Jazz

These Times is a collection of polytemporal compositions inspired as much by broader cultural struggles as Makaya McCraven's personal experience as a product of a multinational, working class musician community. It's the recording that he's been trying to create for 7+ years, as it's been consistently in process in the background while he's put forth a prolific run of releases including: In The Moment (2015), Highly Rare (2017), Where We Come From (2018), Universal Beings (2018), We're New Again (2020), Universal Beings E&F Sides (2020), and Deciphering the Message (2021).

With contributions from over a dozen musicians and creative partners from his tight-knit circle of collaborators – including Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, and Marquis Hill – the music was recorded in five different studios and four live performance spaces while McCraven engaged in extensive post-production work at home. Featuring orchestral, large ensemble arrangements interwoven with the signature "organic beat music" sound that's become his signature, the album is an evolution and a milestone for McCraven, the producer. But moreover, it's the strongest and clearest statement we've yet to hear from McCraven, the composer.

1. In These Times
2. The Fours
3. High Fives
4. Dream Another
5. Lullaby
6. This Place That Place
7. The Calling
8. Seventh String
9. So Ubuji
10. The Knew Untitled
11. The Title

The third and final installment of Thelonious Monk's London Collection, his last recording session as a band leader, finally gets it's time to shine on vinyl. The recording features the legendary pianist/composer on six solo performances as well as five numbers with bassist Al McKibbon and drummer Art Blakey. It was remastered from original analog tapes by Bernie Grundman and pressed on 180gram audiophile-grade vinyl at Pallas in Germany.

• 1 Trinkle Tinkle (Take 2)
• 2 The Man I Love
• 3 Something in Blue
• 4 Introspection (Take 1)
• 5 Trinkle Tinkle (Take 1)
• 6 Crepuscule with Nellie (Take 3)
• 7 Nutty (Take 1)
• 8 Introspection (Take 3)
• 9 Hackensack (Take 1)
• 10 Evidence (Take 1)

Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing. Organist "Brother" Jack McDuff came to Blue Note and made one of the most ambitious albums of his career with Moon Rappin'. Released in 1970, it features five funky, spaced-out originals including "Oblighetto," which would later be sampled by A Tribe Called Quest as the foundation of their classic tracks "Scenario," and "Check the Rhime." Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series is all-analog, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes.

All-Analog 180g Vinyl LP of Grant Green's The Latin Bit Mastered from the Original Master Tapes by Kevin Gray & Pressed at RTI: Reference-Caliber Blue Note Reissue Helmed by Music Matters' Joe Harley

Grant Green had already recorded a prolific 10 sessions of classic hard bop and soul jazz for Blue Note over a 2-year span by the time he arrived at Van Gelder Studio in 1962 to record his album The Latin Bit. The concept of the album was a departure for Green with the guitarist exploring Latin and Brazilian influences with a band featuring Johnny Acea on piano, Wendell Marshall on bass, Willie Bobo on drums, Carlos "Patato" Valdes on conga, and Garvin Masseaux on chekere. As Nat Hentoff wrote in the album's liner notes: "It is because of Green's remarkably consistent ease in many varieties of material, that this album of jazz with a Latin tinge becomes so seamless a blending of Latin idioms and blues-laced, modern mainstream swinging." The highly enjoyable set includes joyful takes of "Mambo Inn" and "My Little Suede Shoes," as well as a lyrical and beguiling version of "Besame Mucho."

Blue Note Records' acclaimed Tone Poet Audiophile Vinyl Reissue Series continues in 2022. Launched in 2019 in honor of the label's 80th Anniversary, the Tone Poet series is produced by Joe Harley (from Music Matters) and features all-analog, 180g audiophile vinyl reissues that are mastered from the original master tapes by Kevin Gray of Cohearent Audio. Tone Poet vinyl is manufactured at RTI in Camarillo, CA, and packaged in deluxe Stoughton Printing "Old Style" gatefold Tip-On jackets. The titles were once again handpicked by Harley and cover the crème de la crème of the Blue Note catalog along with underrated classics, modern era standouts, and albums from other labels under the Blue Note umbrella including Pacific Jazz and United Artists Records. Every aspect of these Blue Note/Tone Poet releases is done to the highest-possible standard. It means that you will never find a superior version.

