Street Rotary

San Francisco Bay Area bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa draws inspiration from a wide range of sources in her music, from film to visual art to science. Her newest release, avantNOIR, is a suite of compositions for jazz sextet based on noir crime fiction—classic works by Dashiell Hammett set in San Francisco, and later works by Paul Auster that are part of his New York Trilogy. Mezzacappa probes the psychological depths of these stories, creating musical profiles of characters like Big Flora from Hammett’s The Big Knockover, and Daniel Quinn from Auster’s City of Glass. She also uses clues from detective’s cases—addresses, aliases, phone numbers, hotel rooms—and translates them into musical structures, melodies and rhythms, in a kind of postmodern jazz serialism. The result is a contemporary jazz gem influenced as much by Charles Ives and Pierre Boulez as by Eric Dolphy and Henry Threadgill.

Wilbur Harden & John Coltrane - The Complete Savoy Sessions (1958) {2CD Set, Savoy Jazz 92858-2 rel 2012}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 773 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 345 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 95 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1958, 2012 | Savoy Jazz 92858-2
Jazz / Hard Bop / Bebop / Flugelhorn / Trumpet / Saxophone

This Savoy double CD brings together in one package all of the label's sessions led by Harden, a talented young musician who turned up briefly, disappeared and is presumed to have died in the 1960s. It includes several alternate takes, giving ample evidence of his attractiveness as a player. He wrote all the pieces, which are more substantial than the on-the-spot "compositions" of many Savoy sessions of the '50s. Sometimes playing trumpet and sometimes rotary valve flugelhorn, he was capable of range, power and bursts of speed, but he built many of his solos on a base of restraint, lyricism and a certain wistfulness.

After the success of the Yellow Cube and the Black Box, the 3rd box will once again travel the musical planet Nova in all directions and at all times since the 50s.

The title of Anna Wilson's third album, Yule Swing!, gives an accurate indication of its contents, which consist of seasonal music in big-band (and small-band) jazz arrangements. But without the subtitle that's written vertically in script up the right side of the cover, one might expect to hear the usual perennials. That subtitle reads, "A Collection of Original Holiday Songs."