Louis Moholo Moholo Octet

It is intended with the utmost respect that this album is entitled Apura!, which in the Filipino language Tagalog translates to “Very Urgent” (the name of an epochal record by the Blue Notes, the pioneering South African jazz sextet of which drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo was the heartbeat). The musicians of Louis and Trevor Watts’s generation cast a tremendous shadow over the legacy of improvised music. It’s not difficult to romanticize the era in which these musicians first made their marks, exercising a creative daring and artistic ingenuity that was transformative in scope. For individuals like Louis, who spent so much of his youth fighting the injustices of the South African Apartheid regime, the raging music of the last century took on a kind of political urgency that reflected very real, very personal consequences…

These are spirited and well-recorded versions of what probably remain Spohr's most popular works. The Nonet is freshly and attractively played, with a proper sense of chamber music informing the performance: that is to say, there is a companionable approach to phrasing, with ideas taken up and returned or passed on as if the players were really listening to one another rather than waiting to say what they were going to say anyhow. Only in the finale do matters become a touch competitive: it is not necessary to go at quite such a speed, and indeed the feeling is of pace rather than the real liveliness which only a very slightly easier tempo might have produced; while some of the string articulation is only just in position. The Adagio is beautifully played, and together with the nimble Scherzo is given a gentle serenade manner: nothing is gained, and sometimes all lost, by trying to make something too profound of these movements.

The Emerald Duets is a crowning achievement among Wadada Leo Smith's many recorded duo collaborations with drummers/percussionists, that have previously featured such creative giants as Ed Blackwell, Jack DeJohnette, Milford Graves, Louis Moholo-Moholo and Gunter Sommer, among others. The Emerald Duets features four master drummers who have each, in their own unique fashion, contributed to the way modern drumming has developed in the past six decades and how it is now perceived. Pheeroan akLaff, Andrew Cyrille and Han Bennink are each featured on one disc and Jack DeJohnette on two discs, including Smith's five-part composition "Paradise: The Gardens and Fountains" that fills the fifth disc of this boxed set in its entirety.

Group Theory: Black Music is a stunning new statement from South African drummer and composer Tumi Mogorosi. Standing in the lineage of South African greats such as Louis Moholo-Moholo, Makaya Ntshoko and Ayanda Sikade, Mogorosi is one of the foremost drummers working anywhere in the world, with a flexible, powerful style that brings a distinctive South African inflection to the polyrhythmic tradition of Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Art Blakey. Since his international debut on Jazzman Records in 2014 with Project ELO, Mogorosi has been in the vanguard of the South African creative music scene’s burgeoning outernational dimension, taking the drummer’s chair in both Shabaka Hutchings’ Shabaka and The Ancestors formation and with avant-garde noiseniks The Wretched.

The last of his orchestral compositions and one of his most enduringly popular pieces, Mendelssohn's violin concerto is as much a crowd-pleaser now as it was when premiered by Ferdinand David and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1845. Its unassuming focus on melody and dynamic interaction between soloist and orchestra – rather than merely on technical feats and virtuosic showmanship – ensures its place at the heart of the violin concerto repertoire.

This CD is a real anomaly: a recording of Latin American music for voice and eight cellos that does NOT include Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5! The repertoire presented here is so rich that the Villa-Lobos isn't even missed (and for fans who crave hearing Conjunto Ibérico perform it, the group has recorded it for Channel Classics). All of the pieces are expertly arranged for cello octet by Conjunto Ibérico's conductor Elias Arizcuren and Pablo Escande.