RSSRandom A-List for Set: Jazz
Jazz, including fusion, excluding vocals.
Here are 12 A-list albums, selected at random from Set: Jazz. Use your Reload button to get more.
Louis Armstrong: The Complete Town Hall Concert 1947 [2004, Fresh Sound]Less than brilliantly recorded, though most '40s jazz boots are much worse, this May 12 experiment, featuring the template for the All-Stars combos he led for the rest of his life, is the Armstrong I play when I want the whole package. Quickly this mode gravitated toward the standard repertoire that dominates the albums I go to for late Louis: the American Icon set and 16 Most Requested Songs. But here the sell was a return to the format of his youth after years of mediocre big bands, so it begins with "Cornet Chop Suey," "Dear Old Southland," "Big Butter and Egg Man." Later there's newer stuff, though "Back o' Town Blues" and "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" are a long way from "Mack the Knife" and "Hello Dolly." Either way the committed, ebullient performances have something to prove. And as a bonus this is Armstrong's only recording with genre-hopping powerhouse Sid Catlett, who should have been his drummer forever but quit fast and died all too soon. A
Burnt Sugar/The Arkestra Chamber:
Blood on the Leaf: Opus No. 1 [2001, Trugroid]
Like most major writers, Greg Tate--the young Ironman turned older-than-that-now Ionman--pursues music at his peril. When I've heard him play guitar in public, I've only wished he'd go finish his novel--or, better still, write more about music. So call this dimly mastered Black Rock Coalition spinoff living criticism. It's electric Miles with soul, "Maggot Brain" with a Ph.D., the Hendrix-Evans band of dreams, the underwater funk some hear in A.R. Kane. With due respect to badmuthashutyo guitarist Morgan Michael, Mandarinsprechen banshee guitarist Rene Akhan, and unstemmed crimson tide guitarist Kirk Douglass, the standout player is piano virtuoso Vijay Iyer, and let us now praise Human Switchboard and Freedy Johnston stalwart Jared Michael Nickerson, though Tate hisself wrote the basslines. But the ensemble is all, and the opus subsumes its parts.
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John Coltrane:
A Love Supreme [1964, Impulse]
This four-track, 33-minute January 1965 release is without question Coltrane's most beloved album. Only certified gold in 2001, it never cracked the Billboard 200 as it cemented 'Trane's divine status in Japan, was adored by American hippies from the Byrds and Carlos Santana on down, and served as theme music to Lester Bangs's wake at CBGB. The through-composed product of two weeks of solitary brainstorming at the Long Island home Coltrane had established with his new wife Alice, it's meditative rather than freewheeling, with each member of his classic quartet instructed to embark on his own harmonically mapped excursion and the title set to a chanted four-note melody you could hum in your sleep. I'm on my fourth consecutive play with no signs of tune fatigue as I write, plus my wife loves it. All true, all remarkable. But how much you value it, I expect, depends on how much faith you place in your own spirituality. Having finally freed my changer to move on to My Favorite Things, which I've loved since I bought it in 1960, I wonder how soon I'll play it again and regret to say that that may well depend on who dies when. And having purchased the Deluxe Edition CD to augment my vinyl, I say go for the single.
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Bill Frisell:
This Land [1994, Elektra/Nonesuch]
For the groove-minded, Frisell is a frustrating case. Unlike so many jazz guitarists, he can get loud and rock out, but for him those are but two compositional options in the grand plethora. So while most of his albums are graced by great moments or nice mood, in the end I'm too rhythm-bound to want any part of the new live one or the two new soundtracks or the one where he covers Madonna or (especially) the one where he falls for a synthesizer. This beautifully constructed sextet record I come back to. It rocks out primarily by association; in fact, many of the avant-garde rags and elegiac ballads feel early 20th-century as they bounce off each other like motives in a symphony. But as is often claimed and seldom achieved, the sheer sound of a few bars of guitar can evoke the whole electric blues gestalt, just as the alto-trombone-clarinet combo can evoke all horns. On his Madonna record Frisell also covered Aaron Copland, who I keep meaning to get to. In the meantime I have this.
