Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify
It may be somewhat ironic, yet ultimately fitting, that the final recording by Larry Willis brought the veteran pianist and composer back to the place where he first began his impressive career as a recording artist, a career that spanned six decades. He first entered the hallowed halls of Rudy Van Gelder’s legendary Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey studios as a twenty-two year-old graduate of the Manhattan School of Music in January of 1965 to record with Jackie McLean for Blue Note Records. Willis’s expansive resume includes entries with the likes of Cannonball and Nat Adderly, Stan Getz, Carmen McRae, Woody Shaw, and many more. He appeared on hundreds of albums as a sideman and dozens more as a leader. His final CD, “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” features long-time friends Victor Lewis and Joe Ford and his relatively new colleague Jeremy Pelt.
With a lyrical modern jazz sensibility, saxophonist and composer Tim Shaghoian’s debut album is a thoughtful exploration of hope and wonder. His compositions developed as gentle beacons guiding him toward a sense of clarity in understanding life events that have impacted him most. His nine original pieces, performed by his California-based quintet, dance with subtle shifts of emotion while song-like melodies are framed in unexpected rhythmic and harmonic structure.
Also this week, trumpeter-composer-arranger Bill Warfield has one foot deeply embedded in funk and the other striding into the further reaches of jazz while leading his Hell’s Kitchen Funk Orchestra on “Smile”;
\
pianist Christian Sands reunites with bassist Yasushi Nakamura and saxophonist Marcus Strickland, and is joined by trumpeter Sean Jones, trombonist Steve Davis, guitarist Marven Sewell and drummer Clarence Penn for his third full-length recording, “Be Water”;
and “The Way I Feel” is the latest from Chicago saxophonist Bernard Scavella.