Rabshakeh

There's a Twitter account I follow where the poster is a big fan. Not so much my thing. Mod type stuff.

Eero Koivistoinen Kvintetti & Sekstetti – Odysseus (1969) A great Finnish post bop record, despite the terrible front cover.

Thanks. How do it do that?

Sad news: Brazilian keyboard great João Donato gas passed away aged 88. I am particularly fond of his later records, particularly Donato Elétrico, which I will be playing tonight.

Adolphe Parillon – I Paint The Sky ~ Cé L'En Mô (Quennette, 1980) There's so much gold in these French Caribbean jazz records. All streamable too..

Glenn Spearman – Night After Night (Musa-Physics, 1981) Sounds interesting Sounds interesting

Joe Magnarelli - Hoop Dreams (Criss Cross 2006) Some really lovely hard bop genre work on this, although I'm not sure about the head of Ask Me Now.

Takehiro Honda & Gerd Dudek – Flying To The Sky Very impressed by this one. The emotional content comes with a heavy Coltrane quarter input, but Honda's playing really shines here.

I've just spent a happy hour or so browsing that thread and the Jazz Beat thread. My experience of SHB is that its jazz threads are just endless repeats of people wowsering of whatever new double/ultra deluxe hereditary audiophilac version of Kind of Blue has been released in the last week. But those two are genuinely good threads. Lots of interesting records I had not been aware of being flagged, with a nice mix of ancient and modern.

Cheers

Which thread is that? I generally find Hoff pretty bleak, but I'd like to see.

That's a great book. This might just be a British thing but I am always surprised at what a low profile the book has.

Some interesting suggestions that I don't know. I'll give these a go.

Rowe / Müller / Sugimoto – The World Turned Upside Down

Herbie Mann – Herbie Mann Returns To The Village Gate I think I may prefer this to the original. Hotter rhythms and less shopworn material.

Allen Lowe – In The Dark

What are your first thoughts?

Very strong anti-IPA bias over in Rabshakeh corner too. They've effectively crowded out bitter and lager in large parts of the London pub scene (although this trend seems to be reversing now). Cheaper to make and easier to market. I liked the Anchor brewery. Nice crisp taste and one of the few US beers that I used to chose if given the choice, so it will be missed. But I had found that it had declined in the last ten years or so. I am not sure whether that was due to an attempt to chase the IPA market or some recipe change after a buy out or something. Hopefully I'll be corrected if I am wrong. Ha!

The two main things I really want from a good professional critic are: (1) clear direction as to whether he/she thinks the new release stands out and is actually worth listening to (saving me the time), and (2), and this is my ideal, a range of references and background knowledge that adds a wider context to the work that I may not know, and also references to important records / bands I might have missed.

Flower-Corsano Duo – Four Aims (2009) I am generally quite cynical on Chris Corsano. I have seen him wreck performances sometimes. But this is a good record.

I don't know that any Shipp solo record really captures him live.

He was on everything. Sad to see him go.

Big fan of late Weather Report and equivalent era Zawinul. I find it helps to think of that music not so much as jazz fusion but as part of what other musicians like Brian Eno, the Talking Heads and Jon Hassell were doing at the same time: world rhythms with primitive / futuristic synths that just weren't advanced enough to handle it yet. Aim for bewilderment. Proto-Jungle, in a sense, but with a cheesy grin, wind in the hair, and colourful shirt. Sportin' Life is right up there for me. Love it. These are great.

I do hope that the surge of interest continues to roll on. The 80s and 90s could do with nice glossy reissue campaigns.

John Law – Extremely Quartet (HatArt 1997)