Shot between 2007 and 2012, Hisham Mayet’s film is an exhilarating, hallucinatory, harrowing record of music, ritual, life, and landscape along the Niger River, as it winds through Mali and the Republic of Niger.

Aka Counceltation — pimped with a new sleeve and title straight out of the treacherous Hefner-Jazz nexus — featuring a hefty West Coast lineup: Jack Sheldon, Curtis Counce, Harold Land, Carl Perkins and Frank Butler.
Easy swinging and elastic, limpid and lyrical, with brilliant playing all round. Perkins is always a pleasure; Land another HJ legend, lethal in ballads; Butler bosses, as per.

The Alabama-born saxophonist and clarinettist in 1966, with Sonny Sharrock, Byard Lancaster, Clifford Thornton, Karl Berger, Henry Grimes and co.

Scientist, Roots Radics.

Terrific big band music from 1970. What a lineup— built around a core of Tolliver, Stanley Cowell, Cecil McBee and Jimmy Hopps, but also featuring all-time greats like Clifford Jordan, Jimmy Heath and Curtis Fuller.

The first album in thirteen years by this great trumpeter (and founder of Strata East).
A quintet — with US veterans Jesse Davis, Keith Brown, Buster Williams and Lenny White — joined by Binker Moses on a couple of cuts.

The great trumpeter with Cecil McBee, Stanley Cowell, and Jimmy Hopps, at Slugs’ nightclub in New York City, on May 1 1970.
‘Tolliver, McBee and Cowell (in that order) each contribute a composition to this superb, compelling set; though very much distinct, each is equally strong. Drought is the kind of dark-hued, well-honed burner which Tolliver routinely produced in his fertile years. Felicite is a more contemplative affair, a deeply felt and empathically performed piece. The unit here is in particularly sublime form, merging considerable skill with a staggering emotion. Orientale falls somewhere in between the pace of the two, with Cowell’s Eastern scales establishing an austere, industrious tone throughout its seventeen-and-a-half minutes.’

Three LPs, boldly mapping their own way through Fire Music, with elements of modern classical music and an abstraction of Mingus as their guiding stars: The Archie Shepp-Bill Dixon Quartet, originally released in 1962 on Savoy; the split Bill Dixon 7-Tette / Archie Shepp And The New York Contemporary 5 from 1964, another Savoy, with some ace Ken McIntyre; and the sombre masterpiece Intents And Purposes, by The Bill Dixon Orchestra — devised to accompany contemporary dance, and with some scorching Byard Lancaster — originally released in 1967 by RCA Victor.

Dawn Le Faun with Billy Le Bon, co-singers of The Letting Go and Wai Notes, digging up a modern(ish) parable from deep in their Everlys sack, afore getting down and sliding around on the flip.

Ace version of The Stylistics’ smash.