Live at The US Festival

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.

For Monk fans, these Mo-Fis are must-haves. Wow! After releasing so many mediocre rock albums, Mobile Fidelity came through with not one but TWO shiny gold CDs by the enigmatic, lovable Thelonious Monk (accompanied in these live recordings by Charlie Rouse on sax, John Ore on bass, and Frank Dunlop on drums)….

On August 31, 1970, Leonard Cohen was scheduled to play the third Isle of Wight Festival. The conditions were not optimal. While 100,000 or so tickets had been sold, there were nearly 600,000 in attendance. Fans overran the island to see and hear the Who, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, and many others over five days…

Captured during a pivotal, trailblazing period of his five decade career, pianist Hal Galper had come off the road with the Cannonball Adderley Quintet looking to establish his new working band. Pulling in Michael & Randy Brecker, whom he had recorded & worked with in the early '70s, along with bassist Wayne Dockery and drummer Bob Moses, Galper set up Sunday matinees at NY's Sweet Basil jazz club for a year to woodshed the group concept and new compositions. In the studio, 1977's "Reach Out" displayed an astonishingly original collective, all matching Galper's chance-taking, high-spirited, free-wheeling approach to music making. 1979's "Speak with a Single Voice" captured the energy of the quintet live, but on this 1977 Berlin Jazz Festival performance, the band shifts into an other-wordly overdrive. From the opening salvos of Galper's "Now Hear This," the mission is defined - jazz giants, in the prime of their youth, set free to blow, pushed to the limits by Galper's facility, full-bodied sound, and fertile imaginatio.

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.

The second volume of Thelonious Monk's appearance at the 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival is drawn from two separate concerts on back to back days, with the pianist joined by longtime tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, bassist John Ore and drummer Frank Dunlop…