Random A-List for Set: Jazz

Jazz, including fusion, excluding vocals.

Here are 12 A-list albums, selected at random from Set: Jazz. Use your Reload button to get more.

Steve Coleman and Five Elements: Rhythm People (The Resurrection of Creative Black Civilization) [1990, Novus]
Jazz specialists are claiming the just-released Black Science as the one they always had in them, but from my specialty (whatever that might be), this 1990 item has the right stuff: almost true fusion, yet I diddybop around to its secondhand funk. Helps that they trade off like the Lakers on a fast break. Helps that Coleman plays his alto off. And it really helps that Cassandra Wilson, called in for two horrendous lyrics on the new one, is held down to a scat. A-

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme [1964, Impulse]
This four-track, 33-minute January 1965 release is without question Coltrane's most beloved album. Only certified gold in 2001, it never cracked the Billboard 200 as it cemented 'Trane's divine status in Japan, was adored by American hippies from the Byrds and Carlos Santana on down, and served as theme music to Lester Bangs's wake at CBGB. The through-composed product of two weeks of solitary brainstorming at the Long Island home Coltrane had established with his new wife Alice, it's meditative rather than freewheeling, with each member of his classic quartet instructed to embark on his own harmonically mapped excursion and the title set to a chanted four-note melody you could hum in your sleep. I'm on my fourth consecutive play with no signs of tune fatigue as I write, plus my wife loves it. All true, all remarkable. But how much you value it, I expect, depends on how much faith you place in your own spirituality. Having finally freed my changer to move on to My Favorite Things, which I've loved since I bought it in 1960, I wonder how soon I'll play it again and regret to say that that may well depend on who dies when. And having purchased the Deluxe Edition CD to augment my vinyl, I say go for the single. A-

Eric Dolphy: The Berlin Concerts [1978, Inner City]
Two astonishing sides and two more than adequate ones, all recorded in 1961. "Hi-Fly" is a feature for flute, an instrument not even Dolphy can induce me to get passionate about, and "When Lights Are Low" is playful to the point of waggishness. But the 19-minute version of Tadd Dameron's "Hot House," with Dolphy on alto and Benny Bailey on trumpet, is a fluent, unselfconscious synthesis of bebop and "free jazz" that sounds entirely up-to-the-minute in 1979. And the bravura exchanges on "I'll Remember April" will make your favorite guitar hero seem a slowhand indeed. A

Mahavishnu Orchestra/John McLaughlin: The Inner Mounting Flame [1971, Columbia]
He couldn't very well call it the John McLaughlin Lifetime, but that's what it is--with Billy Cobham a somewhat heavier Tony Williams, Rick Laird subbing for fellow Scot Jack Bruce, violinist Jerry Goodman and keyboard man Jan Hammer vainly filling in Khalid Yasin's organ textures, and McLaughlin back on electric guitar. The raveups aren't quite as intense as "Right On," though "Awakening" and "The Noonward Race" come close, but McLaughlin has a much clearer idea of how to make a rock band work than Williams. No vocals is the right idea--imagine what claptrap he'd come up with putting the beyond into words. To change pace he provides more of the noble, elemental themes he introduced on Devotion--my favorite is "The Dance of Maya," which breaks into a blues about halfway through. Mistake: "A Lotus on Irish Streams," a lyrical digression featuring Goodman, who ought to be watched closely at all times. A

Nils Petter Molvaer: NP3 [2002, Universal]
More trumpet electronica from Norway, cold as solid ether, but organic unto spring like frost rather than air-conditioned unto laryngitis like a mainframe room. It's cool like itself rather than cool like Miles--true chill-out music. Now he should tell us just what sea the guys on the cover are entering with no clothes on, and when. A-

Thelonious Monk: The Very Best [2005, Blue Note]
Everything El Supremo did for Blue Note is worth owning and these foundational recordings of his best-known tunes--13 in all, running just under 40 minutes--aren't always as forcefully shaped or incandescently accompanied as in their more practiced Prestige, Riverside, and Columbia incarnations. I miss "Skippy," Sonny Rollins, and Charlie Rouse; hell, I miss Ernie Henry. Nevertheless, there is no simpler or cheaper way to access Monk's compositional genius in its naked glory, and here more than anywhere his playing gives the Sinatra-like sense that he both knows exactly what he wants to do and is always shifting slightly at the last millisecond. A powerful thinker with a wicked sense of humor, he can't resist seeking perfection--or is it playin' with ya? A

