Leroy Jenkins

Leroy Jenkins' Sting - Urban Blues (1984) {Black Saint 120083-2 rel 1994}
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© 1984, 1994 Black Saint | 120083-2
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Violin

Leroy Jenkins (March 11, 1932 – February 24, 2007) was a composer and avant-garde jazz violinist and violist. Happy Birthday… Violinist Leroy Jenkins was at the helm of Sting, which played funky and free, did originals and vintage spirituals, and would shift from stretches of collective improvisation to challenging solo exchanges. They were a unique, intriguing group, but sadly didn't last. This 1984 album, reissued on CD, presented them at their best, displaying the breadth of influences, genres, sources and styles that converged and resulted in the work of a great band.

Leroy Jenkins - Live! (1993) {Black Saint 120122-2}
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© 1993 Black Saint | 120122-2
Jazz / Jazz-Funk / Avant-Garde Jazz / Contemporary Jazz / Violin

Jenkins's working band, Sting, were capable of great things in a live setting, but they're nothing compared to the new Computer Minds. The live session completely merits the exclamation mark. It's a fierce, urgent session, recorded in a New York public school, and sounds appropriately in contact with what's going on in the streets. To an extent, Jenkins is a traditionalist rather than a radical. His interests, though, have always reached well beyond jazz, and his band tackles a whole range of black musics.

Excellent session by dynamic violinist Leroy Jenkins, once part of the wonderful avant-garde trio The Revolutionary Ensemble. Jenkins cut this session in 1978, shortly after the trio's demise, and it's loaded with great violin solos, as well as some unusual, intriguing arrangements and compositions.

The Revolutionary Ensemble were an extraordinary trio who unfortunately has a very limited discography, and what they did record is rather difficult to find. The Psyche is a case in point, released in 1975 on the small, self-produced RE: Records label and, as of 2002, unavailable on disc. It's a superb performance, however, consisting of three compositions, one by each group member, and can serve as a microcosm of what the band was about…

The Chicago Symphonies represents another magnificent four-disc collection of extended compositions by composer, musician, artist and educator Wadada Leo Smith leading his Great Lakes Quartet in a celebration of Chicago and the rich contributions of the Midwestern artistic, musical and political culture to the United States of America. The first three symphonies, “Gold,” “Diamond” and “Pearl” are performed by Smith with three other contemporary masters of creative music, saxophonist/flutist Henry Threadgill, bassist John Lindberg and drummer Jack DeJohnette. The fourth, “Sapphire Symphony – The Presidents and Their Vision for America,” features saxophonist Jonathon Haffner with Smith, Lindberg and DeJohnette.

Trumpet is a unique three-CD boxed set of solo trumpet music recorded over one week in the beautiful natural acoustics of St. Mary's Church, the medieval stone church in the Town of Pohja on the Southern Coast of Finland. All compositions by Wadada Leo Smith. Trumpet represents a culmination of Smith's recorded solo trumpet work that has comprised of six albums before Trumpet, starting with his very first album as a leader, Creative Music - 1: Six Solo Improvisations, in 1971 and ending with his dedication to Thelonious Monk, Solo: Reflections and Meditations on Monk, in 2015.