Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.
On a cold Febru
ary evening in 1966, jazz fans lined up around the block waiting for the doors to open at the famed Village Vanguard to catch a new big band formed by Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. Vanguard founder Max Gordon had invited the orchestra to play that evening and for subsequent Monday nights. Inside the club was Resonance Records founder George Klabin, a 19-year-old self-taught sound engineer and Columbia University student who had already established a reputation recording jazz music around New York City. Using a small cocktail table by the edge of the stage near the drums, Klabin set up his equipment and captured astounding sound quality that evening, recording directly to two-track, adjusting the mic volume for each of the soloists on the fly. Klabin’s recording became a demo tape for the band, which secured them a record deal, and he was given free rein to play the recordings on his radio show. Klabin has now transferred and re-mastered the audio, using the original two-track tape as the source for the first official release of “All My Yesterdays: the Debut 1966 Recordings at the Village Vanguard.”
It’s be
en an astonishing couple of years for GoGo Penguin, the UK trio of drummer Rob Turner, double bassist Nick Blacka and pianist Chris Illingsworth. Their trademark mash-up of minimalist piano themes, deeply propulsive bass lines and electronica-inspired drums has seen their 2014 album shortlisted for the Mercury Prize and fuelled their exhilarating live shows from their hometown of Manchester to Montreal and Paris to London. Drawing on a heady brew of influences from Brian Eno, John Cage, Massive Attack and Aphex Twins, the band has created a brave new sound that is wholly their own. In the midst of all of this, GoGo Penguin signed with the iconic jazz label Blue Note which has released “Man Made Object.”
Also this week, gui
tarist Julian Lage debuts his new trio with modern masters Scott Colley on bass and drummer Kenny Wolleson on “Arclight”.
The SF Jazz Collective unveils their latest project, “Live SF Jazz Center 2015: the Music of Michael Jackson and Original Compositions” as we look forward to their appearance in Dubuque in April.
Musician an
d visual artist June Bisantz, who has performed and recorded with a number distinguished jazz musicians including Steve Swallow, Lew Soloff and Mike Stern, offers up “It’s Always You,” the second volume of her Chet Baker Project.