Brian Auger's Oblivion Express Live at Jazz Open Stuttgart

New York improvising guitarist Bill Frisell recording with Dutch/Belgian chanteuse Chantal Acda (Sleepingdog) at the 2017 Jazz Middelheim Fest, in Antwerp, Belgium, which they agreed to do based on mutual satisfaction of their collaboration on Acda's studio album "Bounce Back" that year, resulting in a wonderfully compatible concert of rich and beautiful music.

This is as close to Latin purist Mongo as we have heard in recent years, an eight-piece salsa band – including several members of the 1997 Tito Puente ensemble, like trumpeter Ray Vega, altoist Bobby Porcelli and tenorman Mitch Frohman – playing a brace of Mongo classics and Latin jazz pieces live before a hushed crowd in Seattle's Jazz Alley. There are no pop covers, one electric instrument (a bass), lots of extended jazz solos (Porcelli and Frohman really burn on the pioneering Afro-Cuban classic "Manteca"), and an unusual (for Mongo) emphasis on the timbales on many tracks, which shoves the rhythms closer to the salsified Puente manner.

Masabumi Kikuchi & Masayuki Takayanagi - Live at Jazz Inn Lovely 1990 (2020) {NoBusiness NBCD135}
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© 1990, 2020 NoBusiness Records | NBCD 135
Jazz / Post Bop / Avant-Garde Jazz / Piano / Guitar

This live date from the titular Nagoya venue reveals the mellow side of Japanese free jazz. That could seem unlikely when considering the lead name, guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi, a maverick follower of Lennie Tristano who later turned to total freak-outs and noise, partnering with the likes of outsider saxophonist Kaoru Abe. Recorded nine months before his death 30 years ago this month, the concert finds him in the company of regular collaborator bassist Nobuyoshi Ino, plus celebrated pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, who died in 2015, sitting in during a trip home from his long sojourn in the U.S. Kikuchi, who worked with Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Dave Liebman and Joe Henderson, as well as a cooperative trio with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian, exerts a pull towards the tradition.

This is the kind of series that could last forever pianist Dena DeRose seems to have an endless supply of well- and little-known tunes from the collected songbooks and both the music and performances are timeless. The second set from the same evening that produced Volume One (MAXJAZZ, 2007), this has the same in-the-moment sense of place and, what sounds like a contradiction in terms, a recorded spontaneity.