Sometimes a good album passes me by, unnoticed (so much music, so little time), but few turn out, upon discovery, to be as very, very good as the Jaki Byard Project's Inch By Inch, Yard Byard (on the GM Recordings label)...
Trumpeter Dave Douglas has two very different new albums out: Sound Prints: Live at Monterey Jazz Festival (Blue Note), featuring a Wayne Shorter tribute-band co-led by tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano; and High Risk, a collaborative excursion into electronica.
Sound Prints is also the name of the tribute band (a riff on Shorter's classic Footprints album), and, judging from the two times I've seen them play at the Village Vanguard, they're among the most vibrant, dizzying jazz bands around...
Two years ago, I hailed Steve Coleman’s Functional Arrhythmias as a career breakthrough. His new CD, Synovial Joints (on the Pi Recordings label), is his masterpiecea thrilling kaleidoscope, densely polyrhythmic, but also brisk and airy: music for serious listening as well as dancing in your head and on your feet.
Transparency is a trait we all value in a hi-fi rig, and it's a concept I've long thought I understood. A system that tosses up the illusion of a clear, spacious soundstage, on which you can hearalmost seeall of the singers and/or instruments, from side to side and, especially, from front to way, way back: that's the ticket. Still, although such transparency is a sign that you've entered the realm of fine sound, it's not an absolute requirement. Tonal accuracy, dynamic range, a certain thereness that conveys the emotional heft or delicacy of musicthose things come first. Without them, the most precisely delineated soundstage is like an architect's sketch of an oil painting.
I'm usually not a fan of male baritone jazz singers, not even Johnny Hartman (except, of course, on his album with Coltrane): they tend too much toward the operatic, and they're usually too smooth, too eyebrow-arched suave, for my taste anyway. But Jose James is something else, and his new album, Yesterday I Had the Blues (Blue Note), goes down like a rare vintage port on a chilly night.
A few years ago, Ryan Truesdell, a jazz composer and arranger, gained access to a treasure trove of Gil Evans' handwritten scores from the 1940s to '80ssome of them recorded, many notand set out to form a big band to play them. Lines of Color (Blue Note/Artists Share) is the second album to come out of what he calls the Gil Evans Project (the first, Centennial, was released in 2012), and it's something to savor.
With Break Stuff, his third trio album and his first on the ECM label, Vijay Iyer comes into his own as a master pianist, composer, and conceptualizerone of the truly great jazz musicians of our time.
I've probably ravedenough about Analogue Productions' 200-gram vinyl reissue of Masterpieces by Ellington, one of the greatest (yet, strangely, least-known) albums in Duke Ellington's vast catalogand, despite its vintage (1950, mono) his best-sounding. The good news here: for those of you who aren't into vinyl, AP has now issued it again as a hybrid SACD.
It's cold in New York City, but don't expect that to keep jazz fans from dashing through the streets of Greenwich Village this weekend, darting in out of various clubs and theaters, to see a dozen or more topflight musicians playing in the 2015 Winter Jazzfest.
With so few "major record labels" left standing, the music-loving audiophile stands alert for new ventureindies by the measure of indiesthat offer very good music, excellent sound, and (is it too much to ask?) the occasional slab of vinyl. As first reported by Robert Baird in Stereophile's August 2014 issue, there is another worthy prospect worth celebrating: Smoke Sessions Records, the creation of Paul Stache, proprietor of Smoke Jazz Club on upper Broadway in NYC, where most of his discs are recorded live, with Stache himself at the controls.