"The LPs are mastered directly from the original analog master tapes by Kevin at his incredible facility called Cohearent Mastering. We go about it in the exact same way that we did for so many years for the Music Matters Blue Note reissues. We do not roll off the low end, boost the top or do any limiting of any kind. We allow the full glory of the original Blue Note masters to come though unimpeded! Short of having an actual time machine, this is as close as you can get to going back and being a fly on the wall for an original Blue Note recording session."
- Joe Harley

Musicians:
Grant Green, guitar
Johnny Acea, piano
Wendell Marshall, bass
Willie Bobo, drums
Potato Valdez, congas
Garvin Masseaux, chekere

Features:
• Blue Note Tone Poet Series
• Curated by Music Matters co-founder Joe Harley
• Audiophile-quality 180g vinyl LP
• All-analog mastering (direct from the master tapes) by Kevin Gray
• Manufactured at Record Technology Incorporated
• Deluxe gatefold jacket packaging

1. Mambo Inn
2. Besame Mucho
3. Mama Inez
4. Brazil
5. Tico Tico
6. My Little Suede Shoes

New edition of this very rare deep spiritual jazz album first released as a private-press album in 1970 on flautist Lloyd McNeill's own Asha Record label in Washington, DC. McNeill is an African-American flautist, painter, poet, and photographer born in Washington, D.C., in 1935. His multi-disciplinary creative life led to encounters and friendships with Nina Simone, Picasso, Eric Dolphy, Nana Vasconceles and other legendary cultural figures. McNeill's hypnotic Washington Suite was originally commissioned as a piece of music for the Capital Ballet Company, in Washington, DC. 

1. Home Rule
2. Just 71% Moor
3. 2504 Cliffbourne Pl.
4. Fountain In The Circle
5. City Tryptych
6. Fountain In The Circle

Brownswood Recordings are proud to present Indaba Is – a compilation of current South African improvised music and jazz. The project is a collaboration with two luminaries of the South African Music scene, pianist / songwriter Thandi Nthuli and The Brother Moves On's Siyabonga Mthembu who act as curators / musical directors on the project.

Bokani Dyer's "Ke Nako" (now's the time) opens with an irony, because that was a slogan used to get voters to the polls in the first post-apartheid election. Now, Dyer's using it to remind us to think again about who we are and where we're going. That's always been the question for The Brother Moves On (TBMO: a genre-refusing, personnel-revolving performance collective named, with a twist, for The Wire's assassin: Brother Mouzone). Here, it's embodied in a meditation on relationships refracted through the distorting-glass of their context. It's the singing voices on both those tracks that reference roots even as they engage with contemporary spoken flows and instrumental improvisations.

Explicitly, trumpeter Lwanda Gogwana bookends his track with the idioms of the Eastern Cape – galloping rhythms, harmonies from bow music and split-tone singing, a spluttering trumpet reminiscent of Mongezi Feza – and grows from them a chill contemporary meditation: no spatial or temporal barriers here. Chill, though, is the last term you'd use for Wretched, vocalist Gabisile Motuba's Fanon-inspired project with drummer Tumi Mogorosi and sound artist Andrei van Wyk and the voices of Black Panther Kwame Toure and liberation leader Winnie Madikizela-Mandela: "What is History?.."

That, like "Ke Nako" and The Brother Moves On's bitter allusion to "black yellow and green" (the colours of the ruling ANC) is the thread of another kind of tradition – the reminders and remainders of South Africa's struggle not yet won – weaving through the album. Balm is offered by what guitarist Sibusile Xaba has described as his "modal, groove-oriented roots music". It is, he says, inspired by dreams; he sees himself as a diviner not a performer and his music as functional for healing. That echoes one of his musical masters, the late Dr Philip Nchipi Tabane. "Umdali" is a reference to the Creator, inspirer of such service.

The Ancestors weave Siyabonga Mthembu's voice into a web of musical references forward-looking and historical, including bluesy instrumentals that hark back to what South Africa's jazz bandleaders of the ‘70s and ‘80s conjured up – another aspect of South Africa's musical tradition. Then pianist/composer/vocalist Thandi Ntuli returns to the theme of identity in "Dikeledi" (‘Tears'). "Who are you?' she asks. "What do you call yourself?.. the illusion [of who you are] emerges from you." Ultimately, the song concludes, rootedness in community trumps image.

