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Gabor Szabo was one of the most original guitarists to emerge in the 1960s, mixing his Hungarian folk music heritage with a deep love of jazz and crafting a distinctive, largely self-taught sound. Born in Budapest, on March 8, 1936, Szabo was inspired by a Roy Rogers cowboy movie to begin playing guitar when he was 14 and often played in dinner clubs and covert jam sessions while still living in his hometown. He escaped from his country at age 20 on the eve of the Communist uprising and eventually made his way to America, settling with his family in California. 

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He attended Berklee College (1958-1960) and in 1961 joined Chico Hamilton’s innovative quintet featuring Charles Lloyd. Urged by Hamilton, Szabo crafted a most distinctive sound; as agile on intricate, nearly-free runs as he was able to sound inspired during melodic passages. Szabo left the Hamilton group in 1965 to leave his mark on the pop-jazz of the Gary McFarland quintet and the energy music of Charles Lloyd’s fiery and underrated quartet featuring Ron Carter and Tony Williams.

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Szabo initiated a solo career in 1966, recording the exceptional album, Spellbinder, which yielded many inspired moments and ""Gypsy Queen,"" the song Santana turned into a huge hit in 1970. Szabo formed an innovative quintet (1967-1969) featuring the brilliant, classically trained guitarist Jimmy Stewart and recorded many notable albums during the late ’60s. The emergence of rock music (especially George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix) found Szabo experimenting with feedback and more commercially oriented forms of jazz.

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During the ’70s, Szabo regularly performed along the West Coast, hypnotizing audiences with his enchanting, spellbinding style. From 1970, he locked into a commercial groove, even though records like Mizrab occasionally revealed his seamless jazz, pop, Gypsy, Indian, and Asian fusions. Szabo had revisited his homeland several times during the ’70s, finding opportunities to perform brilliantly with native talents. He was hospitalized during his final visit and died in 1982, just short of his 46th birthday. – Light In The Attic

A TAV Curator’s Pick.

Black Jazz Signature is a compilation album by American artist Theo Parrish. It was released in 2013 by Snow Dog Records, and features tracks from the 1970s record label Black Jazz Records.

Black Jazz Records was an independent jazz record label founded in Oakland, California  by jazz pianist Gene Russell and percussionist Dick Schory. The label was created to promote the talents of young African American jazz musicians and singers, and released twenty albums between 1971 and 1975. Some of the more notable artists to record for Black Jazz Records were Cleveland Eaton, former bassist for Count Basie and Ramsey Lewis, and pianist Doug Carn, whose four albums were the most successful of any Black Jazz artist.

Russell's vision for Black Jazz Records was for it to be geared towards the Black community, and all of the artists recording for the label were African American. The label was created as an alternative to traditional jazz, invoking a more political and spiritual tone, often with funk overtones.Black Jazz released various types of music including, funk, free jazz and soul jazz. Black Jazz Records was also known for its unique album cover concept, which was copyrighted by the label. The concept included a design that allowed the title to be shown regardless of how the albums were positioned in the browsing rack at record stores. All of the albums had white lettering on a black background, with the liner notes and personnel listed in the same place on each of the labels releases.

Snow Dog Records acquired Black Jazz Records in 2012, and began re-issuing the albums as its first project. The remastered albums included new liner notes and previously unpublished photographs. They have also released a series featuring re-mixes of Black Jazz material produced by DJ's from Japan, Germany, and the United States: DJ Mitsu, Gilles Peterson, Muro, and Theo Parrish. - Wiki

"It's a demanding, almost numbing record. Parrish's selections and hands-off approach pays off and then some. This kaleidoscopic mix emphasises the Black Jazz catalogue's consistently searching brand of music, and both complements and abridges one of jazz's most undersung and thrilling musical footnotes." - The Quietus

 "an exhilarating listen and the perfect reflection of Black Jazz Records’ singular musicians, Black Jazz Signature is a record you will probably keep and return to for life." - FACT

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A TAV Curator's Pick

“Formed in 1971 (and still going strong) Oneness of JuJu was the brainchild of saxophonist J. Plunky Branch. Like many others on the legendary Strata East label, Oneness mixed R&B, free jazz, afro-Brazilian percussion and down-home funk with an upbeat spiritual message, earning them a place in many a DJ'sbig metalbox in the process.

