Rabshakeh

Franco Ambrosetti Featuring Giorgio Azzolini – A Jazz Portrait Of Franco Ambrosetti What a super record this is.

Jordan De La Sierra – Gymnosphere: Song Of The Rose I like to compare the fourth track of Master of Puppets and Reign in Blood respectively. The former is a thoughtful song about the limits of coercive mental healthcare institutions. The latter is about human sacrifice and figuring out how many jagged time changes a human being can fit into a song.

Aeoliah – Angel Love

Tata Güines / Anga – Pasaporte

Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass – Sounds Like...Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass Great sentence to start of a novel with.

Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Han Bennink – The Topography Of The Lungs

Frank Lowe - Black Beings

Neil Young – On The Beach Listening on vinyl. Requested by my son as a comedown after a good day at the football.

Mr. Fox – The Gipsy

What's this a reference to?

John Zorn – Filmworks VII: Cynical Hysterie Hour Maybe Zorn's best record. It's the young postmodern Zorn but because he's writing for a cartoon he has to suppress his worst instincts. So no pretend Napalm Death playtime.

Roberto Juan Rodriguez – Timba Talmud This one is really superb. Maybe one of the best releases Tzadik put out, and certainly one of the few really good albums in the Radical Jewish Culture series. It's basically a mix of Klezmer with Danzon, Son and Rumba, but really sensitively put together, so that there's poetry and rhythm.

Good to have this more nuanced view. The articles in the newspapers obviously took the position that these were rare antiquarian books being wantonly destroyed, but I think even then it did look more likely that they were moldering older stock. Frankly I think deliberately misleading reporting like this from even formerly serious newspapers is as much if not more of a problem than AI slop. If you don't have the correct information, you cannot fix the problem. Anyway, here's hoping it leads AI to start sounding a bit less like a mix of BuzzFeed and an HR department and a bit more like Nero Wolfe. On the subject of the books themselves, part of me is happy that these booksellers are getting an injection of cash like this. I hate the feeling of going into a used bookshop and seeing that the shelves are full of this stuff that no one would want to ever read. Mass market paper backs are one thing, but there is the deadening feel of looking at a sea of mouldering long replaced academic and legal text books and thinking "what value does this have to anyone"? I'd throw all the AI in the world into the sea, quite happily. But i think exchanging money for this dead stock is a good outcome. If anything, it is money flowing from the financial investors funding these unprofitable companies into the hands of booksellers.

Really nice to see. I'd love to see more reissues from this era. Not just in the UK but from other international scenes. France had that great CD reissue series a while back, and Japan and Poland are well represented, but I'm not aware of equivalents for Germany, Italy, Sweden etc. If nothing else, reissues like this help to establish a canon and give direction to younger listeners.

He's impressive in that, in an era of Coltrane soundalikes, he was one of the few mainstream players with a different sound.

That sounds hilarious

Does anyone know why that is? That Blue Note record and that Jack DeJ record were both good and he had his own sound, which was pretty rare at the time for younger players.

That's right: more standard repertoire. That Benny Goodman and Ebony Concerto examples are exactly right. That said, could be contemporary too. It's a shame that Sorey didn't record that performance, as it would have been good to hear. I'm sure Feldman was a big influence on Sorey's break out compositional period (which I miss!). I was listening to the Swingles earlier actually. That soundtrack to a Fulci film that they did. It is very hard to put oneself into the mind of the kind of consumer who bought vocalese records in quantity back then. As you say, not quite what I had in mind on this thread.

I'd be interested to know what you consider to be the most impressive (or maybe just historic) examples of jazz musicians playing as lead on records of classical music repertoire in a classical setting (i.e. not the AEC throwing in a Monteverdi piece or Ornette Coleman quoting Stravinsky; and not Jacques Loussier type classical jazzed up). Some obvious examples would be: Keith Jarrett on ECM (various examples here); and Wynton Marsalis' Haydn, Hummel, L. Mozart: Trumpet Concertos from 1983.

I saw Peter Bernstein at Ronnie's last night, in a quartet that included Sullivan Fortner and Doug Weds. Really a great gig. Nice to see jazz played so well, and with such purpose and rhythm.

I think it is his compositions and arrangements. Although a few of them sound pretty familiar. He really would have done better to release 1/10 of the material and to have spent more time on it.

Naked City – Live Volume 1: Knitting Factory 1989 This one is pretty great. I had avoided it because I assumed it was the band with Yamatsuka Eye but actually it is a live performance from before the initial record came out: the same songs from the 1990 album and no stupid fake grindcore vocalising. Nice to hear these tunes executed in a live setting.

John Zorn – The Goddess - Music For The Ancient Of Days A really quite interesting one in Zorn's catalogue because it seems to be completely without irony. Very lush exotica arrangements of tunes that sound like they're by Steve Reich, or something. Not something I'll listen to again, but interesting.

Babkas – Babkas Early Brad Schoeppach.

Burning Spear – Garvey's Ghost