There's a young pianist in NYC named Esteban Castro, young, just out of Julliard. I will state this directly: Esteban is one of the greatest jazz pianists who ever lived, and I mean ever, and I say this unequivocally, after a lifetime of listening to everything from 1920 to the present. I am trying to think of how to describe his playing - it is historically comprehensive, but never in a self conscious way. He just sits at the piano with casual ease and turns out phrase after phrase of brilliant, compelling, artistically meaningful music. In term of musical attitude he has some resemblance to Jaki Byard, but that is primarily in the ingenious way in which he incorporates his incredibly varied, but always personal, ideas of playing. He is astounding. We recorded together not too long ago, and I basically knew what he can do, but he still surprised me - bits and pieces of Tristano, an amazing Fats-Waller-into-stride passage that just blew me away, and a deep understanding of Bud Powell. He can read, he can play inside/outside/upside down, harmonically speaking. He even did an uncanny summoning of Monk on one piece that was not Monkish in the usual sense, but instead a personalization of Monk's way of fusing melody and harmony. Another thing I love about his playing is that it is non-ideological: no systems, no repetitive patterns, no blues cliches. He is the real thing. I will post some more of his stuff eventually, but here's a clip from a few years back which gives a sense of his incredible reach and sense of line:    

This is a great set indeed.  If you have the Mosaic Decca All Stars box, that doesn't do it justice at all, even though all of the studio tracks are there.  You need the 3-disc set with the original ordering and the narration. 

Next up:   Yep. Me too.  🙂

Now, I am listening Jaco Pastorius big band: Twins II...... Now, I am listening Jaco Pastorius big band: Twins II......

Visibly this site has changed. Sadly not for the better. We've had discussions here on this forum in Feb./March 2023 of that Worldradiohistory site and of the Down Beats accessible online there. I then started to download the PDF files of each mag one by one for the years of most interest to me. As did others, it seems. But one forumist provided a method and link of how to "bulk download" these files in batches of several years at a time in one go. So I then downloaded ALL the Down Beats up to the end of 1969 by this method in almost no time at all. There also was a note that Down Beat objected to these being accessible online, so maybe this is why they changed the site again.