Space Jungle Luv emerged in 1976 (a year after the classic African Rhythms set) and marked a distinct change of direction for Plunky and co. Their feet were still in the ghetto, but this time they were looking at the stars; headed up by the strong, sweet vocal stylings of Jacqueline Holman (aka Lady Eka-Ete) and Branch's often effects drenched saxophones, this is cosmic dancefloor jazz of the first water.

Space Jungle Luv opens with the loose limbed latin drift of "River Luv Rite", and moves through the deep, soulful funk of "Follow Me" to the Pharoah Sanders-esque "Soul Love Now" (pianist Joe Bonner was a member of Oneness for this set, and Branch had appeared on Pharoah's Wisdom of Music album).

"Space Jungle Funk" does what it says on the tin; Branch's heavily processed tenor snakes, squelches and squeals its way through a zero gravity slice of flanged ambient jazz funk. "The Connection" offers more earthbound grooves; here Branch's tenor is electronically ghosted into a bass clarinet and moog synth orchestra over Ronnie Toler's pushy funk drums and guitarist Melvin Glover's muted wah chords. Glover shines on the beautiful "Love's Messenger" with a sweet toned, thoughtful solo, while "Bootsie's Lament" showcases Holman's sublime vocal over rainforest flutes and afro percussion stylings.

The missing link between Kool and the Gang (70s vintage) and the deep jazz of Sanders, Gary Bartz and the like, this is a must for any self respecting collection - Branch out ! – BBC Music

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A TAV Curator's Pick.

“Kamasi Washington—a tenor saxophonist, bandleader, and composer with the profile of a low-level pop star—designed his second full-length album as a metaphysical dyad, unfolding over two halves that each run over an hour. Far and away the strongest musical statement of his career, it’s also an exercise in contrast, if not outright contradiction. “The Earth side of this album represents the world as I see it outwardly, the world that I am a part of,” Washington explained in advance press materials. “The Heaven side of this album represents the world as I see it inwardly, the world that is a part of me. Who I am and the choices I make lie somewhere in between.” (According to Discogs, a surprise third part, The Choice, comes as a CD tucked away in the album’s packaging; it wasn’t provided to reviewers, but it’s reported to contain five tracks—almost 40 minutes of additional music.)...

...Heaven and Earth proposes a play of external and internal realities—a bedrock of philosophical thought often framed as mind-body dualism. True to form, Washington presents this bifurcation more spiritually, as a pivoting balance of terrestrial and celestial concerns.” - Pitchfork

“Washington’s expertise as an arranger still drops jaws with ease; witness his enlivening take on Freddie Hubbard’s “Hubtones,” or his transformation of the Bruce Lee B-movie theme “Fists of Fury” into a noir-tinged rallying anthem for black dignity and justice. Though he plays his sax raw, he’s matched at all turns by his friends the Next Step and the West Coast Get Down; in particular, bassist Miles Mosley and twin drummers Tony Austin and Ronald Bruner Jr.’s contributions to Earth (“Can You Hear Him,” “The Invincible Youth”) form the kind of rhythm section you’d check the liner notes for. Befitting the title, Heaven & Earth also contains Washington’s most explicitly spiritual material since 2008’s underground record Light of the World; if more churches played songs like “Journey” and “Will You Sing” on Sundays, those sanctuaries might be standing room only.” – Consequence of Sound

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A TAV Curator's Pick.

