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TAV CURATOR'S PICK - JAZZ
BBE Music present the latest in the acclaimed J Jazz Masterclass Series: Kohsuke Mine ‘First’, the debut album by one of the leading artists in the new wave of modern jazz that swept Japan in the late 60s and early 70s. ‘First’ epitomises the shifting sound of the Japanese modern jazz scene of the time, characterised by rich textures and tones, kinetic rhythms, punctuated by urgent, angular melody lines.

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Reissued for the first time since original 1970 release, Mine is joined by master keyboard player Masabumi Kikuchi on electric piano, and two American players – bassist Larry Ridley and drummer Lenny McBrowne – to deliver one of the strongest debuts in the J Jazz canon. ‘First’ announced the arrival of a serious talent, one who was to be a hugely influential figure in the Japanese jazz scene across the decade that followed and beyond. ‘First’ established an artist who built a reputation for standout albums spanning spiritual jazz, post-bop, modal and funk-fusion. All of that started here, on this exemplary album.

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‘First’ is issued on CD, digital and vinyl. The vinyl edition is presented as a double album, cut at 45rpm by the Grammy-nominated Carvery, with full original reproduction artwork, including obi strip. Both CD and vinyl comes with a 4500 word sleeve note and interview with Kohsuke Mine by Tony Higgins, plus artist portraits by Shigeru Uchiyama. - BBE

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.

“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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There was something in the air in the urban corners of late ‘60s Japan. Student protests and a rising youth culture gave way to the angura (short for “underground) movement that thrived on subverting traditions of the post-war years. Rejection of the Beatlemania-inspired Group Sounds and the squeaky clean College Folk movements led the rise of what came to be known in Japan as “New Music,” where authenticity mattered more than replicating the sounds of their idols.

Some of the most influential figures in Japanese pop music emerged from this vital period, yet very little of their work has ever been released or heard outside of Japan, until now. Light In The Attic is thrilled to present Even a Tree Can Shed Tears, the inaugural release in the label’s Japan Archival Series. This is the first-ever, fully licensed collection of essential Japanese folk and rock songs from the peak years of the angura movement to reach Western audiences.

Nearly 50 years on, this “New Music” is born anew. – Light in the attic

The more one listens, the more (s)he feels compelled to research and learn -- not only about the artists, but the scene that birthed them. Ultimately, this is a soundtrack for an era of discovery that reflects the powerful desire of a generation striving to claim an identity of its own. – allmusic

Capturing the questioning, bohemian spirit of Japan’s late-Sixties underground movement is this lovely compilation, which demonstrates how the country’s postwar generation soaked up Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and the rest for their homegrown folk-rock boom. – The Times

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

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 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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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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