Jazz /
A Letter from Slowboat
LP version. 180 gram vinyl; Half speed mastered; Heavy sleeve and obi. We Release Jazz announce the official reissue of Ryo Fukui's final album, the very personal contemporary jazz offering, A Letter from Slowboat, sourced from the original masters. Known for his miraculous albums 1976's Scenery (WRJ 001CD/LP) and 1977's Mellow Dream (WRJ 002CD/LP), legendary Hokkaido pianist Ryo Fukui, with the help of his wife Yasuko, opened his very own jazz club in Sapporo in 1995, Slowboat. This is where Ry…
Ryo Fukui in New York
LP version. 180 gram vinyl; Half speed mastered; Heavy sleev and obi. We Release Jazz announce the official reissue of Ryo Fukui's New York sessions with Lisle Atkinson and Leroy Williams, the aptly titled album Ryo Fukui in New York, sourced from the original masters. Recorded in February 1999 at Avatar Recording Studios in New York and inspired by Ryo Fukui's idol and mentor Barry Harris, the fourth album from the famed Sapporo pianist captures memorable sessions with seasoned American jazz mu…
Lush Life
* Limited edition 180 gram solid purple coloured vinyl. 2020 Stock * Lush Life (1958) is among John Coltrane's best endeavors on the Prestige label. One reason can easily be attributed to the interesting personnel and the subsequent lack of a keyboard player for the August 16, 1957 session that yielded the majority of the material. Coltrane (tenor sax) had to essentially lead the compact trio of himself, Earl May (bass), and Art Taylor (drums). The intimate setting is perfect for ballads such as…
The World of the Children
* 2021 Repress. Remastered. 180 gram LP * One of the rarest albums on the infamous Jazz label Strata-East from 1977 and it’s a spiritual soul jazz masterpiece. Sonelius Smith’s free piano comes together with Shamek Farrah’s heartfelt saxophone for a totally unforgettable journey into the meaning of sacred jazz. Fresh and imaginative, but not too improvisational. Rhapsodic but never over-indulgent and with a raucous, bold groove that’s in the real classic Strata East mold.Playful and wild but bea…
Kind of Blue
* Gatefold with session photos. Hype sticker. HQ Virgin Vinyl 180 gram. 2020 Stock * "Very few albums can match this Miles Davis's 1959 classic, often considered the greatest album in the history of jazz. Backed by an exquisite combo, this is an essential recording even for those who don't listen to jazz. With Davis himself on trumpet, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley on alto saxophone, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Wynton Kelly and Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on d…
Africa / Brass
* Limited edition 180 gram solid orange coloured vinyl. 2020 Stock * This 1961 Impulse album was particularly notable for Coltrane’s use of the ex- panded sound provided by a ‘big band’ with trumpets, trombone, baritone sax, Eric Dolphy’s bass clarinet and flute, and (most unusually) French horns, euphonium and tuba. Overlaying this backing is one of Coltrane’s great quartets with Messrs. Tyner (who, with Dolphy, did the arranging), Workman and Jones. The album’s centrepiece is the extended Colt…
Spiritual Jazz 12: Impulse!
In Jazzman Records' latest chapter of Spiritual Jazz, the label returns to the source -- the Impulse! label, and the monumental influence of its most prominent artist, John Coltrane. Since the first release in the series back in 2008, Jazzman Records has mapped out the growth of the spiritual sound in jazz. Spiritually energized and politically conscious, the spiritual sound in jazz music is one of the most important currents in the music. The label's series has charted the growth of the style f…
Brilliant!
Why some artists achieve the recognition they deserve while other equally talented ones don't depends on many things. But one thing is clear, that obscurity does not always mean lack of talent. Regardless, it is always a pleasure to discover little known but immensely gifted musicians and it is really a great pleasure to hear the reissue of The Diamond Five's Brilliant!. The Diamond Five, a Dutch quintet led by pianist Cees Slinger, was founded in 1959 and lasted until 1965. They were based at t…
Mona Lisa - Moldejazz 73
* Edition of 500 * An amazing loft tape find of a Norwegian Jazz concert suite taped at Molde Jazz Festival 1973, Christian Reim’s sextet Mona Lisa features Norway's top jazzmen at the time and it’s a rollercoaster post-bop showcase with influences from modal and spiritual jazz with folk undertones and pop psychedelia, one of a kind, never previously released and in great sound quality!
Live in Avignon, France 1989
On October 14th 1989, Horace Tapscott, founder of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, performed alongside his close friend and musical partner Michael Session at the Théâtre du Chêne Noir in Avignon, France. This was during a tour in which they traveled across Europe. The duo presented compositions by Leimert Park musicians Jesse Sharps, Nate Morgan and Tapscott himself.