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Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society:
Mandance [1982, Antilles]
Despite Jackson's Blood pedigree and predilection for electric plectrists, I'm hard-pressed to describe this as "rock" or even harmolodic funk, because while Jackson is the master of every drum rhythm from march to free time, the feel of the record is more swinging than funky, with heavy doses of Tony Williams force-beat. What it really adds up to is a fusion album on which the soloists are forced to think concisely by compositional structures that are more than cute riffs. Guitar hero: Vernon Reid, who also gets to play banjo.
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Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society:
Barbeque Dog [1983, Antilles]
He wouldn't connect without Shannon writing the tunes and swinging the funk, but the star is Vernon Reid, especially on straight Les Paul--he articulates with so much more delicacy and incisiveness than the perfectly suitable horn players, who often serve as his scrim. On Stratocaster he's power-packed. On guitar synth he's fusion or wah-wah. On banjo he sets down and thinks for a spell. On steel guitar he sounds like he's playing something else. And on "Say What You Will" he writes the tune himself, reminding us who's the leader.
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David Murray:
Ming [1981, Black Saint]
Murray's dazzling technique hasn't yet won him a style, it's true. But he's only 26, and the committed eclecticism [ . . . ] it easy to achieve an instant voice. This record documents that sensibility superbly. Classic and cacophonous, it swings at its artiest, inspiring reassuringly down-to-earth performances from the likes of George Lewis and Anthony Davis as well as the superbly balanced stuff you expect from Henry Threadgill, Olu Dara, and Steve McCall.
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Marc Ribot:
Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos (The Prosthetic Cubans) [1998, Atlantic]
This witty, beautiful, slightly bent tribute to the old-time trés-playing bandleader Arsenio Rodriguez--inventor of the son montuno, the Cuban conjunto, and practically speaking the mambo--reduces all that action to a guitar-bass-drums-percussion jazz quartet, sometimes with organ and once with a few horns. Deconstructing as it adores, enjoying the rhythms and melodies of arrangements that function simultaneously as dance music, dinner music, and art music, it epitomizes what it is to love something from a distance there's no denying, yet love it well.
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Marc Ribot:
Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos (The Prosthetic Cubans) [1998, Atlantic]
This witty, beautiful, slightly bent tribute to the old-time trés-playing bandleader Arsenio Rodriguez--inventor of the son montuno, the Cuban conjunto, and practically speaking the mambo--reduces all that action to a guitar-bass-drums-percussion jazz quartet, sometimes with organ and once with a few horns. Deconstructing as it adores, enjoying the rhythms and melodies of arrangements that function simultaneously as dance music, dinner music, and art music, it epitomizes what it is to love something from a distance there's no denying, yet love it well.
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Pharoah Sanders:
Message from Home [1996, Verve]
Where Sanders's serviceable if eerie new collection of Coltrane replicas is pure middlebrow market ploy, this putatively commercial move ventures into the unknown. With his fabulous sound, un-American activities, and grandly simple musical ideas, the man was made for Bill Laswell's world-jazz strategems. Lacking an "Upper Egypt" or "The Creator Has a Master Plan," he establishes his leisurely command, then immerses in an "Ocean Song" that is more former than latter before going out on the two friendliest, wildest, and most African of the six cuts. These highlight old Laswell hands Foday Musa Suso and Aiyb Dieng, and by the time they're over, you'll forget whether you remember the tunes.
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Archie Shepp:
Steam [1978, Inner City]
You'd think records on which world-class saxophonists think on their feet in an inspired rush for 20 minutes a side would be as plentiful as John Coltrane reissues, but they're not, and this is one of them. Drummer Beaver Harris has a lot to do with how powerfully things flow.
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Art Tatum:
The Best of the Pablo Group Masterpieces [2003, Pablo]
Digitally spectacular and harmonically futuristic, solo Tatum is also florid and self-involved. But with Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter, Buddy DeFranco, etc. playing one thoughtful note to a handful of his brilliant ones, the aptness, ambition, and jaw-dropping entertainment value of his silvery showers shine through. The young Tatum was so enamored of his own technique that he suffered sidemen begrudgingly, and all these standards were recorded, mostly in quartet or trio formats, over the three years before he died at 47. You'd never guess he'd slowed down by then if the booklet didn't swear it was true.
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