“A primer on London’s bright-burning young jazz scene, this new compilation brings together a collection of some of its sharpest talents. A set of nine newly-recorded tracks, We Out Here captures a moment where genre markers matter less than raw, focused energy. Surveying the album’s running order, it could easily serve as a name-checking exercise for some of London’s most-tipped and hardworking bands of the past couple of years. Recorded across three long, fruitful days in a North West London studio, the results speak for themselves: they’re a window into the wide-eyed future of London’s musical underground.” – Bandcamp

“The question of who will "save" jazz – a music that celebrated a century on record in 2017 – is one that gets a new answer every few years. The cycle goes like this: A flashy award, a pop cosign, a high-profile collaboration or some intangible sense of "relevance" suddenly brings an artist like Esperanza Spalding, Robert Glasper or Kamasi Washington to the attention of the mainstream. All while conventional mass media – La La Land, Drew Brees' FedEx commercial – continues to paint the music as difficult or alienating…

… All of these artists – and much of the other improvised music coming out of the U.K. – share a sense of urgency, spontaneity and, frankly, fun that sets their music apart from crossover-ready jazz stateside. In London, musicians have created a jazz community that offers access and support to anyone who can blow, regardless of their background. And as it turns out, the music is that much better as a result.” – RollingStone

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A TAV Curator's Pick.

“On his ECM debut, 2016's Into the Silence, Avishai Cohen was toiling with the death of his father and understandably, the album was deeply ruminative and introspective. With his sophomore ECM outing, 2017's equally nuanced Cross My Palm with Silver, the trumpeter is no less reflective, yet the album feels somehow lighter, more clear-eyed and less shrouded in sadness. Prior to working with producer Manfred Eicher at ECM, the Israeli-born Cohen (who studied at Boston's Berklee College of Music) was known as a boundary-pushing maverick whose various projects found him moving from extroverted bop standards to groove-oriented klezmer jazz, avant-garde improvisation, and expansive, ambient soundscapes

Cross My Palm with Silver finds Cohen achieving a better balance between his exuberant post-bop inclinations and his more poetic, classical, avant-garde side. Helping Cohen achieve this balance are several returning associates in pianist Yonathan Avishai and drummer Nasheet Waits, augmented this time out with bassist Barak Mori. Together, they play with the kind of intuitive sense one associates with a band who have played together for several years, as is the case here. At just five tracks, the album has a cohesion and brevity that belie its artful slow burn. These are quiet songs punctuated by moments of piercing intensity, such as on the poignant and unsettling "Theme for Jimmy Greene." A tribute to the gifted saxophonist who lost his daughter in the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, the song starts as a warm hush as Avishai's piano builds the song with increasingly discordant energy, eventually lifting Cohen to a series of declamatory high notes.

Similarly, the spacy "340 Down" is a minimalist group improv that evokes both the trumpeter's work with his Triveni Trio and his longtime love of mentor Ornette Coleman. Elsewhere, "Shoot Me in the Leg" is an angular, classically influenced piece in 3/4 time with Cohen screaming in a controlled flutter as pianist Avishai lays down a cubist chordal bed. The album-closing "50 Years and Counting" is perhaps the most straight-ahead moment. Centered around a minor-tinged bass motif with a subtle, off-kilter groove, it sounds like something Horace Silver might have written for another ECM artist, the late trumpeter Kenny Wheeler.

In fact, much of Cohen's playing on Cross My Palm with Silver feels deeply inspired by Wheeler; his harmonically fluid lines marked by wide intervallic leaps. Ultimately, it's Cohen and his bandmates' deft improvisational skill and wide artistic sensibility, straddling straight-ahead jazz, classical, and the avant-garde, that helps make Cross My Palm with Silver such a bright spot in his discography.” – AllMusic

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Further departing from both the cinematic abstraction of ‘Piteous Gate’ and the hectic drums of ‘Damaged Merc’, Berlin producer M.E.S.H’s new full-length, ‘Hesaitix’, is marked by its hyper-ornamented rhythms and a sense of pensive, moonlit spaces.

