Gate.
But while this quartet performed twenty songs during this engagement, only three were ever released (on Sonny’s album Our Man In Jazz), and even then, one of them was heavily edited.
Thankfully, the complete four night stint has now been released as a six-CD boxed set titled Complete Live At The Village Gate 1962. But while the music is great, the way it’s presented in this collection might irritate some picky purists.
Since launching in 2011’s with Live In Europe 1967: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1, the Miles Davis Bootleg series has presented largely unheard (save for among hardcore collectors) and mostly complete live shows from some of the iconic jazz trumpeter’s best groups.
But now, with Miles Davis At Newport 1955-1975 The Bootleg Series Vol 4 (CD, digital), this series is switches gears, and instead of being dedicated to a single band, this has Miles playing eight shows with seven different groups over eight different years of the titular festival.