- Natural Information Society – descension (Out of our Constrictions). Joshua Abrams’ minimalism/trance/jazz outfit is one of my favorite current groups, and I’m still catching up to everything they’ve put out. This is a recent live recording, with Evan Parker sitting in. The sonic combination of Parker’s soprano sax and Jason Stein’s bass clarinet is naturally reminiscent of the great Coltrane/Dolphy band, but this group is more about interplay and rhythm than expansive individual solos.
- James Brown – The Payback. This 1973 album features more laid-back, hypnotic grooves than I’m used to hearing from James Brown. My all-time favorites are probably still the relentlessly catchy and more uptempo numbers on the compilations In The Jungle Groove and Motherlode, but I was pleased to put these tracks into the mix too.
- Greg Osby – Inner Circle. Osby was responsible for one of the best turn-of-the-century jazz albums, The Invisible Hand, on which he enlisted jazz elders Andrew Hill and Jim Hall. Recorded around the same time but with a band of all younger players, this album is also excellent. With its complex tunes and Stefon Harris’ vibes opening up the sound, the session feels like a fresh update of some of the modernist Blue Note releases of the 1960s.
- Ella Fitzgerald – Sings The Duke Ellington Songbook. I feel like I’m committing heresy when I confess I don’t really love Ella’s string of songbook albums that much: the orchestrations are mostly just too stiff and middlebrow for me. The Ellington songbook album, though, is a revelation: it’s the Duke himself and the band backing her up, and you can’t get jazzier than that. A true classic.
- Darondo – Let My People Go. I was pretty surprised to hear some of these totally unknown yet wonderfully soulful funk tracks come across the stereo in the bar downstairs from my office in Beijing. Darondo was a mysterious figure who recorded little and subsequently vanished from view, which is too bad: he gets close to the exalted level of Al Green, or Sly Stone’s solo records.
The Tangled Woof 