The classic Adam’s Apple album from 1965, with Herbie, Reggie Workman, and Joe Chambers, featuring the first time out for Footprints, and the samba dancer El Gaucho. And the questing Super Nova album from 1969, entangled with Miles’ Water Babies, featuring a wigged-out Dindi: three guitarists (John McLaughlin, Sonny Sharrock, Walter Booker) and three percussionists/drummers (Jack DeJohnette, Chick Corea, Airto Moreira), plus Miroslav Vitous.
‘Michael Brändli’s sound restoration and mastering skills take Ezz-thetics’ carefully curated reissues further into exalted territory. Once again, Brändli has woven his magic and for the listener the result is almost like hearing the material for the first time’ (Chris May, AllAboutJazz).

Terrific recordings commemorating three nightclub engagements in 1964-66.
Horace is sparklingly excursive and dead funky; Joe Henderson is grooving, raucous, and reaching. The great Carmell Jones is here, subbed twice by Woody Shaw. Altogether the playing has an immediacy and abandon you only get live.
The repertoire is killer diller; cherry-picked from a string of stone classic LPs — Song For My Father, Tokyo Blues, The Cape Verdean Blues, Six Pieces, and Senor Blues. The sound is superbly restored to the label’s customary high standards by Michael Brändli.

‘Long before his death in 2014, Silver’s reputation had become occluded, or tarnished with the notion that he was a relatively slight figure, more of an entertainer than an innovator… His habit of quoting other songs in his solos, often dismissed as a shallow, crowd-pleasing trick, is a forerunner of sampling culture and hip-hop. It’s also an acknowledgement of how profoundly knowledgeable Silver was about the canon and its evolution. Here’s a line of mine, he might say, and here’s where it came from, but also here and here. His only mistake in this regard was to smile while he was playing… a challenge to the really rather recent notion that jazz should be deadly serious and played with a pained rictus.’

Warmly recommended. Do yourselves a favour.

The definitive edition, with much better sound than any of the rather garbled ESP iterations.
‘Recorded on May 18, 1966 at St Lawrence University, Potsdam, NY, Nothing Is…Completed & Revisited has Ra, who was at the time only just beginning to perform on the US college circuit, testing the water with a programme drawn from several stages of his work with the Arkestra. There are space chants (Outer Spaceways Incorporated, Next Stop Mars, Second Stop Is Jupiter, We Travel The Spaceways), a salute to the swing era (Velvet, from the 1959 Saturn masterpiece Jazz In Silhouette), far-out material such as the sixteen minute version of Outer Nothingness from the 1965 ESP album The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra Vol. l, and trippy exotica such as reed player Marshall Allen’s oboe feature Exotic Forest, here given its first airing on disc.
‘The twelve-piece band is killer, with Allen, tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, baritone saxophonist Pat Patrick and trombonists Ali Hassan and Teddy Nance propelled by the A-team anchors Ronnie Boykins on bass and tuba and Clifford Jarvis on drums. Everyone, including Ra on clavioline and piano, is on top form’ (Chris May, All About Jazz).

A killer Unit: with Jimmy Lyons, Ramsey Ameen, Alan Silva, Jerome Cooper, & Sunny Murray.
Documenting the third of their performances during a residency in New York City, this release follows on from the classic HatHut album It Is In The Brewing Luminous, and the recent Ezzthetics CD Live At Fat Tuesday’s, February 9, 1980.
Wonderful music.

Late 1966 recordings for Blue Note and BYG.
With Jimmy Lyons, Alan Silva, and Andrew Cyrille throughout; plus Bill Dixon and Henry Grimes on the opener (from the Conquistador sessions).

The core trio joined by Joe McPhee, playing saxophone and pocket trumpet, in readings of compositions by Don Cherry, PJ Harvey, Ornette Coleman, McPhee himself, James Blood Ulmer and Frank Lowe.

Thornton’s BYG album Ketchaoua: the leader on cornet and percussion, with Grachan Moncur on trombone, Archie Shepp on soprano sax, Arthur Jones on alto, Bob Guerin and Earl Freeman on bass, Sunny Murray on drums, and Dave Burrell on piano.
Plus Arthur Jones’ own Scorpio album, also for BYG in 1969: an excellent, unsung set, new-thing but rooted, with shades of Ornette and ESP, Johnny Hodges and Sonny Rollins.