The atmosphere has shifted; the radical deconstruction of previous releases has given way to subtler interventions, building new structures in strange territories. Shifting from the meditative to states of manic unease, Hesaitix is an unnerving injection into both the social space of club music and the interior space of digital audio fantasy. – PAN

“The images conjured are potent and surreal—two good descriptors for M.E.S.H.'s music, incidentally—and are as good as any an entry point into his rich, complex second album. Other M.E.S.H. records—including his 2015 debut LP, Piteous Gate—were narrow beam; Hesaitix is the full spectrum.” – Resident Advisor

“Hesaitix has a more refined quality to it, more confident. It creates spaces for you to exist in temporarily - or be trapped in, which is my theory. It’s like being in a warehouse rave, but in absolute darkness, with powerful flashes of sound that evoke the effect of searchlights” – The Quietus

“Australian improv trio the Necks have condensed their approach on this new double LP for Stephen O’Malley’s label. The experience feels like a ceaseless fever dream.

…For this double LP, the Necks devote each of four sides to one improvisation. With runtimes between 15 and 22 minutes, they’ve chopped the typical Necks tune into thirds or quarters. What’s more, there’s no intended sequence for these sides, meaning you could start with the hectic, gamelan-like rumble of “Timepiece” or end there, a move that makes the entire experience feel like a ceaseless fever dream. It’s a surprisingly indeterminate decision for a group whose output has always felt, no matter how improvisational it was, meticulous, even hermetic. Since the mid-’90s, the Necks’ records have invariably offered micromanaged adventure; with Unfold, they let you shape your own tale by giving you tracks without a tracklist.

Still, all of the Necks hallmarks appear at some point during Unfold—hyperactive drumming that expands and contracts any real sense of meter; piano lines that can summon a storm or conjure a presiding calm; bowed bass that rattles the room*.* And though the Necks looklike a jazz trio, their swing is tempestuous and their approach nebulous, with touches of post-rock and soul and Stockhausen and gospel wrapped into their orchestrated mess.

…The Necks’ newfound density is intoxicating. The ideas fly by in a way they never have with this band. Each compressed piece simply pushes you along to the next, eager to witness how a quarter-century-old act can again reshape your perception of drums, piano, and upright bass. After the Necks answer the psychedelic, wildly melismatic organ runs of “Overhear” with the pensive, clinched gaze of “Blue Mountain,” hearing what else is possible becomes a compulsion. (And if you’re new here, the quest can and should send you deep into a rich back catalog.) The relatively succinct tracks of Unfold aren’t some cynical concession to an audience’s fractured attention span or some attempt to become suddenly accessible. They are, instead, the result of a band that’s always tested supposedly solid borders—between jazz and rock, between acoustic and electric, between composition and improvisation. On Unfold, they’ve wondered aloud if the spell of their long-form magic works when stunted by the limitations of physical media and shuffled by the will of the listener. It does.” – Pitchfork

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Ziúr is one of the most exciting producers to come out of the fringes of Berlin club music in the last few years. A new generation is breaking out of the techno mould and creating in a spirit of freedom and experimentation, taking seemingly incompatible influences and balancing them into a new and exciting sound.

'U Feel Anything?' was written as a way to think about music as a tool of enlightenment, a de-conditioning force and the kind of yin and yang that can be summed up in the title of one of the songs 'Laughing and Crying are The Same Things', a track which features Swedish pop singer Zhala, whose vocals straddle twisting beats, space and staccato strings. The album also features a collaboration with Aïsha Devi on the epic 'Body of Light', in which Aïsha's vocals are pitched up and down, manipulated and distorted into wispy angelic tones, setting the tone for the first half of the album. There's a process to Ziúr's music that's informed by this wish to get beyond the small things. She says "Putting a relation on what's big and small and certainly meaningless behind our existence; how nothing is everything at the same time etc... it's something that I try to explore again and again by putting myself into a thought process, rather than having everything already formulated. – Bandcamp

“Warped and pitched-up voices call out over whistling drone, and contemplative bells echo—the backdrop for a moment of quiet reflection in an album defined by intense emotions. Its sections of high energy, of tension, of unpredictability, show an ability to bring contrasting energies together in a powerful way.U Feel Anything? asserts Ziúr as one of club music's most vital rising talents.” – Resident Advisor

“U Feel Anything?, an album that grabs the listener by the arm and throws them deep into its complex and fervent sonic world. This is an album of extremes — blastbeat percussion and golden-glistening synths, serene pop and ferocious club — but not of oppositions. Rather, it seems best to consider the ways in which Ziúr’s sounds resonate with each other, to trace the ways in which they touch, tease, and collide.” – Tiny Mix Tapes

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A TAV Curator's Pick.

