This is a Recording

There's no way of telling if the photo of Wes Montgomery reproduced on the rear of this LP's sleeve was taken at the Half Note, but he is undoubtedly smoking: a lit cigarette in his mouth as he plays his guitar. The photo of Wynton Kelly looks to have been taken in a recording studio if the out-of-focus reel of tape on his piano is anything to go by. He isn't smoking, but concentrating intently on the keys before him. Both men are wearing white shorts with skinny black ties: Montgomery also in a dark-coloured jacket; Kelly in a cardigan and a beanie-type hat. Only half of Smokin' at the Half Note was recorded in June '65 at the Half Note Club on Hudson Street in New York. The intention must surely have been for it to be entirely a live album, but producer Creed Taylor, presumably dissatisfied, had insisted on some of it being done over a few months later in a studio setting. The two tracks on side A are the live ones; the three on side B those from Rudy Van Gelder&

At the local charity shop one Saturday about five years ago I spotted something with the distinctive orange-&-black Impulse! Records spine. I hadn't heard of Gary McFarland, but felt it was worth the few pounds' asking price to give Profiles a listen. The cover provides a good deal of information up-front: "RECORDED LIVE / Sunday, February 6, 1966-8PM / Norman Schwartz presents / Gary McFarland: / Profiles / A unique concert of original compositions reflecting the special qualities of today's most accomplished jazzmen..." Inside the gatefold, Nat Hentoff stresses the occasion having been a sit-down concert performance of (chiefly) through-composed music. This was evidently a major showcase for McFarland, who had made a name for himself through the early '60s as a composer and arranger, having worked with the likes of Anita O'Day and Gerry Mulligan . The 20-piece band recruited for the performance did McFarland proud: among their number the likes of Cl

For about seven months in 1997 I shared an apartment in Rome with a fellow ex-pat, an Englishman with a taste for the acid jazz and neo-soul music of the day, and it was through him that I first heard the likes of Erykah Badu, D'Angelo and Maxwell. For all its merits, it was a style I couldn't seem to get a proper grip on at the time, and indeed, it was only really during the recent pandemic that I gave these artists another hearing, at last developing more of an appreciation for them. About this time last year I spotted a few Maxwell CDs in a box at the local charity shop & thought the MTV Unplugged EP might provide a digestible introduction to his work. So it proved - it's a record I very much enjoy. At over 34 minutes I'd say it's more a short album than an EP. On the strength of this disc I also acquired a copy of Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite but I found that a bit too much Maxwell for me in a single sitting, succumbing as it did to a common late-'90

I'd heard of Ethan Iverson on the strength of his playing with The Bad Plus, and suspect that YouTube searches on his name led me to learn about this recent (2019) release featuring Iverson and veteran trumpeter Tom Harrell, whose name I hadn't known, despite its being attached to a discography extending back into the mid-'70s. The other two members of the quartet on this live recording are Ben Street on bass and Eric McPherson on drums. Superficially, at least, this is a backwards-looking affair. Most of the tracks are tunes that would have already been familiar jazz standards sixty years ago. The playing is refined, tasteful and seldom attention-seeking. It can serve as elegant background music, but paying closer attention is well worthwhile.  Iverson's piano-playing provides the most obvious points of departure from how these melodies would have been interpreted back in the '50s or '60s: such as in the eerily discordant introduction to 'The Man I Love'

Masakatsu Takagi is a pianist, composer and film-maker who has accumulated an extensive discography  over the last twenty-one years. My only window overlooking that body of work is Private/Public , a live album comprising highlights from a series of concerts given in Tokyo in October 2006, and released the following spring. I aquired it during my phase of ordering CDs from amazon.co.jp. I'd previously obtained discs by the singer UA and the percussion duo OLAibi, both contributors to the ensemble here, and I'd probably found this album when searching for other recordings of theirs. The music is mellow and melodic, arguably a kind of contemporary easy-listening. One might call some of it chamber-pop. Some tracks resemble soundtrack cues, and, indeed, a couple of the pieces were apparently composed for use in TV commercials. There are classical music flavours too, with the vocals in a few of the songs backed by piano and string quartet. The opening track, 'Ceremony' begi

This deluxe production has excellence right through it: Sinatra near his peak; Basie and his band; Quincy Jones conducting & arranging. The recording quality is first-rate too, and puts the listener right in the room that "has that peculiar air about it that only successful clubs have: a combination of cigarette smoke, overheated air, smouldering dust, Lysol Clorox cleaned linen, even the silverware smells different from home silverware" to quote Stan Cornyn's notes in the gatefold. As well as instantly-recognisable songs like 'Come Fly With Me' and 'It Was a Very Good Year', there are also a few brief, but thrilling Basie instrumentals, and a pair of Sinatra's monologues - one longer ('The Tea Break'); one shorter ('A Few Last Words'). Collectively these do heighten the sense of a single evening's entertainment, but would it have been any less of a record had the monologues been omitted? Nat 'King' Cole's At The San