The stark instrumentation of this concert led to minimal arrangements of compositions typically performed by much larger ensembl…
Peace And Love
Japan import. Recorded on 29 September and 1 October, 1970 at TSC Japan. Comes in gatefold LP. Reissued for the first time. Reissued for the first time. Rare and rich contents from 1970s Japanese jazz which is now gathering global attention, originally released on Terumasa Hino's private label Love Records and distributed by a Japanese major label. Representing "Ode To Workman" from J Jazz : Deep Modern Jazz From Japan 1969-1984 released on BBE, in his session with local NY musicians, Peace And …
I'll Remember
LP version. Tip-on sleeve. For every celebrated name in jazz, soul and related music, there are probably another 1000 musicians who had all the talent and potential but for whom widespread recognition remained elusive. Roscoe Weathers is one such figure, a jazzman who earned his chops the hard way, a sideman in smoky clubs from Memphis to Seattle, before finally settling in LA. He recorded a significant amount of music through the 1960s, but never found the slightest modicum of commercial acclai…
My Greatest Love
LP version. We Release Jazz present a reissue from Geneva's Boillat Thérace Quintet, the My Greatest Love album, featuring bebop and hard-bop legend Benny Bailey and available for the first time since 1975. Galvanized by the creation of the Montreux Jazz Festival in the late '60s and lively local scenes, jazz music was healthy and booming in Switzerland in the 1970s. One band that beautifully captured this energy was Jean-François Boillat and RaymondThérace's Boillat Thérace Quintet whose self-t…
Boillat Therace Quintet
LP version. We Release Jazz present its sixth release, a reissue of Boillat Thérace Quintet's self-titled album, available for the first time since its original limited private pressing in 1974. Full of prolific and inspired local clusters and boosted by the recently launched Montreux Jazz Festival, the Swiss jazz scene was vibrant and inventive in the 1970s, notably in the region surrounding Lake Geneva. This is precisely where jazz activist and brilliant pianist Jean-François Boillat and wind …
Black Is The Color: Live in Poughkeepsie and New Windsor 1969-70
Never-before-issued music from three very different settings in upstate New York, all recorded in the period running up to Poughkeepsie multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee's Nation Time (CVSD 054CD). From a year before that landmark LP, in the same hall at Vassar College, McPhee led a band with soulful vibraphonist Ernie Bostic and voluble rhythm section of Tyrone Crabb and Bruce Thompson, both of Nation Time fame, performing a John Coltrane-oriented set that included versions of Mongo Santamaria's…
The Fantastic Jazz Harp Of Dorothy Ashby
This is the sixth album by Dorothy Ashby, a Detroit born jazz harpist who passed away in her early 50s in 1986 way before her time. She left us a rich legacy of music with this 1965 release being one of her milestones. The music is pure bright and swinging with a joyful mood. Dorothy Ashby performs her lines big time with her harp and captures your soul with the melodies she picks from its strings. She is always there upfront while the brass section mostly fills the background with colour if the…
Sahib's Jazz Party
In a time before jazz music went free and ‘avant-garde’ there were a couple of inspired souls who put an emphasize on extended jams and improvised yet melodic parts based on a rather repetitive rhythm background. The result in turning away from the rather artistic and complicated bebop was the modal jazz that came up in the second half of the 1950s and lasted as the leading style until the mid to late 60s when bands either became free avant garde or discovered rock music to boost up their sound.…
Jazz Piano
Roman pianist and film composer Armando Trovajoli scored over 300 feature films during his remarkable career. Starting out in the 1930s as a player in Orchestra Rocco Grasso and Sesto Carlini’s beloved jazz orchestra, in 1949 he represented Italy at the Festival du Jazz de Paris and he began composing films three years later. Jazz Piano, released by RCA in 1959, saw Trovajoli fronting a quartet with three of his regular orchestra members, namely drummer Sergio Conti, bassist/arranger Berto Pisan…
A Love Supreme
One of the most important records ever made, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme was his pinnacle studio outing, that at once compiled all of the innovations from his past, spoke to the current of deep spirituality that liberated him from addictions to drugs and alcohol, and glimpsed at the future innovations of his final two and a half years. Recorded over two days in December 1964, Trane's classic quartet-- Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Jimmy Garrison -- stepped into the studio and created one of t…
And All Those Cats
**2020 small repress* This is a terrific-sounding Italian compilation of sounds by Sahib Shihab, the great saxophonist and flutist who is criminally under-recognized for his contribution not only to the language of hard bop, but for his multi-dimensional look at world music and his influence on soul-jazz and the harder swinging big bands that recorded for MPS in the 1960s and '70s. A complete iconoclast, Shihab followed the beat of his own drummer and that is clearly on display here, in recordin…