The Cannonball Adderley Sextet in New York is a live album by jazz saxophonist Cannonball Adderley recorded at the Village Vanguard and released on the Riverside label featuring performances by Adderley with Nat Adderley, Yusef Lateef, Joe Zawinul, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes. 

“This excellent live date from the Village Vanguard was the recording debut of the Adderley sextet, with Cannonball waxing eloquently and swingingly on alto, brother Nat charging ahead on cornet, and the versatile Yusef Lateef (who had joined the band only three weeks earlier) adding a bit of an edge on tenor, flute, and unusually for a jazz wind player, oboe on the odd, dirge-like "Syn-Anthesia." Also, this was the first recorded appearance of pianist Joe Zawinul – a little over three years since his arrival in America – in Cannonball's band. This group would be Zawinul's spring-board to prominence in the jazz world, and readily apparent is how his compulsively funky mastery of bop and the blues had fused tightly with the Sam Jones/Louis Hayes rhythm section. Included is one of the earliest recordings of a Zawinul composition, "Scotch and Water," a happy, swinging blues.” – AllMusic

“…Compositionally, the highlights are the opening tune, "Gemini" (Jimmy Heath's bi-modal 6/8 blues); "Dizzy's Business" (a bebop gem by Basie arranger Ernie Wilkins); and an infectious Zawinul blues, "Scotch and Water." Yusef Lateef's compositions are not especially memorable in themselves but, along with his playing, provide richness, depth, and resonance lacking on the Brothers' other recordings. And his tenor playing is so good on the set chaser by Sam Jones, one wishes the record-ing would simply run on. Even with the addition of Lateef, Cannonball dominates throughout. His introductory remarks on what it means to be truly "hip" ("hipness isn't a state of mind: it's a fact of life") are immediately illus-trated by an arresting, hard-charging solo: he's a flaming comet on "Gemini," placing the ensuing soloists in the unenviable position of maintaining the brightness. But give equal credit to unsung he-ro Sam Jones, an unflappable walker whose every gritty note is distinct with no extra help from the engineering.” – All About Jazz 

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A TAV Curator's Pick.

The Sound of Sonny is an album by jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins, his first recorded for the Riverside label, featuring performances by Rollins with Sonny Clark, Roy Haynes and Percy Heath or Paul Chambers. 

“A new phase in Sonny Rollins' career began in 1957. He started what was at the time an almost blasphemous trend of recording for a number of different labels. His pioneering spirit yielded a few genre-defining albums, including this disc. His performances were also at a peak during 1957 as Down Beat magazine proclaimed him the Critics' Poll winner under the category of "New Star" of the tenor saxophone. This newfound freedom can be heard throughout the innovations on The Sound of Sonny. Not only are Rollins' fluid solos reaching newly obtained zeniths of melodic brilliance, but he has also begun experimenting with alterations in the personnel from tune to tune. Most evident on this platter is "The Last Time I Saw Paris" – which is piano-less – and most stunning of all is Rollins' un-accompanied tenor solo performance on "It Could Happen to You." Indeed, this rendering of the Jimmy Van Heusen standard is the highlight of the disc. That isn't to say that the interaction be-tween Sonny Clark (piano), Roy Haynes (drums), and bassists Percy Heath and Paul Chambers – who is featured on "The Last Time I Saw Paris" and "What Is There to Say" – is not top-shelf. Arguably, it is Rollins and Heath – the latter, incidentally, makes his East Coast debut on this album – who set the ambience for The Sound of Sonny. There is an instinctually pervasive nature as they weave into and back out of each others' melody lines, only to emerge with a solo that liberates the structure of the mostly pop standards. This is a key component in understanding the multiplicities beginning to surface in Rollins' highly underappreciated smooth bop style." - AllMusic

