Dave Douglas Charms of the Night Sky (Winter & Winter) New Jersey-born trumpeter Dave Douglas is a hard man to pin down, a prolific and protean musician whose output varies wildly according to who he is playing with. This is a man, after all, who dared to record a new version of Coltrane’s challenging Ascension […]
John Coltrane The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings (Impulse!) In late October 1961 saxophonist John Coltrane started a run of gigs at the famed Village Vanguard club in New York’s Greenwich Village. His new-that-spring record label Impulse! – famously “The House That Trane Built” – took the opportunity to record the group on four nights […]
Andrew Hill Verona Rag (Soul Note) sse The obvious choice of all of pianist Andrew Hill’s many fine albums would be Point of Departure, his outstanding 1964 Blue Note set with Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson and a ridiculously young Tony Williams, among others. But Hill’s discography includes many other gems, including this fine solo set […]
We live our lives through recommendations, from the ten best Sunday roasts in Brighton’s pubs to those irritating suggestions from Amazon to buy more stuff we don’t really need. But sometimes these prompts serve a purpose, to encourage us, in this case, to hear some of the best jazz ever recorded but which we might […]