Featuring his usual touring band, conga master Candido released the funky Beautiful in 1970. His first release for Blue Note — following his Solid State debut, Man of a Thousand Fingers — is a dance-oriented project that features lots of go-go-style blues jams propelled along by Candido‘s high-energy percussion,Richard Davis‘ electric bass, and Frank Anderson‘s…
Drummers Alphonse Mouzon and Billy Cobham led almost parallel careers during the 1970s and helped to raise the bar by which all subsequent drummers were to be judged. They were both in legendary fusion bands (Mouzon in Weather Report and Larry Coryell‘s Eleventh House and Cobham in Dreams and the Mahavishnu Orchestra), both led their own successful bands, both reinvented jazz-rock drumming, and both…
Although he has participated in a couple of Miles Davis tribute bands and Herbie Hancock’s V.S.O.P., Ron Carter always resisted leading a CD of Davis tunes, until this project. Actually only seven of the ten songs that are performed by Carter’s quartet on Dear Miles were associated with the…
The obscure music on this CD has rarely been reissued. Pianist Wynton Kelly is heard with a trio (Franklin Skeete or Oscar Pettiford on bass and drummer Lee Abrams) at the age of 19 when he was working as an accompanist for Dinah Washington. Featured on this recording a…
The music on Wizard of the Vibes features Milt Jackson with the Thelonious Monk Quartet in a 1948 session combined with a 1952 date with his bandmates from the Modern Jazz Quartet (at that time including John Lewis, Percy Heath, and Kenny Clarke) along with alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson,…
Like his debut, Smithville is another set of thoroughly winning straight-ahead bop from the underappreciated trumpeter Louis Smith. Stylistically, there are no surprises here — this is mainstream bop and hard bop, comprised of original and contemporary bop numbers, as well as standards (“There’ll Never Be Another You,” “Embraceable…
Louis Smith had a brilliant debut on this Blue Note album, his first of two before becoming a full-time teacher. The opener (Duke Pearson’s “Tribute to Brownie”) was a perfect piece for Smith to interpret, since his style was heavily influenced by Clifford Brown (who had died the previous…
