Suite For Flute & Jazz Piano

If your Latin jazz collection centers mainly around styles from Cuba and Brazil, pianist Edward Simon would like you to consider expanding your library to include musical influences from a culturally diverse land geographically situated between those two countries – namely Venezuela, where he was born and lived until the age of 12. Simon is an acclaimed post-bop and modern creative jazz pianist in his adopted country of the United States, and while Latin American elements have certainly seasoned his recorded output to date, this 2014 Sunnyside release finds him focusing more intently than ever on the nexus between creative jazz and the folk music of his home country. The album's title is derived from "Venezuelan Suite," whose four parts fill over 28 minutes of the disc's concise 38-minute duration. Simon composed the suite for his Ensemble Venezuela, and the ten-member version of the group heard here – including musicians from the U.S., Venezuela, and Colombia – is wonderfully vibrant, ably fulfilling the pianist's creative intent. Chamber Music America commissioned Simon to write this work, and he rose to the challenge with music that is suitably rich with timbral and textural variety.

Charles Earland - In Concert: At The Montreux Jazz Festival and The Lighthouse (1972-1974) {Pestige PRCD-24267-2 rel 2002}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 527 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 187 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 14 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1972-74, 2002 Prestige / Fantasy | PRCD-24267-2
Jazz / Soul Jazz / Organ Hammond B-3

This two-fer CD pairs 1972's Live at the Lighthouse with the less impressive, though still worthy, 1974 album Kharma, which was recorded at that year's Montreux Jazz Festival. As the head of a sextet on Live at the Lighthouse, Earland spearheaded some first-class soul-jazz, which integrated some funk and rock of the early '70s without sounding like a watered-down cocktail of all those styles (as many other soul-jazz-pop albums of the time did). The horn section of James Vass on sax and Elmer Coles on trumpet leaned more toward soul than jazz, as heard on the opening instrumental cover of Sly & the Family Stone's "Smilin'." The Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun" wasn't the greatest tune to attempt, though Earland gamely put it into a boppish swing arrangement.

Keith Jarrett (born May 8, 1945) is an American jazz and classical music pianist and composer. Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey, moving on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s he has also been a group leader and a solo performer in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music. His improvisations draw from the traditions of jazz and other genres, especially Western classical music, gospel, blues, and ethnic folk music. In 2003, Jarrett received the Polar Music Prize, the first recipient of both the contemporary and classical musician prizes, and in 2004 he received the Léonie Sonning Music Prize. His album, The Köln Concert, released in 1975, became the best-selling piano recording in history. In 2008, he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame in the magazine's 73rd Annual Readers' Poll.