Lonnie Bird

George Benson - It's Uptown (1966) {2015 Japan Jazz Collection 1000 Columbia-RCA Series SICJ 33} (ft. Dr. Lonnie Smith)
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 382 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 143 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 324 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1966, 2015 Columbia / Sony Music Japan | SICJ 33
Jazz / Hard Bop / Jazz Pop / Soul Jazz / Guitar / Organ Hammond B-3

Reissue with the latest remastering. Comes with liner notes. George Benson's first LP for Columbia – a hard, heavy, soul jazz slammer that bears no resemblance to his overproduced work of the 70s! The album's a real cooker – recorded hot on the heels of Benson's classic work on Prestige with the Jack McDuff group, and sounding a lot like McDuff's hard wailing organ jazz of the same time. George is working with a group that features a young Lonnie Smith on organ, plus Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Ronnie Cuber on sax, and Charlie Persip on drums – all tightly coming together, and jamming hard on the album's short cooking tracks. Tracks include "Clockwise", "Jaguar", "Hello Birdie", and "Bullfight". Plus, the CD adds five bonus tracks, including "Sideman", "Minor Chant", and the previously unreleased "J.H. Bossa Nova" and "Clockwise (Alternate Take)".

This Wounded Bird two-fer packages together two of Deodato's transitional albums from 1979 and 1980, when he was actively pursuing chart success and radio play in the United States. Knights of Fantasy, from 1979, contains trace elements of the Brazilian producer and composer's fusion persona while melding them with disco and lite funk – as many other jazzmen were also doing at the time, from Lonnie Liston Smith to the Crusaders. Fine for the dancefloor or the listening room, Night Cruiser is easily Deodato's most consistent effort of that decade.

Charles Mingus - Music Written for Monterey, 1965, Not heard…played in its entirety at UCLA, September 25, 1965 (2006)
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 462 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 212 Mb | Artwork | 5% repair rar
© 1965, 2006 Sue Mingus Music / Sunnyside Communications | 984 275-9
Jazz / Post Bop / Progressive Jazz

The back story behind this concert CD is that, in September 1965, Charles Mingus performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival. He had done so triumphantly well the year before, however, Mingus' 1965 set was inexplicably cut short at a half-hour (Mingus himself claims 20 minutes) and so the material he had planned for the event, much of it newly composed, was instead unreeled at UCLA a week later. Mingus later pressed a couple hundred copies of the performance into a self-released two-LP set, but the master tape was hence destroyed and the album basically forgotten until its release on CD by Mingus' widow Sue in 2006.