Joe Morris & Elliott Sharp Realism (2025)

A journey as perilous and majestic as any in recent jazz history, full of unanswered questions, ellipses, asides, detours, ecstatic shouts and Iyrical prayers. A pas de deux, with a risk-taking so bracing, you find yourself holding your breath at the wonder and beauty of its coherence and cogency and spiritual resonance.

Jamie Saft is a virtuoso pianist, keyboardist, producer, and composer from New York. His stylistic versatility, multi-instrumentalist capabilities, and production skills have been featured with Beastie Boys, Bad Brains, HR, The B-52’s, John Zorn, John Adams, Laurie Anderson, Donovan, Antony and the Johnsons, and Iggy Pop. Saft leads the New Zion Trio, The Jamie Saft Trio, and The Jamie Saft Quartet.

Joe Jackson - Look Sharp! (1979) {A&M Records 393 187-2}
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© 1979, 1990 A&M Records | 393 187-2
New Wave / Rock / Post Punk / Contemporary Pop

A brilliant, accomplished debut, Look Sharp! established Joe Jackson as part of that camp of angry, intelligent young new wavers (i.e., Elvis Costello, Graham Parker) who approached pop music with the sardonic attitude and tense, aggressive energy of punk. Not as indebted to pub rock as Parker and Costello, and much more lyrically straightforward than the latter, Jackson delivers a set of bristling, insanely catchy pop songs that seethe with energy and frustration.

All recordings, especially those of improvised music, try to freeze the sound of a present moment, but invariably melt into the past and the future, real and imagined. Listening to this album, I can’t help but think of the classic meeting of Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins, where two titans of the same instrument across different generations displayed mutual love and respect through stylistic contrast and playful jousting. Or I create a fiction, of Django Reinhardt and Freddie Green crossing paths in some distant hotel, staying up late one night and pushing each other to new ideas. (I don’t make that allusion lightly – for the abundance of virtuosic extended technique, don’t miss the profound swing of the articulated lines and the chunky chords.) Taylor Ho Bynum, excerpt from the liner notes.

He burst onto the scene a couple of years later than Elvis Costello and Graham Parker, but Joe Jackson completed British rock's Angry Young Man trinity...