Electrifyingly intense Chaoui music from the Aurès region of Algeria, booted into the future, with drum machines, phased gesba flute and reverbed-out vocals.

CD from Reactive.

Plenty of thrills and spills in this soundtrack to Otto Preminger’s 1959 film. Steeply evocative dynamic and rhythmic contrasts and quick changes in orchestral density get the job done — with a repeated strain of melody —  and make for highly entertaining listening, with numerous rollicking brass passages in amongst the piano-threaded impressionism, plus terrific soloing by Johnny Hodges, Ray Nance and co. Highlights include the suspenseful opener, the moody Midnight Indigo, the sublimely sad Almost Cried, and the band hard-rocking out-the-door with Upper And Outest, culminating in an amazing stratospheric passage by Cat Anderson, playing for a moment as if the needle is stuck.
Check out the opening of the film, with its title sequence by Saul Bass, and Duke’s music. Class.

Utterly beautiful solo-piano explorations in African folk, spiritual meditation, Satie-esque classicism and Tatum-esque jazz, by this Ethiopian nun, making her 1963 LP debut, recorded in Germany. Stunning; highly recommended.

Precious 1964 recordings, top-notch though never previously released, part of the First Songs sessions for Folkways.

Lovely. Classical songs by such exemplars as Schubert and Schumann, re-imagined with heart and soul as bare, doleful folk. Just voice and electric guitar.

Tasty trio date led by the rhythmic piano-playing of the blind Lou Donaldson sideman.

Peck Morrison, Horace Parlan, Charlie Rouse, Curtis Fuller and Clark Terry. 1961.

Norwegian Christian-folk-jazz drawn from the two early-seventies LPs of the Oslo-based group, led by Jan Simonsen and Per Arne Lovold, shepherded by Priest Olaf Hillestad.
No kidding!

Classic LP with the Roots Radics, mixed by Scientist at Tubbys.

Tasha and Channel One productions, newly corralled, with three stone exclusives. The highlights are an FJ duet with Michael Palmer retrieved from dubplate duties, and from the Riders a next version of Youthman Invasion and a trigger-happy Illegal Gun. Wonderful photos by Beth Lesser and Syphilia Morgenstierne.

‘Four years after a first album on the Futura label in 1971, Jacques Thollot returned, this time on the Palm label of Jef Gilson, still with just as much surrealist poetry in his jazz. In thirty-five minutes, the French composer and drummer, who had been on the scene since he was thirteen — recording Gilson LPs when he was just sixteen — established himself as a link between Arnold Schoenberg and Don Cherry. Resistant to any imposed framework and always excessive, Thollot allows himself to do anything and everything: suspended time of an extraordinary delicacy, a stealthy explosion of the brass section, hallucinatory improvisation of the synthesisers, tight writing, teetering on the classical, and in the middle of all that, a hit, the title-track — which Madlib would one day end up hearing and sampling.
‘In a career lasting half a century, centred on freedom, Jacques Thollot played with a roll-call of key experimental musicians (Don Cherry, Sonny Sharrock, Michel Roques, Barney Wilen, Steve Lacy, François Tusques, Michel Portal, Jac Berrocal, Noël Akchoté...) who all heard in him a pulsation coming from another world.’

Dreamy percussion exotica by a group of fourteen-year-old students (ten girls, including Evelyn Glennie, and one boy) in Aberdeen, 1978.