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In Spades is the eighth studio album by American alternative rock band The Afghan Whigs, released on May 5, 2017 on Sub Pop Records. - Wiki

“Cleromancy” isn’t a word one normally finds in rock lyrics. Then again, In Spades – the forthcoming album by The Afghan Whigs, from which the new song “Oriole” hails – is defined only by its own mystical inner logic. The term means to divine, in a supernatural manner, a prediction of destiny from the random casting of lots: the throwing of dice, picking a card from a deck. From its evocative cover art to the troubled spirits haunting its halls, In Spades casts a spell that challenges the listener to unpack its dark metaphors and spectral imagery. – Sub Pop

“As ever, Dulli spends the majority of In Spades teetering on that shaky precipice where romance turns to rancor, and pillow talk leads to restraining orders. But like a master genre filmmaker, he’s always got a couple of new tricks up his sleeves to keep us on our toes. “Birdland” honors his tradition for slow-burning, cinematicscene-setters, but rather than gently immerse us into his nocturnal netherworld, we’re pushed right in by staccato shocks of harmonium and operatic vocal gasps, like strobe-lit flickers of an image that take you a few moments to process into a fluid moving picture. “We’re coming alive in the cold,” Dulli declares, like a beast reawakened and ready to do damage once again.

In Spades clocks in at just 10 songs in 36 minutes, but feels as expansive and substantial as a double-album statement. And that’s thanks in large part to coolly paced, multi-sectional songs like “Arabian Heights” and “Light As a Feather,” where Dulli masterfully ratchets up the tension before unleashing his fevered howl at just the right moment (while reminding us that the Whigs are the rare rock band that can pull liberally from ’70s Blaxploitation funk without sounding like they’re making a jokey porno soundtrack).” – Pitchfork

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A key and compelling component to Brady Corbet’s directorial debut, Scott Walker’s soundtrack for The Childhood of a Leader is Walker’s first O.S.T. work since his remarkable score for Pola X in 1999.

Partly inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story of the same name, The Childhood Of A Leader is a tense psychological drama tracing the formative years of a young boy and set against the backdrop of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that led to the establishment of the Treaty of Versailles.

Walker continues to work with long-term collaborators Peter Walsh (co-producer) and Mark Warman (musical director), with the latter conducting an orchestra comprised of 46 string players and 16 brass for the studio recording. Both Walsh and Warman were involved in the live film score performance of The Childhood Of A Leader, alongside a 74-strong orchestra, an event which closed the Rotterdam Film Festival in February 2016. – 4AD

“The Childhood of a Leader is a clear high water mark for Walker in terms of instrumental writing, but it is also, in many ways, an apt extension of textural ideas Walker has explored on his past two albums—as well as in his previous scores for Leos Carax’s 1999 film Pola X and dance piece And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball? Leader highlights Walker at a late-career stage of both creative abundance (this is his third release in four years) and stasis. “I just work in my own sound world now,” Walker explained to The Quietus in 2014. “I’ve established a sound world and developed certain tropes and things that I understand.” After decades of painstaking experimentation, he seems content tinker around in the same haunted toolshed for the foreseeable future. But don’t call it career-twilight complacency: Judging from the depth of vision in The Childhood of a Leader’s half-hour of music, there's plenty of exciting possibilities left for Walker’s musical lexicon, which continues to go unused by anyone but him.” – Pitchfork

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A TAV Curator's Pick.

Actress, real name Darren Jordan Cunningham, known to friends as DAZ, returns with a new album, now on Ninja Tune and a new music system called “AZD” (pronounced “Azid”), a chrome aspect journey into a parallel world. An artist who has always preferred to make music than to talk about it, in “AZD” he has achieved another remarkable landmark, one which is as resistant to interpretation as it is demanding of it. Following on from his previous albums, R.I.P, Splazsh and Hazyville, an epilogue poem attached to the press release for Ghettoville was construed by media, commentators and spectators that Cunningham had retired. This led him to conceptualise this mass of conclusion as the key to ‘Giving power back to identity.’

