LISTEN UP: NEW RELEASES OF VARYING DEGREES OF BRILLIANCE (8.26.2022)

 JIMMY SMITH - A DATE WITH JIMMY SMITH VOL. 1





Originally released in 1957. Jimmy Smith was the most inventive and technically skilled organist of the bop generation. A Date With Jimmy Smith features performances recorded in the same year with Smith heading a sextet including a bunch of Blue Note heavyweights such as Donald Byrd (trumpet), Lou Donaldson (alto saxophone), Hank Mobley (tenor saxophone), Art Blakey (drums), plus a guitar-organ-drums combo with guitarist Eddie McFadden and drummer Donald Bailey, and as one would expect with those names this is groovy jazz at its best. Recorded on February 11 and 12, 1957.

LISTEN HERE:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTdej-oOKDg&list=PLMm9m6dhCpc7GMTunydLA7DSieFSiyb7h



LOS DEMENTES - MANICOMIO a LOCHA





This album marks the debut recording for Venezuela’s Velvet label by pianist Ray Pérez and his trombone-led salsa band Los Dementes. Heavy dance numbers and the distinctive vocals of Perucho Torcat make this historic 1967 rarity a sought-after collector’s item.   Now the LP has been lovingly restored, mastered from the original tapes, with its original artwork intact, preserving the legacy of Los Dementes for today’s generation of salsa lovers everywhere.  First time reissue. 

LISTEN HERE:

https://vampisoul.bandcamp.com/album/manicomio-a-locha?from=fanpub_fnb



VARIOUS - THE AFROSOUND OF COLUMBIA VOL 3





Third volume in Vampisoul's comp of Afro-Latin sounds from the golden period of the seminal Discos Fuentes label in Colombia.  An outstanding selection of twenty-six hard-to find-tracks, many reissued for the first time, covering a wide array of Afro-rooted genres, with an stronger focus on the music’s folkloric origins than in previous volumes, comprising recordings by the likes of Michi Sarmiento, Wganda Kenya, The Latin Brothers, Los Corraleros De Majagual, Peregoy . . .  Includes an extended booklet with notes by compiler Pablo Yglesias aka DJ Bongohead.

LISTEN HERE:

https://vampisoul.bandcamp.com/album/the-afrosound-of-colombia-vol-3?from=fanpub_fnb


JACK ROSE - JACK ROSE & THE BLACK TWIG PICKERS






The well-regarded steel-guitarist, banjo player, and experimental Pelt dronist Jack Rose teams up with the alternative string trio the Black Twig Pickers for this self-named 2009 collaboration. This isn't your typical Americana project, however, even as it respects all the eternal verities. The ever-forward spirit of that original folk-alt pioneer John Fahey, a big Rose influence, infuses the proceedings from beginning to end. First there's the overall sound, raw without courting a faux primitivism; the guitarist favors a bracing, hard-edged attack and he brings the more easygoing Pickers along in his wake. And there's the formal structure of the songs themselves (many of which feature the occasional casual vocal from Picker Mike Ganglof). Rose even revisits two instrumental pieces--"Kensington Blues" and "Revolt"--from previous solo albums. For their part, the Black Twigs --Ganglof (vocals, guitar, fiddle), Isak Howell (guitar, harmonica), Nate Bowell (percussion)--provide a reliable, sympathetic foil for Rose's ambitious yet focused wanderings. The result is that JACK ROSE & THE BLACK TWIG PICKERS is a lively, sometimes busy, always swinging lesson in American music counterpoint.

LISTEN HERE:

https://jackrose.bandcamp.com




PELT - DAUPHIN ELEGIES







First new studio recordings from Pelt in three years finds them picking up where 2005's Untitled CD left off:  delivering massive slabs of heavy, all-acoustic drone action. "Waning Crescent" is an ominous workout for three large gongs, rich with overtones and subsonic rumble. "Fire Signs Along the Field" offers a slightly jarring quartet of spare string noise, with Nathan Bowles (Black Twigs, Spiral Joy Band) sitting in on double bass.  "Cast Out to Deep Waters" is an immense thirty minute epic that fits into the archetypal classics in the Pelt canon, in the vein of "Empty Bell Ringing in the Sky" and Untitled's "I."  The all too brief "Crown of Comets" closes the album with the chiming, overlapping ring of bells recorded in Virginia's Falls Ridge caves.

LISTEN HERE:




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