Solid Records: MPS & More
With Silence
Munich, Studio 70, 24 June 1972. Four players who would otherwise never have been in the same room: Karl Berger on vibraphone and marimba, the Japanese pianist Masahiko Sato (the trio Trinity for Enja dates from the same period), the Austrian bassist…
Vibrations
Berlin, 7 November 1971, the week of the Berliner Jazztage. Terumasa Hino on trumpet and flute with the Frankfurt tenor Heinz Sauer, Peter Warren on bass and Pierre Favre on drums, for Enja's second year. Five long pieces, free and arranged in turns,…
A Tribute To Mal Waldron
Yosuke Yamashita and Mal Waldron knew each other from Waldron's years of touring Japan; in 1985 they would record as a piano duo at the Pit Inn. A Tribute To Mal Waldron comes five years earlier, recorded at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg on 17 and 1…
A Touch Of The Blues
Nuremberg, East-West Jazz Festival, 6 May 1972. Mal Waldron's trio with Jimmy Woode, the former Ellington bassist, and Allen Blairman on drums. Three long pieces, all by Waldron, taped live and issued by Enja only in 1975.
Waldron had settled in Euro…
Hard Talk
Nuremberg, East-West Festival, 4 May 1974. Mal Waldron's quintet with Steve Lacy on soprano, Manfred Schoof on cornet, Isla Eckinger and Allen Blairman. Four Waldron compositions, live; AllMusic gives it four and a half stars and calls it a strong se…
Live In Ruvo Di Puglia 2000
Cecil Taylor solo at the Talos Festival, Ruvo di Puglia, 10 September 2000: one continuous improvisation, unreleased for twenty-one years and issued by Enja in 2021 for its fiftieth anniversary. From the same week as the Willisau concert and the same…
Vintage Dolphy
Eric Dolphy live in 1962-63, in Gunther Schuller's Twentieth-Century Innovations series at Carnegie Hall and in Syracuse: his own quartet with Richard Davis and J.C. Moses, three Schuller third-stream pieces with strings and Jim Hall, and a Donna Lee…
Noisy Silence - Gentle Noise
One day at the MPS studio in Villingen, 21 January 1969. Dave Pike on vibes, Volker Kriegel on guitar and sitar, Hans Rettenbacher and Peter Baumeister, produced by Joachim-Ernst Berendt. The Dave Pike Set's debut, with the sitar piece Mathar and Kri…
Haiku
No big band. Haiku, recorded over four days from 1 to 4 June 1973 and released by MPS in 1974, puts Don Ellis's trumpet in front of a twelve-piece string orchestra and a small rhythm group, on ten of his own pieces, each named after and written from …
Between Or Beyond
Villingen, 29 June 1970. Mike Nock, the New Zealand pianist who had come up through Yusef Lateef's and Art Blakey's bands and was then leading the San Francisco fusion group the Fourth Way, records a session for MPS with the Fourth Way rhythm section…
The Day After
Rolf Kühn and Phil Woods had worked together in New York in the late 1950s, when Kühn was there with Benny Goodman and the Tommy Dorsey orchestra. The Day After, released by MPS in 1972, is their reunion: Woods on alto, Kühn on clarinet, Joachim Kühn…