Features 24 bit digital remastering. Comes with a description. The Jazz Makers: Art Ellefson (tenor saxophone), Ronnie Ross (alto and baritone saxophones), Stan Jones (piano), Stan Wasser (bass), Allan Ganley (drums) recorded in New York, September 23, 1959. What ever happened to The Jazz Makers? In 1959, the British jazz quintet The Jazz Makers came second in the British Melody Maker journal reader’s poll small jazz combo section, beating even the Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Couriers. They first established a US presence in 1958, appearing at the Newport Jazz Festival, and subsequently touring on the same bill as Thelonious Monk, where they caught the ear of Atlantic boss Nesuhi Ertegan. He brought them into a New York studio to record this album, The Swinging Sounds of The Jazz Makers, Atlantic 1333. Ronnie Ross went on to receive a Downbeat magazine New Star award.
As the ‘60s progressed, cultural and political revolutions occurred both in the US and in Europe. Jazz was both a victim and a saviour, with radical developments in the music occurring in both continents. In the US, artists took control of their own musical destiny as small labels broke away from the mainstream, expressing new and creative visions of freedom and peace against a backdrop of civil unrest, repression and war. Be sure to check the first volume of this series, Spiritual Jazz.
Existing completely under the critical radar and largely ignored or unknown by music fans and critics alike, most of the musicians featured in this album won't be familiar to even the most seasoned jazz aficionado. But in this era of musical apathy, where so many music junkies look to the past for their musical fix, we have re-discovered hidden, obscure and esoteric jazz musicians who looked to the four corners of the earth - and beyond - for inspiration.
Back in 1940, Keynote Recordings Inc. was a new, small and independent New York company with offices at 522 Fifth Ave., recently founded by Eric Bernay, the owner of a midtown Manhattan record store called The Music Room. Bernay was musically openminded and, looking for a place in the increasingly convulsed American record industry, he launched a catalog of varied music and performers.
On August 30, saxophone master James Carter will release his Blue Note Records debut James Carter Organ Trio: Live From Newport Jazz, a thrilling live performance of Carter’s imaginative soul jazz reinvention of Django Reinhardt that was captured at the 2018 Newport Jazz Festival.
That old discussion has broken out again: What is jazz? Who does it belong to? Where does it begin? The latter of these questions is at least not an issue for the Finnish pianist Iiro Rantala: "Johann Sebastian Bach and his music came into my life when I was six." So it comes as no surprise that Bach ties up his new ACT album "my history of jazz" - Rantala's personal history of the music that captivated him when he was 13 is embedded in the classically rendered aria: "Ever since then I always wanted to become an improviser, composer, stage performer and bandleader". A universal concept shown on the five greatly varied improvisations on the Goldberg Variations, upon which Rantala threads the album like a string of pearls.
UK jazz ensemble The Jazz Defenders release their third album "Memory In Motion" in April on Haggis Records (home of The Haggis Horns and Malcolm Strachan). The Bristol jazz boppers deliver another quality release of original material that takes in their usual diverse mix of influences and genres, from timeless acoustic jazz referencing the classic sounds of Blue Note Records, to a more contemporary fusion where jazz meets soul, funk and hip-hop.
In many countries, state-owned radio companies took a significant role in recording and broadcasting music that did not interest commercial firms. This was also the case in Finland. Even though Finnish Broadcasting Company Yleisradio, known as Yle, was not actually a state corporation but a license-based joint-stock company, it was a public service that had a total monopoly on the Finnish radio waves.
When the composer Sergey Akhunov discovered the ground-breaking book of 1947, “Jazz”, by Henri Matisse – a collection of prints of his colourful cut-paper collages – he was struck by its almost surreal nature, and he conceived the idea of composing music with the title “Jazz”, but which, like Matisse’s book, has nothing to do with jazz. That inspiration finally took shape when Julia Igonina and Maxim Emelyanychev commissioned him to compose a work for them. The result was Jazz, a cycle for violin and piano: fifteen miniatures, bearing titles taken from the prints in Matisse’s book. On this new recording, those pieces are brought together with two French masterpieces of the 1940s by Messiaen and Poulenc (whose favourite painter was Matisse), performed by Julia Igonina and Maxim Emelyanychev on period instruments – violin with gut strings and a magnificent 1908 Blüthner piano (part of the collection of the Piano Museum in Rybinsk).