Archie Shepp – Live At The Donaueschingen Music Festival

"Live at the Montreal Jazz Festival" features Diana Krall on vocals and piano along with her band of Anthony Wilson on guitar, Peter Erskine on drums, and Robert Hurst on bass. Most of the songs performed here are culled from Krall’s 2004 Verve release, "The Girl in the Other Room".

In the absence of Stephane Grappelli, Ray Nance, and Stuff Smith, 83-year-old frigo is nothing short of a violin icon. Which is not to say that he is anything of a museum piece. His work during this Caribbean jazz cruise is soulful and swinging. For the uninitiated, Frigo's playing will invite inevitable comparisons with Grappelli. True, both have a buoyant joy to their music, especially on rhythm numbers. Frigo, however, has a reservoir of Gypsy melancholia (particularly on ballads or verses) that is not to be found in the Frenchman's music. When Frigo navigates emotionally through "The Man I Love" on a Gershwin medley, handkerchiefs all over the ship must have been pressed into service. The hell-bent fiddling on "Strike up the Band" is a reminder that Frigo spent years on a country-music radio show. The last tune elicits some delightfully surprising chord choices from pianist Joe Vito…

This double album matches and mixes together four masterful musicians: pianist Oscar Peterson, guitarist Joe Pass, bassist Niels Pedersen and harmonica great Toots Thielemans. Together they perform O.P.'s "City Lights" and ten veteran standards with creativity, wit and solid swing. There are a few miraculous moments as one would expect from musicians of this caliber and the results are generally quite memorable.

Generally disregarded by jazz purists, Roy Ayers' Live At the Montreux Jazz Festival is nevertheless a thoroughly engaging set of funky jazz fusion. In fact, the album is one of the most sampled jazz records in hip-hop. Loops of this performance of "Everybody Loves the Sunshine" have appeared on tracks by A Tribe Called Quest, Brand Nubian, and several others. The original grooves on this album are just as funky as those the hip-hop artists have derived from it. In fact, Ayers is probably funkier and looser than the musicians that borrowed from him several years later. Live At the Montreux Jazz Festival is one of the core recordings of acid jazz, "rare grooves," and jazz hip-hop; it's a record that sounds better 20 years after its release than it did when it first appeared.