From the time of his first Blue Note recording in 1964 to his final session for the label in 1967, Sam Rivers made stunning progress as an avant-garde innovator. Starting with an inside/outside hard bop foundation, Rivers quickly took his music as far out as he could while maintaining a recognizable structure; his work fearlessly explored wildly dissonant harmonies and atonality, dense group interaction, cerebral rumination, and passionately intense, free-leaning solos.
This series of short duets reveals a different side of free jazz icon and tenor saxophonist Frank Lowe, who joins the relatively obscure French bassist Bernard Santacruz. Except for the occasional abstract passages, the music is quite accessible, beautiful, and engaging. The two musicians share compositional duties and perform some fine tunes by the likes of Don Cherry, Dollar Brand, Sun Ra, and Denis Charles…
2012 two CD collection devoted to the works of Motown session keyboardist (and Funk Brother extraordinaire) Earl Van Dyke. Originally, some of the Hitsville studio musicians would be ''allowed'' to cut soulful Blues and Jazz tracks for the company's Workshop Jazz label, as long as they handled the regular gig, cutting hits on the Hitsville U.S.A. assembly line. By 1964, however, Workshop Jazz was dead. Motown made good on their promise, somewhat, giving Earl Van Dyke a rare opportunity in the spotlight by issuing in his name a single and a subsequent LP, That Motown Sound. Earl's artistic disappointment belies the gems contained within those vocal-less Motown hits and the additional bonus tracks from Motown's vaults that comprise Disc One of this set. Additional previously unheard nuggets can be found amongst the bonus tracks on Disc Two.
Taking their name from Mervyn Peake's gothic fantasy novel, Titus Groan was a quartet lead by guitar/keyboardist and singer Stewart Cowell and wind player Tony Priestland. Their sound approaches the early UK prog (sometimes called proto-prog), all tracks being over 5 minutes long and often fronted by wind instruments is promising, but ultimately deceiving as the songs lack depth. Centred around the great 12-mins Hall Of Bright Carvings track (also a Peake theme), the album was released in early 1970 on the collectible Dawn label Titus Groan also release a three track single the same year, all three tracks appearing as bonus on this CD reissue.
The 1998 remastering of the Strawbs' best album sports the finest sound of any of their CDs, which, by itself, would make this purchase worthwhile – the detailed notes and the presence of three bonus tracks – the shorter, punchier single version of "Lay Down," "Will Ye Go," and "Backside" – only add to the enticements offered. Additionally, the song order has been changed to the correct one (on the LP, "The River" had to follow "Down by the Sea" to end the first side, because of its heavy bass part), but the main virtue is the sound, which is extraordinary: every instrument sounds as though it's miked directly into your speakers. The result is that Dave Lambert's heavy chording is so close that the record does come off closer in texture to a Who album at certain points than it does to the group's folk roots.