Experimental Big Band

Most jazz musicians develop their sound and approach early in their careers and spend the rest of their lives refining and slightly altering their style. Miles Davis was a major exception. The trumpeter constantly reinvented himself during his career while keeping his same wistful and melancholy...

Tomes are available annotating the importance of this recording. The musical and social impact of Miles Davis, his collaborative efforts with Gil Evans, and in particular their reinvention of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess are indeed profound. However, the most efficient method of...

Recorded and released in 1975, Seriously Deep is the only album producer, arranger, conductor, and composer David Axelrod recorded for Polydor. Strangely enough, Jimmy Bowen and Cannonball Adderley produced it, not Axe. He did write everything here, and one has no doubt that he hand-selected...

First excursion on a funky trail, executed immaculately. Near essential. ~ Michael G. Nastos, All Music Guide

A fascinating reissue that comfortably straddles the lines of jazz, folk, and world music, working up a storm by way of a jazz protest album that points toward the Spanish Civil War in particular and the Vietnam War in passing. Haden leads the charge and contributes material, but the real star...

This reissue, prior to the release of many of Sun Ra's Saturn albums on Evidence CDs, was often thought of as Ra's second recording although now several earlier dates have appeared. The music from Sun Ra's Chicago-based band of the 1950s (some of the same tunes, but different...

The Mingus Big Band had been together four years when they recorded this set while on a European tour. The musicians had mastered the great bassist's music, resulting in versions of a variety of Mingus classics that rank with the originals. The largely all-star 15-piece band includes such...

A transitional album can sometimes be a band's most exciting effort, representing fresh ideas, the taking on of new blood, or perhaps just the beginning of a door closing on one phase and opening on another. Orange Then Blue's double-CD opus While You Were Out is one such album,...

This CD combines together the two related Africa/Brass LPs that formed John Coltrane's debut on the Impulse! label. On these dates the great tenor was backed by groups ranging from nine to 14 pieces playing pieces arranged by Eric Dolphy. "Africa" (which is heard in two versions)...

Back in the mid-'50s, bandleader Sun Ra decided to get his music to his audience through a more direct process by starting his own label, Saturn Records. Equal parts creative futuristic vision and small-time Southern R&B bandstand hustle, these 45s were pressed in unbelievably small...

Having exhausted most of the late bassist's best-known songs, the Mingus Big Band emphasizes obscurities (such as

Que Viva Mingus! is an album dedicated to Mingus' considerable output of Latin-influenced jazz. The selections here include well-known Mingus compositions like "Los Mariachis," "Dizzy Moods," "Ysabel's Table Dance," and "Cumbia and Jazz Fusion,"...

The MBB has become the most important and virile "ghost band" of them all. Their roaring, swinging spirit echoes the late bassist/composer/bandleader in ways that compare favorably to when Mingus was alive. The musicianship, rotating as it tends to, is consistently and outrageously...

On this reissue, Alexander Von Schlippenbach leads two huge, all-star lineups of 18 European improvisers through two ig band pieces that aren't just the crazy free explosions one might expect. While there's plenty of playing that's aggressive, dissonant, and, well, loud, these...

Chapter Three: Viva Emiliano Zapata is the third of the four excellent "chapters" in saxophonist and composer Gato Barbieri's four-part "Latin America" series for Impulse, and released in 1974 with the core of a band he would use for his live outing on Chapter Four:...

Composition No. 96 has loomed large in Braxton's oeuvre. He not only refers to it often as a key work, crucial to his own development, but it is also one of the most common "sound territories" to appear in recordings by various of his groups.The present recording is by a 37-piece...

For those enamored with the detailed and often brilliant writing of British bassist Graham Collier, the rare and sumptuous two-CD Day of the Dead set issued on the Spanish Disconforme label is a wonderful feast. The first CD, the reissue of a suite linked to Malcolm Lowry's "Day of the...

The Sun Ra Arkestra looks both forwards and backwards in time on this obscure small label LP. Ten years earlier, one could not have imagined Ra and his men romping through "On the Sunny Side of the Street" or reinventing "Flamingo." However, those versions certainly sound...