Ellman

The idea for this project started when Alternative Guitar Summit founder Joel Harrison presented a concert of virtual solo performances from around the world during the pandemic. Struck by the fantastic variety of people's work he decided to produce a CD as a way of documenting these and other brilliant artists.

Tenor saxophonist JD Allen's output on Savant Records has been steady since his 2012 album The Matador and the Bull, and this beautiful and intensely interesting ballads album is an assured milestone in his career to date. There are patented JD-isms: that almost operatic-like swoon and smear of tone; deconstructed themes full of non-linearity and melodic asides arriving unforeseen.

Walter Wolfman Washington is a soulful musician of rare talent, as well as a deep thinker and hip philosopher, and his hometown is New Orleans. Walter has cut his teeth for the last 50 years playing everywhere from European festivals to bars that Google Maps will never find. New Orleans is notorious for its wildness, parades, and celebrations. New Orleans is Mardi Gras, but it’s also the uptown class of Allen Toussaint and hip style and language of Dr. John. Walter has always embodied both, but finally we have a set of songs that reflects the yin to Walter’s bring-the-party yang. This is the record that we all have known he has in him. This is the night after that party, or maybe just the after party. He’s been given free rein to express himself, and that’s special.

JD Allen's previous recording Americana won widespread critical acclaim for it's ground breaking melodic and harmonic explorations and for its impressive emotional intensity. While that album presented Allen's ideas with a somewhat contemplative hand, Radio Flyer moves with a more unbridled enthusiasm, testing the possibilities jazz has for individual expressionism and improvisational freedom.

A few years ago, acclaimed East African vocalist & songwriter Somi decided to move from New York City to Lagos, Nigeria for 18 months in search of new inspiration. The result: a new album she calls The Lagos Music Salon released in August 2014 as her major label debut on Sony Music/Okeh - landing at #1 on US Jazz charts. The album, which features special guests Angelique Kidjo, Common and Ambrose Akinmusire, draws it material from the tropical city's boastful cosmopolitanism, urgent inspiration, and giant spirit - straddling the worlds of African jazz, soul, and pop with a newfound ease and a voice that Vogue Magazine simply calls “Superb!”

When it feels right, stick with it…and keep digging. Rosetta Trio has done just that, and on Thwirl they achieve a breakthrough of their own. Crump brought together Rosetta Trio for the first time in 2005 to record an album of pieces written in the aftermath of 9/11. That “engaging and sublime meeting” (Signal to Noise) of Crump on acoustic bass with guitarists Liberty Ellman and Jamie Fox, produced Rosetta (2006), which was greeted enthusiastically by fans, radio, and the press.