158 products
Breaking Point (Blue Note Tone Poet Series)
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Live In Montreal 1965 Vol. 2
Regular price $28.00 Save $-28.00Live In Montreal 1965 Vol. 1
Regular price $28.00 Save $-28.00Love Bug (Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series)
Regular price $28.00 Save $-28.00Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing. Love Bug was organist Reuben Wilson's 2nd album for Blue Note. Recorded with an exceptional quintet including Lee Morgan (trumpet), George Coleman (tenor saxophone), Grant Green (guitar), and Leo Morris (drums), it features funky Wilson originals like "Hot Rod," "Back Out," and the title track, alongside R&B hits of the day like "I Say A Little Prayer." Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series is all-analog, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes.
Egypt Strut
Regular price $26.00 Save $-26.00“One of the most unique and dramatic albums in all of global jazz music.” Francis Gooding, The Wire
Strut present the definitive edition of the 1973 Egyptian jazz classic, 'Egypt Strut' by Salah Ragab and Cairo Jazz Band.
Inspired by a concert in Cairo by Randy Weston in 1967 encouraging Pan-African unity, drummer Ragab, Eduard “Edu” Vizvari, a Czech jazz musician, and Hartmut Geerken of Goethe Institut vowed to create Egypt's first jazz big band. Following the Arab-Israeli war, Ragab became a Major in the Egyptian army and had unparalleled access to the military's 3000 musicians spanning Upper and Lower Egypt, along with a wide range of instruments. Part of the barracks were christened the Jazz House and, following a crash course in jazz history by Geerken, the Cairo Jazz Band was born, playing their first concert at Ewart Memorial Hall at the American University in 1969. Further inspired by Sun Ra & His Arkestra's first visit to Egypt in 1971, Ragab recorded an album for the Egyptian Ministry Of Culture a year later, entitled ‘Egyptian Jazz’, later released as 'Egypt Strut', a perfect fusion of jazz with Arabic modes with tracks referencing Islamic festivals, Egyptian landmarks and friends and family dear to Ragab. The Wire’s Francis Gooding summarises the album as “esoteric African American Egyptianism and radically spiritualised modal jazz taken up by Ragab as the tool for a form of mystical Egyptian nationalism – a triumphalist military jazz, angled in Ra-like fashion towards the Gods of the New Kingdom.”
Somewhere Different
Regular price $26.00 Save $-26.00Over the past decade, the harpist Brandee Younger has been at the center of music's celebrated work, even if you didn't know she was there. Be it her output with the soul singer John Legend or the rapper Common, she's always put her stamp on the music in question, all while setting a new course for what classical music can entail. But with her major-label debut, Somewhere Different, she's pushing her artistry to the foreground. By her own admission, Younger would've stepped back in years past to let others shine; the harp would've been mixed behind layers of woodwind instruments. Now she's putting her instrument first.
"It was important for me to thrust the harp forward in a non-traditional setting," Younger says of her new album. "I made a conscious effort to make sure that the harp was a bit more present in this recording. It's important for the instrument." Indeed, the first sound heard on Somewhere Different is the harp, a gorgeous, tone-setting solo that ushers in "Love & Struggle," the album's meditative opener. It also sets the mission for the music that follows: Younger has spent her career breaking down the barriers between classical music and contemporary forms of R&B, hip-hop, and funk. This album synthesizes her work while forging new ground. "I started recording music that wasn't common on harp in 2006," she says. This is my way of combining all the worlds I have into one. This is me doing my own thing completely."
Listeners will hear this creative freedom throughout the LP, from the introspective tenor of "Olivia Benson," "Beautiful Is Black" and "Pretend," featuring Tarriona "Tank" Ball of the breakout New Orleans band Tank and the Bangas, to the vibrant rock and bounce-infused sounds of "Reclamation" and the title track, respectively. In that way, Younger pays homage to the pioneering harpists Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby, both of whom merged the instrument with jazz, funk and soul at a time when such ingenuity wasn't commonplace. Somewhere Different is not only the realization of Younger's musical journey, it channels the spirit of a deserving performer whose life merits deeper examination.
Army Arrangement
Regular price $24.00 Save $-24.00Knitting Factory Records reissues Fela Kuti's Army Arrangement on vinyl LP, previously only available as part of the Box Set series. Army Arrangement is about Nigeria's attempt at ‘democracy' in 1979 after more than a decade of military rule. The audio has been restored and remastered from Fela's original Nigerian recordings. The artwork has been meticulously recreated from original album artwork.
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Indaba Is
Regular price $24.00 Save $-24.00Brownswood 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.
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Pathways to Unknown Worlds
Regular price $30.00 Save $-30.00Black Monument Ensemble - NOW
Regular price $25.00 Save $-25.00Vinyl LP pressing. Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble's previous album, their 2018 debut Where Future Unfolds, had a best new music in Pitchfork, was a Top 50 Album of the Year in Wire Magazine, and was BBC DJ Gilles Peterson's unequivocal Favorite Album of the Year. NOW is the band's much anticipated follow-up, which carries on their unique brand of Choir-fronted Hip-Hop-meets-Gospel/Jazz Liberation Music ' very much a modern day echo of the Harlem Freedom Singers and/or Eddie Gale's Black Rhythm Happening. This new one is a bit heavier on the beats and drum machines, sounding almost like Public Enemy/Bomb Squad working with ESG. Clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid and cornet player Ben LaMar Gay are heavily featured on this album.
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At The Half Note Cafe, Vol. 1
Regular price $21.00 Save $-21.00Limited vinyl LP repressing of this classic Jazz release. This album is a Blue Note essential and is part of the Blue Note 75 anniversary LP reissue campaign. At the Half Note Cafe is a live album by American trumpeter Donald Byrd recorded in 1960 at the Half Note in Manhattan and released on the Blue Note label originally as two single LP issues. Trumpeter Byrd is joined on this recording by Pepper Adams, Duke Pearson, Laymon Jackson and Lex Humphries. This first volume includes "Intro/My Girl Shirl', "Soulful Kiddy", "A Portrait Of Jennie", "Cecile", " and "Theme: Pure D. Funk".