So a few pointers, or possible ways to think about “AZD”. The album is themed around chrome – both as a reflective surface to see the self in, and as something that carves luminous voids out of any colour and fine focuses white and black representing the perfect metaphor for the bleakness of life in the Metropolis as suggested by Anish Kapoors Cloud Gate.

Another way to approach would be through the art of James Hampton and Rammellzee (who inspired “CYN,” which Cunningham also sees as a vision of New York in reverse…) – both of whom, though of different generations of the African-American slave diaspora, created art through “Sourcing castaway materials from their environment and reinterprating them into absolute majesty given from the fourth dimension.” There is also the career-long influence of the Detroit techno pioneers, something which becomes clear on this album “there is a contrast in the type of glow or reflection”.

Alternatively, you could write your PhD thesis on Jung’s Shadow Theory and AZD: “Lots of ideas come from dreams, this isn’t new, but sometimes the conscious mind starts to meld into the universal consciousness through constellation tunnelling.” If that sounds too taxing then you could always fall back on Star Wars and, in particular, the Death Star: “It has a dark dystopian backdrop, with highly sophisticated technology, but it is fading into the ether, still holding on and emitting a powerful energy. The music remaking the embers, binding them together and pulling them apart again.”

Alternatively, just listen. That “glow” Cunningham talks about makes this in some ways more immediate than previous Actress releases. Take lead single, “X22RME” (pronounced “Extreme”) which elegantly plays between the lines of Oriental classic rave and Balinese warehouse Techno machined in a Rotherhithe lock up welding the grooves into a seamless cracked joint.

At the other end of the spectrum is “Faure in Chrome,” a byproduct or development from his collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra, in which he “repatterns” aspect of Faure’s Requiem into a piece which sounds like the very institution of classical music being encased in electronic ice and scanned through a high frequency bandwidth. In between are gems like “Runner,” a personal re-soundtracking of Blade Runner “its from the deleted Fade Runner scene where AZD in a Peckham Cafe realises his barber has over the years etched a faded scroll into his head using early 80s African synthpop as a vexing serum“, or “Falling Rizlas,” an alienated music-box ballad. It’s a remarkable piece of work, that harks back both to Actress’ previous productions and to earlier iterations of the (broadly conceived) “techno” project without being beholden to anything but Cunningham’s forward-facing, individual and disembodied vision. – Ninja Tune

The simplest you could say about “AZD” is that it’s art – the unique creation of a unique mind. There will be few more distinctive, brilliant or visionary suites of music released in 2017. Call him what you will, this is the year that Darren ‘Daz’ Cunningham - aka Actress, aka AZD – asserts more clearly than ever before his complete independence. “Actress has a talent for melodies that snag at you, as demonstrated on the music-box ambience of Falling Rizlas, or Blue Window, on which house music battles to be heard over the sound of tape hiss. He also has an ability to twist the sound of dance music until it sounds private and intimate. Even the album’s most upbeat moment, X22RME, has a strangely introverted atmosphere to it: when the beats drop out, it doesn’t feel like a euphoric breakdown, but rather as if someone’s mind has wandered in the middle of the dancefloor.” – The Guardian

“…for all its artfully-deployed discordance, *AZD *maintains a musicality that holds the listener close. Sometimes this comes through in more danceable techno moments, like the single “X22RME” or the 80s-leaning synth-driven track “RUNNER,”; elsewhere, it’s in the  emotive minimalist breaks of “FALLING RIZLAS” or “THERE'S AN ANGEL IN THE SHOWER.” Cunningham participates in a futurist tradition, following an arc set by artists and writers like Rammellzee and Eshun. But that futurism isn’t predictive, something yet to come; rather, his combination of science fictions, music histories, and socio-spatial realities feels deliriously adjacent to the world we’re listening to it in.” – Pitchfork

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A TAV Curator's Pick.