But community isn't unproblematic. The persistent fractures in South African society were deliberately engineered by apartheid, results of an attempt to impose unitary, racially-constructed identities on all. All the tracks in this collection challenge that: they demonstrate the unifying power of collective hard music work. In that context, iPhupho L'ka Biko's "Abaphezulu" ("They are coming, those who are above" – an invocation to ancestors, including the spirit of Steve Bantu Biko) is a fitting conclusion. Opening with the notes of Kinsmen's Druv Sodha's sitar, it smashes another of the walls apartheid tried to build against Black unity: between South Africans of African and South Asian heritage. The classically-inflected gospel voices of Mthembu's dialogue with Indian and modern jazz rhythms and free horn improvisations in joyous heterophony.

LP1

1. Bokani Dyer - Ke Nako
2. The Brother Moves On - Umthandazo Wamagenge
3. Lwanda Gogwana - All Ok
4. The Wretched - What is History

LP2

1. Sibusile Xaba with Naftali, Fakazile Nkosi, & AshK - Umdali
2. The Ancestors - Prelude to Writing Together
3. Thandi Ntuli - Dikeledi
4. iPhupho L'ka Biko ft Siyabonga Mthembu & Kinsmen - Abaphezulu

A1: Autumn Leaves
A2: Love For Sale

B1: Somethin' Else
B2: One For The Daddy-O
B3: Dancing to The Dark

The Bill Evans Trio with Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums would reach a climax with their June 25, 1961 club recordings at the Village Vanguard in New York. LaFaro would die in a car accident soon after (on July 6, 1961), at the age of 25. Evans was so shocked by his bassist's death that he waited a long time before forming a new trio. A selection of pieces from the Village Vanguard session was made by Evans himself and originally presented on two albums: Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby, the latter presented here in it's entirety. THE COMPLETE ALBUM + 1 BONUS TRACK - 180-GRAM CRYSTAL CLEAR VINYL - LIMITED EDITION

• 1 My Foolish Heart 5:02
• 2 Waltz for Debby 6:58
• 3 Detour Ahead 7:37
• 4 My Romance 7:11
• 5 Some Other Time 4:57
• 6 Milestones 6:30
• 7 I Loves You Porgy 6:00*

The formation heard here marks the third incarnation of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, which included trumpeter Lee Morgan, tenor saxophonist Benny Golson, pianist Bobby Timmons and bassist Jymie Merritt. Golson penned four of the songs from Moanin' and added several perennial compositions to the group's repertoire, among them the two bonus tracks on this edition, "Whisper Not" and "I Remember Clifford," the latter written in memory of star trumpeter Clifford Brown. Pianist Bobby Timmons contributed such hits of his own as the title track, "Moanin'". THE COMPLETE ALBUM + 2 BONUS TRACKS - 180- GRAM VIRGIN VINYL - LIMITED EDITION

• 1 Moanin'... 9:32
• 2 Are You Real... 4:48
• 3 Along Came Betty... 6:09
• 4 I Remember Clifford... 5:43 *
• 5 The Drum Thunder Suite First Theme: Drum Thunder Second Theme: Cry a Blue Tear Third Theme: Harlem's Disciples... 7:32
• 6 Blues March... 6:14
• 7 Come Rain or Come Shine... 5:47
• 8 Whisper Not... 7:32 *

Dexter Gordon - "Go!" / Capitol Music Group; Blue Note; Jazz; By the time he recorded Go! In 1962, Dexter Gordon had already lived several lifetimes in jazz. He was among the first to adapt the language of bebop to the tenor saxophone in the 1940s, but after a decade in which personal troubles limited his output, he signed with Blue Note in 1961 and began a run of essential albums that marked a rebirth for the tenor giant. Featuring a quartet with Sonny Clark on piano, Butch Warren on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums, Go! #was a showcase of Gordon's limitless creativity on hard-swinging numbers like his great tune "Cheese-Cake," and a sure-footed version of "Love for Sale," as well as his peerless artistry on ballads as evidenced on stunning takes of the standards, "I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry" and "Where Are You." Available on 180gram blue vinyl. Limited Edition. Indie Exclusive.

