New Release Round-up,
Jazz New Release Round-up - 30th June, 2023
The Brooklyn-based horn player reunites his intriguing Weirdear ensemble for an album of anomalous avant-bop cuts. LoRe is an inventive composer and musician – just take, for example, his arrangement of the complete Goldberg Variations for alto sax, which he completed over lockdown – and he leads his quartet with aplomb through the effective combination of his adventurous penmanship and performances alike. Exploring dark and often uncharted territories, this is urgent and well-executed modernist jazz.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC
Heading his exciting piano trio from behind the kit is the composer, conductor, percussionist and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, one of the most fascinating and mystifying musicians working today. A name that’s not usually associated with the world of jazz standards, this record finds the group taking great pleasure in four vintage yet underappreciated tunes. In a follow-up to the terrific Mesmerism from last year, this new album expands on music by Ahmad Jamal and other classics through space and time.
Available Format: CD
A late recording from the jazz legend of the New York Art Quartet, Johnny Tchicai, is now released seventeen years after the session took place in Montpellier. One of the greatest personalities on the Danish music scene and one of the father-figures of free and abstract improvised music, Tchicai formed a brand-new trio collaboration with Stefan Pasborg on drums and Jeppe Skovbakke on bass at the Copenhagen Jazz Festival in 2006. Their successful tour culminated in several tracks which made it onto Pasborg’s album, Triplepoint (2007), but the full session has never been released – that is, until now!
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Led by bassist Seth Ford, the miraculous Phi-Psonics return for their second outing. Truly elevating music that encompasses the enticing sonorities of flute, acoustic bass and Wurlitzer, the group’s debut album, The Cradle, revealed the transformative properties of such auditory remedies with its soothing spiritual power. Judging from the two preliminary singles, ‘An Offering’, followed by ‘We Walk In The Garden Of Our Ancestors’, Octava promises to be as deeply meditative as its predecessor.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Grammy award-nominated percussionist & composer John Hadfield’s new album’s core trio is composed of Gregory Privat and Chris Jennings, two of the finest Parisian jazz musicians working today, with the addition of a handful of talented guests in the form of Syrian clarinettist Kinan Azmeh, saxophonist Ron Blake and Iranian guitar virtuoso Mahan Mirarab. Inspired in part by the work of musicians Colin Walcott and Nana Vasconcelos (two-thirds of experimental world fusion group, Codona), the seven tracks included in this album “communicate musically the notions and feelings drums would express about themselves more broadly […] if they took a life of their own.”
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC
Barney Whittaker
