The Best Blue Note Album in the World . . . Ever! (Blue Note)
This "best album in the world . . . ever!" business is a marketing scam that rarely lives up to its title, and this certainly isn't the best Blue Note album ever released; but it is the best sampler yet of classic Blue Note recordings by the likes of John Coltrane,) Cannonball Adderly (with Miles Davis) and Kenny Burrell. All jazz greats doing, respectively, pretty definitive readings of Blue Train, Autumn Leaves and Midnight Blue. Crossover fans also have cuts like Cassandra Wilson doing Van's Tupelo Honey. But this real appeal of this double CD probably will be to rap and hip-hop artists who, like Us3 (featured here on Cantaloop) sample dudes like Grant Green and Lou Donaldson. Easy access to one of the greatest jazz labels in the world . . . ever!By Joe JacksonTubby Hayes: (Spotlite)
Live dates and lengthy solos are often an endurance test for the listener, but not with the Tubby Hayes Quintet, by any standards a marvellous post-bop outfit. Here it's caught at the peak of its considerable form at a club over three decades ago, fresh, exciting, dazzlingly inventive, always coherent and interesting, never self-indulgent. Hayes - on tenor, mostly, and flute - and Jimmy Deuchar on trumpet and the deeper-throated mellophonium, make a front line of enviable power and imagination, while the rhythm section had the excellent Terry Shannon and Freddy Logan, on piano and bass respectively, and an absolutely brilliant Allan Ganley tying everything together on drums. Vintage stuff, comparable to the best live recordings of its then contemporary style brother, the Shelly Manne quintet.
By Ray Comiskey
Terence Blanchard: Jazz in Film(Sony)
Blakey alumnus Blanchard's notable talent as a trumpeter is common currency these days. On this absorbing exploration, recorded last year, of some of the better film scores of the past - among them Taxi Driver, The Pawnbroker and Anatomy of a Murder - his burgeoning gifts as an arranger are impressively demonstrated. Against discreet, spare orchestral backdrops of taste and intelligence, he foregrounds a stellar sextet/quintet led by himself, with trombonist Steve Turre and saxophonists Joe Henderson and Donald Harrison, and allows them space to be themselves. This is music with a striking sense of balance and blend between the written and the improvised, epitomised in the late Kenny Kirkland's gorgeous piano and the broodingly effective solo and orchestral responses to the noir of Chinatown.
By Ray Comiskey