• - Disc 1 -
• 1 Cheese Cake
• 2 I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry
• 3 Second Balcony Jump [Rudy Van Gelder Edition]
• - Disc 2 -
• 1 Love for Sale [Rudy Van Gelder Edition]
• 2 Where Are You? [Rudy Van Gelder Edition]
• 3 Three O'Clock in the Morning [Rudy Van Gelder Edition]

Dexter Gordon - "Our Man In Paris (Blue Note Classic Vinyl Edition)" [180gram Heavy Vinyl LP] Dexter Gordon's 1963 album Our Man In Paris was his first dispatch from Europe and is also symbolically considered to be the last bebop album. The saxophonist assembled a quartet with bebop legends (and fellow expats) Bud Powell on piano, Kenny Clarke on drums, along with the French bassist Pierre Michelot, to record this all-time classic at CBS Studios in Paris. This Blue Note Classic Vinyl Edition is stereo, all-analog, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes, and pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal. Capitol Music Group; Blue Note; Jazz; Catalo

Sonny Rollins - "Volume 1 (Blue Note Classic Vinyl Edition)" [180gram Heavy Vinyl LP] After Sonny Rollins' first Blue Note appearance with Bud Powell in 1949, the saxophonist returned to make his label debut as a leader in 1956. Volume 1 was classic Rollins, with hard-swinging originals plus a tender ballad that showcase his robust sound and limitless improvisational creativity. Featuring a quintet including Donald Byrd, Wynton Kelly, Gene Ramey and Max Roach. This Blue Note Classic Vinyl Edition is mono, all-analog, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes, and pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal. Capitol Music Group; Blue Note; Jazz; Catalog.

Art Blakey, whose career spanned nearly 50 years of Black music history, exemplifies the timeless role of the drums in jazz. This Album of the Year LP, originally released in 1981, features the Jazz Messengers: trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, saxophonists Robert Watson and Bill Pierce, pianist James Williams, and bassist Charles Fambrough, alongside drummer and bandleader Art Blakey.

The album was recorded in Paris, and tracks include 'Cheryl' (written by Charlie Parker), 'Soulful Mister Timmons,' and 'Little Man,' among others. The accompanying liner notes were written by Ted Panken. LISTEN: https://youtu. Be/yGldcFRBNhU * 180 GRAM AUDIOPHILE VINYL * FEATURING WYNTON MARSALIS, JAMES WILLIAMS, ROBERT WATSON, BILL PIERCE, CHARLES FAMBROUGH * INCLUDES LINER-NOTES BY TED PANKEN Track listing: SIDE A 1. Cheryl 2. Ms. B. C. 3. In Case You Missed It SIDE B 1. Little Man 2. Witch Hunt 3. Soulful Mister Timmons

• 1 Side A
• 2 1. Cheryl
• 3 2. Ms. B.C
• 4 3. in Case You Missed It
• 5 Side B
• 6 1. Little Man
• 7 2. Witch Hunt
• 8 3. Soulful Mister Timmons

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - "Like Someone In Love (Blue Note Classic Vinyl Edition)" - The 1960 edition of the Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers was one of the band's greatest line-ups with the drummer joined by trumpeter Lee Morgan, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Bobby Timmons and bassist Jymie Merritt. Opening with a sublimely swinging version of the title track, the rest of Like Someone In Love presented originals by Morgan and Shorter. Capitol Music Group; Blue Note; Jazz; Catalog Special Pkg:180g Heavy Vinyl. This Blue Note Classic Vinyl Edition

• - Disc 1 -
• 1 Like Someone in Love
• 2 Johnny's Blue
• - Disc 2 -
• 1 Noise in the Attic
• 2 Sleeping Dancer Sleep on
• 3 Giantis

Freddie Hubbard -"Here To Stay (Blue Note Classic Vinyl Edition)" Blue Note Classic Vinyl Reissue Series! 180g Vinyl LP! Mastered by Kevin Gray from Original Analog Tapes! Pressed at Optimal Capitol Music Group; Blue Note; Jazz; Catalog

• - Disc 1 -
• 1 Shake It Baby
• 2 Country Boy
• 3 Bottle Up and Go
• 4 You're Wrong
• - Disc 2 -
• 1 Sugar Mama
• 2 Decoration Day
• 3 Money
• 4 It Serve You Right to Suffer

Millions love this pianist/composer for his Peanuts music, but his biggest solo triumph, easily, was this 1962 LP. His imaginative interpretations of songs from the film Black Orpheus join Guaraldi originals including his sole pop hit, the beautiful Cast Your Fate to the Wind, which joins Samba de Orfeu: Manha de Carnaval: O Nosso Amor, and more. So sweet to be able to hear this on vinyl! 120-gram. Fantasy.

• 1 Samba de Orpheus
• 2 Manh de Carnaval
• 3 O Nosso Amor
• 4 Felicidade
• 5 Cast Your Fate to the Wind
• 6 Moon River
• 7 Alma-Ville
• 8 Since I Fell for You