Jothan Callins & The Sounds Of Togetherness - Winds Of Change (February 22, 2022 MAD ABOUT RECORDS)

Rare Spiritual Jazz funk Masterpiece reissue for the first time ever Worldwide with the original 4 page booklet

“Winds of Change” is generally compared to the Strata East style of jazz

Jothan Callins had played with Olatunji in the late 1960s, he both joined The Sun Ra Arkestra and founded his own Sounds of Togetherness. The incarnation of the band featured on this 1975 New York recording includes Cecil McBee, Norman Connors, Joseph Bonner, and Roland Duval.

Released as a one and done on Triumph Records, there is a little information about Callins and almost nothing about the sessions. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Callins played with a long list of luminaries, was an educator and obtained his Masters degree at the University of Pittsburgh (where Nathan Davis directed the jazz studies program). He established the Birmingham Youth Jazz Ensemble (BYJE) in addition to becoming the first Jazz Artist in Residence in the Birmingham Public Schools. At the time this record was released, Callins was teaching in NYC.

1. Prayer For Love And Peace 08:14

2. Winds Of Change 15:05

3. Sons And Daughters Of The Sun 10:03

4. Triumph (Invitation / Call To Warriors) 10:10

Composed By, Trumpet, Bells – Jothan Callins

Bass – Cecil McBee

Congas, Percussion – Roland Duval

Drums, Percussion – Norman Connors

Piano, Tambourine – Joseph Bonner

Engineer – Frank Kulaga

Illustration – Taiwo Duwal

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Dave Liebman - John Coltrane’s Meditations (January 2022 Arkadia Records)

“…the music is simply terrific. Water is Liebman’s first recording with Metheny, and it’s a solid combination… if he just keeps making records as engaging as this one, that’ll be libation enough: a tall glass of water.”

– Downbeat Magazine

20-time Grammy Award winner Pat Metheny plays alongside saxophone virtuoso David Liebman as he leads this remarkable quartet, that includes Jazz architects Cecil McBee and Billy Hart, as they examine the expansive and elusive nature of the primordial element, Water. From impressionistic ballads to tsunamis of sound, David Liebman’s Arkadia Records album, The Elements: Water is probably the most ambitious project of Liebman’s career.

“Here’s a Jazz concept album that actually works quite well… The combination of Liebman and Metheny is particularly strong, ranging from soft, ethnic-sounding passages to roaring avant-garde explosiveness – a potent reminder that there is far more to Jazz in the ‘90s than the more frequently heard, retro examinations of the past.”

– Don Heckman, Los Angeles Times

“They produce a greater variety of timbres and textures than most quartets due to Liebman doubling on tenor and soprano sax and wood flute and Metheny employing several guitars: acoustic, electric, guitar synth, and Pikasso guitar. Each group member plays impressively. Liebman has a bright, attractive soprano sound and displays considerable rhythmic grace when playing the instrument. On tenor he’s powerful; his solid full lower register work deserves special attention. And what a nice, big flute sound he produces.”

– Harvey Pekar, JazzTimes Magazine

Teaming up with guitar prodigy Pat Metheny, reedist David Liebman, who plays tenor saxophone, soprano sax, and wood flute, explores through music the various aspects and facets of water, giver of life and refresher of souls. The combination of Liebman and Metheny on this album is stunning. While the Arkadia Records album, Dave Liebman: The Elements: Water, leans towards Jazz’s less traditional sensibilities, it also contains an earthy quality that connects it to the sounds of nature, and in doing so creates an organic yet contemporary album that’s both accessible and inventive. 

1. Introduction 00:52

2. The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost 13:44

3. Compassion 10:55

4. Love 12:24

5. Consequences 07:35

6. Serenity 09:24

Composed by John Coltrane

Transcriptions by Caris Visentin

David Liebman: Tenor sax

Vic Juris: Guitar

Jamey Haddad: Drums and percussion

Phil Markowitz: Piano and synth

Tony Marino: Bass

With Special Guests:

Billy Hart: Drums

Cecil McBee: Bass

Tiger Okoshi: Trumpet

Caris Visentin: Oboe

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The Cookers - Look Out! (September 24, 2021 Gearbox Records)

Look Out! is the triumphant sixth album return of jazz supergroup The Cookers, due out on September 24th on double vinyl, CD, and digital. Recorded at the iconic Van Gelder studio in Englewood Cliffs and cut using a Van Gelder-era '67 Haeco Sculley lathe at Gearbox Records, the 7-track release comprises original, fresh pieces written by Cecil McBee, Billy Harper, and George Cables which channel the heady, aggressive post-bop era of the mid-60s.

Whereas the majority of the jazz tradition’s elder statesmen head their own groups, this is one of the few jazz bands to contain legacy musicians of this calibre functioning as an equitable, long-standing ensemble. Billy Harper, Cecil McBee, George Cables, Eddie Henderson, and Billy Hart all came up in the heady era of the mid ‘60s: Hart and Henderson were members of Herbie Hancock’s groundbreaking Mwandishi group; Cecil McBee anchored Charles Lloyd’s great ’60s quartet alongside Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette; Billy Harper was part of Lee Morgan’s last group, as well as being a member of Max Roach’s Quartet and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers; while George Cables held down the piano chair in numerous bands including groups led by Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Dexter Gordon and Art Pepper. David Weiss and Donald Harrison, from a more recent generation and the youngest members of the band, are experts in this forthright lingo, having gained experience performing with Art Blakey, Bobby Hutcherson, Freddie Hubbard, Charles Tolliver, Roy Haynes and Herbie Hancock.

