One Deep River

Mike Zito is one who enjoys returning to his blues roots, playing electric guitar and ripping though songs with his sawtooth-sharp voice. Pearl River – his fifth album – is quite different than the previous effort Today, which was more rock-oriented, and focuses on not only contemporary urban tunes but a few acoustic folk-oriented ones, and the basis of all of his music, the sound of New Orleans. He's got help from guitarist Anders Osborne and keyboardist Reese Wynans from Stevie Ray Vaughan's band, and there are guest appearances from Cyril Neville, Johnny Sansone, Lynwood Slim, Randy Chortkoff (also his producer,) and Susan Cowsill (yes, she of the Cowsills fame). It's good to hear Zito dig deep into songs like the title track, Neville's pure, slow blues, the New Orleans shuffle treatment of Sonny Boy Williamson's "Eyesight to the Blind," and Mel London's rocksteady "Sugar Sweet."

Made up of seasoned players like Jimmy Herring from the Aquarium Rescue Unit, former Santana bassist Alfonso Johnson, and Dixie Dregs alums keyboardist T Lavitz and drummer Rod Morgenstein, Jazz Is Dead doesn't function so much as a Grateful Dead cover band than as an outfit that uses Dead gems as jumping-off points for a sonic journey that leads the listener not into well-traveled grooves, but into an enthralling soundscape without rules, vocals, or fixed time signatures. Superior playing and that special brand of ESP that all good jam bands possess further enrich these adroit and artful reinterpretations of Dead songs. "St Stephen" and "The Eleven" come out sounding like a cross between Indian bazaar music and the Allman Brothers (Herring spent a year filling in for an ailing Dickie Betts in the Allmans). Recorded live at the IMAC Theater in Huntington, New York, this disc captures all the nuances and guitar wizardry that Herring can wring out of his instrument, but one suspects that this band is even more spectacular live.

Love is connection. Love is gratitude. Love is passion. Love is audacity. These qualities define tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis’ second album with the glorious Red Lily Quintet: For Mahalia, With Love. Whereas Lewis used his transformative talents to illuminate renaissance man George Washington Carver in a whole new way on Jesup Wagon, the groundbreaking 2021 masterpiece that swept most major jazz polls, the saxophonist does the same for the pioneering gospel-music force of nature Mahalia Jackson. But this time it’s personal, because Lewis lived her music growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., playing there in churches as a youth and being nurtured by his grandmother, who had received Mahalia’s singing like a bolt from above.

A lot of care went into the track selection and mastering on this four-CD set, devoted to 30 years in the history of Deep Purple – though for most listeners, discs one through three, devoted to the band's first eight years, are what will really count. Deep Purple recorded significant bodies of work in several styles, but the years 1968 through 1974, when they evolved out of psychedelia and into heavy metal, are the vitally important ones…

In his long career Michael Tippett produced a large body of work, including five operas, three large-scale choral works, four symphonies, five string quartets, four piano sonatas, concertos and concertante works, song cycles and incidental music. The works for which he is best known are the Concerto for Double String Orchestra, the oratorio A Child of Our Time and the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli.

Italian multi-instrumentalist Marco De Angelis grew up listening to classic prog bands like Pink Floyd, Genesis and Yes, as well as related groups, such as Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. His music shows evidence of his roots, but listens might notice most a resemblance to Floyd, and also Alan Parsons. He is proficient on guitar, bass and keyboards, and is one of Italy's few Chapman Stick masters. Although he has been performing for over thirty years, as well as producing and engineering, he didn't release his first album under his own name until 2013. Marco De Angelis is an Italian solo artist, songwriter, musician, audio engineer and record producer.

Midnight Ramble, released in 1983 on Milestone, was saxophonist Hank Crawford's return to recording after a four-year break following his departure from Kudu. It was the beginning of a decades-long relationship with the prestigious jazz label. Crawford, a veteran of Ray Charles, had long been associated with soul-jazz groove-oriented music. On this date, he delivers a solid, straight-ahead session with some notable surprises. The first is that he plays not only his trademark alto saxophone, but also electric piano. Next is his rhythm section: Dr. John on piano and organ, Charles "Flip" Greene on bass, guitarist Calvin Newborn (brother of Phineas), and stone-cold soul-jazz drummer Bernard Purdie. But that isn't all. Crawford also includes five other horns: two trumpets, trombone, bass saxophone, and David "Fathead" Newman on tenor. Needless to say, Crawford's idea of "straight-ahead" still contains plenty, plenty soul. The program is solid, top to bottom; it's amiable, relaxed, and deeply rooted in the blues.