David Murray: Francesca [2024, Intakt]
Eight tracks ranging between 6:09 and 10:54 featuring the greatest working tenor player and three sidepeople I'm not jazzed up enough to expatiate on. But they're all hyperactive and that's exciting not messy: Marta Sanchez on piano, Luke Stewart on bass, Russell Carter on drums. The music never stops moving around, and while I suppose it could be argued that Murray's virtuosity is too much an end in itself here, that kind of talk is for prigs. This kind of genuine ensemble is one of the things jazz is for. A-

David Murray: Jug-a-Lug [1995, DIW]
Recommended recent jazz titles by this endlessly resourceful if suspiciously prolific recording artist include the Malcolm tribute-quickie MX (Red Baron), stirred and soured by Bobby Bradford's cornet, Saxmen (Red Baron), which knocks back Young-Rollins-Parker-Rouse-Stitt-Coltrane standards guaranteed to knock new jazz fans out, and Special Quartet (DIW/Columbia), featuring McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones to guess what conceptual end (start with Rhino's Coltrane box and proceed). I can also dig Shakill's II (DIW import), a less audaciously greasy follow-up to his first Don Pullen-drenched avant-lounge organ outing. But more to the pop point is the leap he takes here and on The Tip, cut during the same four-day burst: a funk band, period, or do I mean question mark-explanation point?! Imperfect for sure, but although I'd prefer it didn't swing so much, in fact the full-bodied confidence of the only-jazz that begins this set gives it the edge over The Tip, which never equals the Sly Stone and David Murray classics it takes off from. The drag throughout is keybman Robert Irving III, whose adoration of Joe Zawinul almost transforms The Tip into the darn good Weather Report album Murray's damn lucky this one ain't. The motorvator is bass-whomping Darryl Jones, who is all over this record once it gets going--most spectacularly on the loosey-goosey bass-clarinet workout "Acoustic Octo Funk," where Irving has the common sense to imitate Pullen for a while. They should have made a single album out of all this--real pop pros know an an outtake when they hear one. But it frees both Branford Marsalis and Maceo Parker to go back where they came from. A-

Matthew Shipp: Harmony and Abyss [2004, Thirsty Ear]
My tastes in piano run to five-fingered banging, my tastes in ambience to rhythm massage. So although I've admired several of Shipp's many albums, Nu Bop especially, this one I identify with. The hard-driving "Galaxy 105" tinkles jazzily at times, and "Invisible Light" contributes a free interlude, but mostly Shipp and his certified-jazzbo drums-and-bass--plus, crucially, programmer FLAM--explore pulses and textures: all distinct, some quite jazzlike but most on the trip-hop side. Remember "acid jazz"? This is what it wasn't tough enough for. A-

James Blood Ulmer: Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions [2001, Label M]
Ulmer's singing has always been Delta, but on the blues album of his life Vernon Reid hooks him up with Willie Dixon, and the three unmatched neoprimitivists make roughslick music together. Not all the best tracks are Dixon songs: here's to old-time DJ Holmes Daylie's "Too Lazy to Work, Too Nervous to Steal," John Lee Hooker's whistled "Dimples," the eight-minute "I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)" turbocharging over the dull memory of the nine-minute "Walking Blues." And if Dixon ever heard anything like the harmolodics Ulmer lays on "Little Red Rooster" and "I Love the Life I Live," Pete Cosey was God. A-

World Saxophone Quartet: World Saxophone Quartet Plays Duke Ellington [1986, Nonesuch]
As someone who's never gone all the way with the elegantly appointed orchestrations of what all agree is the man's greatest period, I admire the way the quartet format suggests sonorous magnificence without deploying an embarrassment of riches in its service. Barely touched by deconstructive anarchy, these homages constitute the richest, mellowest music ever recorded by a group whose accomplishment has always been tarnished by a certain theoretical veneer. I suppose a rhythm section would only distract from its textured gloss. And have no doubt that the guest composer adds a quantum of quality. A-