Counterpoint (1967)

Igor Markevitch was a leading conductor, known for brilliant performances, especially of twentieth century music. He was also a composer who attracted some interest in his own day. His parents left Kiev when he was two years old. Markevitch was brought up in Vevey, Switzerland. He took piano lessons from his father and then with Paul Loyonnet and also started to compose.

A 2CD set from organ supremo Brian Auger that includes the 1969 album Streetnoise, produced by Giorgio Gomelsky and featuring Julie Driscoll and Trinity, plus sixties compilation The Mod Years.
The final collaboration between singer Julie Driscoll (by that time dubbed as "The Face" by the British music weeklies) and Brian Auger's Trinity was 1969's Streetnoise - it was an association that had begun in 1966 with Steampacket, a band that also featured Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry. As a parting of the ways, however, it was Trinity's finest moment. A double album featuring 16 tracks, more than half with vocals by Driscoll, the rest absolutely burning instrumentals by Trinity…

Recorded in June of 1965 and released posthumously in 1970, Transition acts as a neat perforation mark between Coltrane's classic quartet and the cosmic explorations that would follow until Trane's passing in 1967. Recorded seven months after the standard-setting A Love Supreme, Transition's first half bears much in common with that groundbreaking set. Spiritually reaching and burningly intense, the quartet is playing at full steam, but still shy of the total free exploration that would follow mere months later on records like Sun Ship and the mystical atonal darkness that came in the fall of that same year with Om. McCoy Tyner's gloriously roaming piano chord clusters add depth and counterpoint to Coltrane's ferocious lyrical runs on the five-part suite that makes up the album's second half…

Sara Lazarus is in no hurry. After the Delaware-born French emigré won first prize at the 1994 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, she waited over a decade to record her debut, 2005's Give Me the Simple Life. To the benefit of jazz listeners, she didn't wait long to record a followup: It's All Right With Me finds the singer once again taking her time and making every word count, as if to imbue each syllable with the deepest possible meaning. The result is a fresh take on classic songs that avoids overindulgent flashiness. Like her debut, which covered the well-worn theme of love, It's All Right With Me recalls the Frank Sinatra concept albums of yesteryear. Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim (Warner Brothers, 1967) comes to mind, but instead of bossa nova, Lazarus has opted for gypsy-influenced jazz, finding ideal support in Bireli Lagrène's Gipsy Project...