Legendary is a word too often used when writing about musicians. Takeshi Terauchi is no myth, more an elemental force and surely a nominee for the status of Living National Treasure – a first for a rock musician in Japan. While not exactly well known in the West, he has received praise over the years from artists as diverse as the Ventures and Jello Biafra.

You don’t want to mess with Terry, as he is commonly known. An 8th Dan of the Wado school of Karate and a Zen master of the Zuiganji temple, he is also a pioneer in the history of Japanese guitar music, record producer, author and businessman who still finds time to play for charity. Terauchi is a hard drinking (or used to be), guitar-shredding maverick who ruled his band with an iron fist while his free hand gave the tremolo arm lessons in tensile strength. His early recordings date back to the late 1950s, with the country and western outfit Jimmy Tokita and the Mountain Playboys. Now in his early 70s, he is still going strong.

Terauchi has released a vast number of records in his long career, embracing country, surf, Hawaiian, rock’n’roll, funk, classical and more. He rode the wave of the Eleki boom, a musical style encompassing surf and beat instrumentals. The fuse was lit by the Ventures’ first trip to Japan in 1962, although the trend started in earnest in 1964, when Terauchi and media promoter Nabe Pro organised a huge bash headlined by the Animals and the Ventures at the Kousei Nenkin Kaikan in Tokyo. This was the year that Takeshi Terauchi and the Blue Jeans released their debut album “Korezo Surfing” (Let's Go Surfing).

Sales of electric guitars in Japan rocketed, the demand so great that even the burgeoning electrical corporations produced their first models. There were several bands playing Eleki – notably the Spacemen and Yuzo Kayama and the Launchers – but, armed with his custom red Fender Jaguar, Takeshi Terauchi and his Blue Jeans led the vanguard.

Terauchi rejects suggestions that he was influenced by the Ventures, although they were certainly no hindrance to his rise, and he often played a Mosrite, a gift from the band. He is adamant that his music emanates from Japan, and the tracks on this collection stand as a testament to the fact. Many are versions of traditional Japanese folk songs (Minyo), a style that became much copied. Terauchi’s speedy “shredding” technique could be said to echo Tsugaru shamisen, a unique blues-like style of percussive, semi-improvised playing from northern Japan. He revisited some of these standards for his 1974 album “Tsugaru Jongara” with the re-formed Blue Jeans.

Here is a selection of some of the finest beat instrumentals, traditional-infused nuggets and later raw Tsugaru-influenced workouts from his long and varied career.  – Ace Records

“The Sixties instrumental surf craze hit postwar Japan with the same seismic magnitude as Beatlemania. Takeshi "Terry" Terauchi proved the incomparable leader of the movement as a Zen master Buddhist and quicksilver guitarist with violent, needlepoint precision. As bewitching as the Sonics or the 13th Floor Elevators at peak levitation, Nippon Guitars collects the greatest hits from his two most prominent groups, the Bunnys and Blue Jeans. Terauchi achieved national acclaim for his fusion of Japanese traditionals and the modern eleki boom, captured here in opening riptide "Ganroku Hanami Odori" from 1967 as well as the tremolo terror of "Hoshi Eno Tabiji (Journey to the Stars)," which sounds like a lost translation of the Pulp Fiction theme. That Eastern accent makes Terauchi's body of work an asterisk in the surf rock canon, instantly familiar like the Bo Diddley beat, an effect heightened by oriental touches in the hypnotic "Sado Okesa" and "Touryanse," the latter rising like a sun-dazed mirage in a Kurisawa Western. Side two of the vinyl unfolds a near-sequential and heavy awakening: kerosene dream "Nambuzaka Yuki No Wakare," serene ballad "Tsugaru Yamabiko Uta (Mountain Echo)," and closing chase scene "Tsugaru Eleki Bushi." Nippon Guitars offers more than a retrospective; it's a revelation.” – The Austin Chronicle

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