Rabshakeh

Jimmy Smith – Sit On It! (Mercury, 1977) First listen: not as bad as is made out. Actually, fine. It’s an okay instrumental funk record with jazz chops.

Are they released and / or available?

Gary Burton & Steve Swallow – Hotel Hello (ECM, 1975) What a charming record this is, every time I remember it's existence. There's a lot of what I love about Keith Jarrett's more concise earlier stuff, but just more concise and congenial.

Eddie Harris – The Electrifying Eddie Harris (Atlantic, 1968)

I was going through a bit of a Don Cherry patch a few weeks ago. Still have a lot of love for Mu.

どくとる梅津Diva – Diva (NEC, 1988)

Randy Weston – Blues To Africa (Freedom, 1975) It's on YouTube. I listened to it via the Discogs page videos. A really interesting one that I'm going to hunt down. With the woozy studio vocals and the 007 references, I assumed that @TTK would know it. Allmusic is a truly great resource but one that I do not trust much. I learned an awful lot from it back in the day: before that all there was was word of mouth and occasional retrospective critics' lists. But good God is it always wrong on a lot of stuff.

Looks like this has just gotten a rerelease.

Soul jazz organ with gauzy female exotica type vocals. An interesting mix. Allmusic don’t like it, but I found it interesting.

I was listening to that today!

Ogun has such a killer catalogue. So many gems.

Frederick Roach – All That's Good (Blue Note, 1965) I'd like to know what kind of cocktail @Teasing the Korean serves with this one.

Nice record

Thanks!

What is it like?

Sanders is going through a moment. Lots of the younger people I work with say they like jazz and they all point to Sanders as one of the jazz artists whom they love most. Younger record shop staff who know that I like free jazz are often keen to talk about him. It's quite a weird one, because I'm not sure how many people on this forum would zero in on Sanders, even among the free-er players, as the great stand out of his era. But something about his positioning as one of the greats of "spiritual jazz" means that he is extremely popular. Perhaps it helps that his music is very 'conscious', but not really that abrasive, and there's often a blissed out quality to the accompanying musicians on his classic records (LLS, on keys, in particular). I've learned the hard way recently that younger fans of Sanders and 'free jazz' music do not necessarily have much interest in the the musicians that, to my mind, are part of that movement, like Ayler or Ornette. Something has shifted in the perception of this music. I think that the same is true of Sun Ra's late 70s stuff, which seems to be similarly prized. That Promises record was a bit divisive but I thought Sanders himself was good, and the record was overall fine. Not so sure about Floating Points' music or his writing for strings, both of which I find insipid and dull, but there's no denying that the record made a big splash, which is surely a good thing.

Wycliffe Gordon & Ron Westray – Bone Structure (Atlantic, 1996) My first listen to this. Double trombone front line, with Marsalis / JatLC acolytes. I'm surprised how much I enjoyed this record. They're talented players, and the tunes are actually good.

That's a great story. Well found.

@Mark Strykerof this parish recently started an interesting thread on twitter relating to the ongoing reception of this kind of music, starting with the following article: https://www.jazzedmagazine.com/articles/guest-editorial/25-of-the-best-big-band-recordings-of-all-time/?fbclid=IwAR2--Qa18QBjJWfwl7VSGbimATMBI8dT8FUBFG06Ed0rzV6fSvAH6Ufyz0Y The thread can be found here:

No arguments here. I still think that there's a difference between them and e.g. Akiyoshi's or Ellis' big bands.

I'm specifically looking for more bop oriented big band stuff here. This isn't to downplay Ellington and Basie. We all know and love their music already. Those late Ellingtons in particular are masterpieces. But I think that their revivals predated the bands to which this thread relates, and represents something a bit different. Separately, there's the trend of the avant big bands - some great records there: Crystals, Hearinga Suite, Seasons, Creative Music Orchestra, Escalator Over The Hill, Gardens of Harlem, but they're rarely by ongoing groups, and, again, I think that they represent a different thing to the sudden reappearance of brassy big band modernists. I know the Loud Minority, which is a great record, but had no idea that he did others. I shall definitely check out Well Water. I've oddly been struggling with Gerald Wilson a bit. I'm not sure when it will hook me - Even Lewis / Jones took a while. The group doesn't seem on a first listen to have quite the arranging firepower of the other bands of the era, but that opinion will probably dissipate on a second listen.

After gradually easing further into this world, I am getting an understanding of the reason that people are perhaps not that interested in discussing these records. The thread was largely inspired by a recent trip to Minneapolis, where records by Maynard Ferguson and Don Ellis seemed to be mainstays of the second hand bin ecosystem. I don't really know these records or this period. The fact is that equal occupants of those bins were Richie Cole and 70s Phil Woods. I guess it is a similar concept, in ways. Those are records that excite very few people in 2022. Anyway, Boland / Clarke and Jones / Lewis are recent tweaks to my listening habits that are here to stay. Perhaps that's the high water mark for this era of big band music.

Recommended? Are there others to which you would go before this?

Is this the same 3x LP collection mentioned by @Big Beat Steve?

I like some of them a fair bit. The South African approach has been very successful I think.