hprill

Cool. That's exactly what I was wondering about. In Europe, lots of former Legacy editions are now being reissued in cheapo cardboard boxes. Not even digipaks, just plain cardboard.

I'm not much of a big band person, but I quite like the Robert Bachner Big Band's Moments of Noise, released in 2006 on ATS Records (CD-0616; order information: http://www.robertbachner.com/). They're incredible live, and manage well enough to capture much of the energy on CD.

I think I never regretted selling any of the albums I sold because I felt that didn't like them anymore. Except for the first record that I ever bought myself. I should have kept that, no matter how crappy it was, simply because it was my first record ever. But what I did regret was selling lots of vinyl LPs in the late 1980s and replacing them with CDs. I really should have kept the vinyls in addition to the CDs, especially as I didn't get that much money for them anyway. It cost me a lot of time to get at least some of them back via eBay.

Yes, that was my source. It mentions the existence of an album entitled The Visitor, but without any release data and no indication whether it was merely a working title or actually released somewhere with this title. So I had been hoping for more information.

Juba-Lee is certainly a fantastic album, and I'm glad to own a Japanese vinyl pressing. I heard it was also released under the title The Visitor. Can anyone confirm this, perhaps even with release details?

Great news. It took me about six months of waiting on eBay to secure a vinyl copy at a reasonable price, but I'll probably still get the CD anyway. It's an incredibly swinging date, very reminiscent of Moncur's recordings with the Farmer/Golson Jazztet, minus the trumpet, but plus Melvin Sparks' guitar. Moncur's "Space Station" and "The Coaster" sound incredibly lightweight. Good stuff.

Yesterday I got my copies of Inner Cry Blues and Hipnosis III, which I had ordered from the Moncurs' website. Here are slightly edited versions of the reviews I wrote for the rateyourmusic.com website: Hipnosis III is very much a showcase for Tamam's and Moncur IV's poetry, set to the sound of percussion, keyboards, electronics and the strangely lingering tone of Moncur III's trombone. The songs are successful to different degrees, and moments of true inspiration alternate with moments of mediocrity without any warning, often within the same song. Moncur III is hardly to blame. His trombone is never really in the front spot, and his compositions stand up well enough. "Hipnosis" works even when converted to a gospel-like backdrop for poetry, and "When", here transformed to a soulful pop song, is in fact one of the highlights on this album. The biggest problem is more the sometimes too obvious homemade flavour of the album. The keyboard sounds a bit too cheap in several places, and much as I agree with Tamam's stance on police brutality in "Black Boy Mother's Blues", ten minutes of continuous poetry recital is a bit hard to stomach, even though the very same track also contains some of the better musical moments of this album. Ellington's "A Train" is similar torn between moments of excellence and parts that just don't feel right at all, leaving me undecided what to make of it. All in all it's interesting, especially for a Moncur fan such as myself, but I wouldn't call it a jazz album. Inner Cry Blues, on the other hand, is very much a jazz album, and a good one. It's a good, straightforward swinging date that pairs Moncur with Ben Adams's quintet. The result is a remarkably fresh sounding display of elements from cool jazz and hard bop, but not really any of the post-bop/avant garde music that Moncur used to be famous for. Which is fair enough, as the musicians seem to be enjoying themselves, and there is no need for forced seriousness. Even the tracks dedicated to Moncur's late mother-in-law and to his daughter who died tragically at a young age show none of the bleakness of tracks like "Ghost Town"; on the contrary, there seems to be a strong element of warmth and hope in them. Fans of Moncur's mid-60s recordings might find this unusually optimistic-sounding music. Ben Adams is no Bobby Hutcherson either; his playing is more forward-looking, spelling out melodies rather than setting accents, and thus well-suited to this very swinging, uptempo album. He disappoints only once, when his accompaniment for "A for Pops" is a bit too similar to his lines on "Sonny's Back". Mitch Marcus on tenor and Erik Jekabson on trumpet provide valuable contributions while never hogging solo space; the result is a comfortable, organic melodic flow that never feels forced. Even though (or perhaps because?) this is less of a musical showcase than 2004's Exploration, the smaller line-up makes this feel equally or even a bit more convincing. A very fine album.