Top-notch mid-seventies spiritual jazz; steeped in Trane. Championed by Jazzman.
Billy — aka William X, nowadays Khalim Zarif — was a Jazz Messenger. Around the same time as this recording, he was one of the Cosmic Brotherhood supporting Jackie McLean on his New York Calling LP, also for SteepleChase; another lost classic.
Warmly recommended.

Of all his albums, this was Stan Getz’ favourite. Ours, too.
Freed from the formal orthodoxies of small-group bebop, and revelling in the freedoms opened up by Eddie Sauter’s thrilling strings-based arrangements, lyrical improvisation pours out of the saxophonist (with Lester Young coursing through as per). The music shimmies devil-may-care through jazz, classical, soundtrack, show-tune, and the rest.
Try the dazzling opener. A theme from Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is mashed into skittering, paranoid funk, with a killer spot for Roy Haynes. And next up, something quite different, a quiet, complexly tender tribute to Getz’s mum, exquisitely proffered. Just a shame Bill Evans wasn’t sitting in.
Original, knockout; very warmly recommended.

‘Verve By Request.’

Utterly stupendous music from JG’s long wilderness years — radio recordings freshly dug out from 1965, three years after the austerely avant-garde brilliance of Free Fall kissed goodbye to any chance of a record deal for the best part of a decade.
Amazingly, more than anything — out of nowhere — you hear the quicksilver, stark brawn of fellow-Texan Ornette Coleman. Bill Meyer’s review in the Wire hits it on the head. ‘His liberal use of split tones and abrasive timbres underline his awareness of the advances of Albert Ayler’ — whilst in other passages ‘Giuffre’s quick fingering and elongated tones sound like the missing link between first generation free jazz and the advances in technique that Evan Parker presented on his solo albums ten years down the road’. Jazz On A Summer Day it ain’t.
‘Free counterpoint’ is a kind of collective improvisation which envisions the New Thing without bluster. ‘He wrote out full scores,’ recalls Joe Chambers in the excellent booklet, ‘with drum parts written as another voice. They look like Schoenberg and Webern scores, right in line with what I had been studying in college.’
The other players are awesome, too. Bassist Richard Davis is here, perfumed with masterpieces like Out To Lunch, The Space Book and Rip, Rig And Panic, all recorded within the previous year. (That’s him on Astral Weeks, by the way.) Chambers’ drumming is sensational.
Jazz fans, it’s a must. Hotly recommended.

Featuring Grant Green, and engineered by Rudy van Gelder, in the manner of classic Blue Note organ jazz, this is an ‘underappreciated gem’, according to AllMusic. Leo Wright plays a blinder.
Here is a lovely photo of drummer Pola Roberts performing in the fifties. Nice name, the Pixie Bongo 4 Jewel’s.
Pola and Gloria had an all-women band together in the early sixties. George Coleman is Gloria’s old man.
‘Verve by Request’.

Kicks off with the rollicking samba Soy Califa; then a ravishing, bittersweet ballad.
Key Dexter.
Recorded the same week as Go!, with the same crew, including Sonny Clark on top form throughout.
Don’t miss Don’t Explain.
In the Blue Note 80 Vinyl series.

‘Classic Vinyl’ series.

‘Classic Vinyl.’

A performance for Danish TV, never released on vinyl until now, with Kenny Drew, Niels-Henning Ørsted Petersen and Albert Heath. The title track is storming Afro-Cuban jazz (from the unmissable Blue Note LP A Swingin’ Affair).

Milford Graves with Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover, in the weeks leading up to their March 1976 recording of Bäbi.
Graves recorded these sessions himself in his legendary Queens basement laboratory and workshop. Outstandingly, the first two sides feature Graves on drums alongside Glover on klaxon and a Haitian one-note trumpet called a vaccine — “it’s important to keep that tribal possession-state feel… as in the Divine Horsemen of Haiti,” he says in the sleevenotes — and especially riveting, scorching tenor playing by Doyle, even by his own standards.

‘Classic Vinyl Series.’

From 1963 — with Wendell Marshall (bass), Willie Bobo (drums), Johnny Acea (piano), Carlos ‘Patato’ Valdes (congas), Gavin Masseaux (chekere); and on the last two Ike Quebec and Sonny Clark.

With Joe Henderson, Duke Pearson, Bobby Hutcherson.
The title-track is lengthily, meltingly gorgeous.

‘Best of all his Blue Notes… Quebec is on cracking form here, and his pitch and phrasing on Someday My Prince Will Come should be a lesson to all young jazz players. Green has, for us, his finest hour, ripping though My One And Only Love and If I Should Lose You with a ruggedness of emotion that goes hand and hand with the simplicity of diction. Not a single note is wasted’ (The Penguin Guide To Jazz).

‘Classic Vinyl Series.’