Masters of Art

Arthur Blakey (October 11, 1919 – October 16, 1990) was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. He was also known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina after he converted to Islam for a short time in the late 1940s.

Witness Eternia as you’ve never seen it before!

'By definition the bass player is a pivotal figure in jazz, a steward of tonality as well as tempo. Determining a good one can require close listening: that quality reveals itself in the cohesion of the band as well as in the handling of line and phrase. All of this was accounted for in Mr. Williams’s set, which also involved a pair of harmonically sound original compositions and a balance of tradition and novelty.' -Nate Chinen, New York Times State Of Art is a result of Williams’ first prize in the 2009 Thelonious Monk International Competition for double-bass. The album marks Williams’ first album as a leader, however it is not the bassist’s first time working with the Concord Jazz family.

Mikio Naruse was a contemporary of the great post-war Japanese masters Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi and indeed his works lie somewhere in between Ozu’s natural rhythms of everyday family life and Mizoguchi’s outlook on female issues and social injustices. In some respects Naruse even surpasses these two great directors in their own areas, his films being more naturalistic and not as formally rigid as Ozu, tackling a wider range of subjects and issues, those concerns often being adapted from the works of female authors, giving them a truer perspective on female issues than Mizoguchi, whose films can often seem like a man’s guilt-ridden perspective on the treatment of women in society.