JAZZBO NOTES HIGHLY RECOMMENDED RECORDING
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A companion piece to Belo Horizonte, Music Spoken Here is the second and final recording of McLaughlin’s fusion outfit comprised mostly of French musicians.
Critics accused the band’s earlier release, Belo Horizonte, of “smelling Spanish,” and they repeat the assertion concerning this release, albeit with more justification this […]

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
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Jim Beard’s Song of the Sun, his first date as a leader, is an impossibly assured debut, the work of a mature artist. There is the none of the grandstanding you would expect from a young virtuostic pianist.
Instead, what you get is laser sharp focus, a manifesto, the […]

JAZZBO NOTES RECOMMENDED RECORDING
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The first of a series of jam-based boogaloo recordings, A Go Go features Medeski Martin & Wood as Scofield’s rhythm section, which gives A Go Go a sort of updated guitar and organ trio feel. Medeski Martin & Wood provide a charming, witty backdrop for the leader, a groovilicious bed […]

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
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The Beginning brings together several selections featuring Chick Corea (piano, percussion), Barry Aschtul (drums, percussion), and Dave Holland (bass). The music is mostly avant guarde and free jazz, very different from the very accessible Brazilian flavored jazz Corea would be playing two years later with Return to […]

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
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It’s too easy to say that the First Seven Days is a forerunner of New Age music. Jan Hammer’s depiction of events which may or may not be biblical in nature has little in common with the weak kneed noodling of poseurs like George Winston and his […]

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING
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The last couple of CDs I reviewed before this were very demanding musically, with abstract melodies, intentionally ambiguous harmonies, and cryptic improvisations. Frankly, writing about them gave me a bit of a headache. I was starting to worry that I was getting soft in my old age, […]

JAZZBO NOTES RECOMMENDED RECORDING
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Even though David Sanchez is Puerto Rican, his band contains a percussionist, and his music sports Latin rhythms, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Melaza is Latin Jazz, no matter what allmusic.com says. Melaza decidedly falls more in the genre of post bop.
Sanchez announces his serious intentions with […]

JAZZBO NOTES RECOMMENDED RECORDING
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The studio debut of Miles’ Second Great Quintet (Miles, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor; Ron Carter, bass; Tony Williams, drums; Herbie Hancock, piano), E.S.P. is far more abstract than anything Miles had recorded up until that time. The relative accessibility of that earlier music may explain why the […]

JAZZBO NOTES RECOMMENDED RECORDING
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Including recordings with his brother Randy, Michael Brecker put out 20 recordings as a leader. What then is so special about Two Blocks from the Edge that you have to own it? Not all that much, really.
Compositionally, Brecker was in a holding period at the time, taking […]

JAZZBO NOTES RECOMMENDED RECORDING
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Very Rare is a bit of a schizophrenic recording. It is divided between a set of miniatures (the longest clocks in at 6:22, with most of the tunes less than four minutes long), with Elvin fronting a typically strong band consisting of Art Pepper on alto, Roland […]