After 14 years together, again the incredibly high level of musicianship has only increased with the revisiting of their fresh, challenging, boundary-pushing music from these legendary, revered, veteran improvisers. 

1. The Mystery of Monifa Brown

2. Destiny Is Yours

3. Cat's Out The Bag

4. Somalia

5. AKA Reggie

6. Traveling Lady

7. Mutima

Billy Harper: tenor sax

Eddie Henderson: trumpet

David Weiss: trumpet

Donald Harrison: alto sax

George Cables: piano

Cecil McBee: bass

Billy Hart: drums

Produced by David Weiss

Executive Producer: Darrel Sheinman 

Recorded at Van Gelder Recording Studio by Maureen Sickler

Mixed by Katherine Miller

Mastered by Caspar Sutton-Jones and Darrel Sheinman at Gearbox Records

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Roy Brooks - Understanding (July 23, 2021 Cellar Live)

Understanding, a blazing 1970 concert recording featuring the Detroit-born master percussionist Roy Brooks leading a gifted quintet through its spirited paces at Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom, will be released by Cellar Music Group's archival imprint, Reel to Real Recordings on July 17 as a limited edition 3 LP set exclusively at independent record stores for Record Store Day and as on 2 CDs/digital on July 23.

Comprising more than two hours of expansive performances averaging 20 minutes in length, the potent date was recorded by Left Bank Jazz Society and stars trumpeter Woody Shaw, tenor saxophonist Carlos Garnett, pianist Harold Mabern, and bassist Cecil McBee.

All proceeds from the release — produced with the cooperation of McBee and Garnett and the estates of Brooks, Mabern, and Shaw — will go directly to the Detroit Sound Conservancy, a non-profit organization founded in 2012 and devoted to the preservation, education, conservation, and place keeping of the Motor City’s musical heritage.

Born in 1938, Roy Brooks is perhaps best known as a sideman. He spent five years with pianist Horace Silver’s storied hard bop combo, appearing on the popular Song for My Father, and also worked behind Chet Baker, Yusef Lateef, and Charles Mingus, and alongside Max Roach in the percussion ensemble M’Boom.

Beyond his formidable, gale-force attack on the traps, Brooks — who died in his hometown in 2005 — delighted audiences with flights on the musical saw (heard on the present recording) and even invented a device, the “breath-a-tone,” with which he could change the pitch of his drums as he played. Sadly, the musician’s career was thrown off track in later years by severe mental illness. But the Famous Ballroom date displays him at the height of his considerable powers.

In his comprehensive liner notes for the collection, historian Mark Stryker, author of Jazz from Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2019), writes that Understanding “shines a long-overdue spotlight on Brooks. A product of Detroit’s mid-century jazz explosion, Brooks was a deeply swinging drummer of uncommon creativity, flexibility, fire and conceptual imagination.”

Led off by a 42-minute performance encompassing the Brooks-composed prelude and title track, Understanding roars through compositions by Shaw (“Zoltan,” first heard on organist Larry Young’s 1965 classic Unity) and Garnett (“Taurus Woman”) and a furious take on Charlie Parker’s “Billie’s Bounce” before an involved, vocal audience. Projected at a fever pitch, the music operates on the cusp between the ‘60s quintet innovations of Miles Davis (whose “The Theme” closes the gig) and the free-form explorations of John Coltrane and his acolytes.

Understanding is filled out by intimate written remembrances by a pair of Brooks’ classmates at Detroit’s Northwestern High School, journalist Herb Boyd and alto saxophonist Charles McPherson. 

1. Introduction 00:25

2. Prelude To Understanding 21:34

3. Understanding 20:10

4. Billie's Bounce 21:06

5. Zoltan 23:18

6. Taurus Woman 32:25

7. The Theme 04:31

Roy Brooks – drums

Carlos Garnett – tenor saxophone

Woody Shaw - trumpet

Harold Mabern – piano

Cecil McBee – bass

Recorded Live at The Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, MD on November 1, 1970

Produced for release by CORY WEEDS and ZEV FELDMAN

Executive Producer: RAYMON TORCHINKSY

Associate Producer: RAYMON TORCHINKSY and JOHN FOWLER

Project Assistance: ZAK SHELBY-SZYSZKO

Sound Restoration by CHRIS GESTRIN

Original Recording Engineer: VERNON WELSH

Cover Photo by BOB CRAWFORD

Art Direction and design: JOHN SELLARDS

Album Package Editor: SHARON MCINNIS

Production Manager: CORY WEEDS

Photo Research: ZEV FELDMAN and CORY WEEDS

Extra special thanks to Carlos Garnett, Cecil McBee and Raheem Brooks.

Dedicated to the memories of Roy Brooks, Woody Shaw and Harold Mabern

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Camille Thurman - Waiting for the Sunrise (CHESKY RECORDS August 24, 2018)

"You’re hard-pressed to find rising talents more exciting than Camille Thurman."

- New York Times 

Following up her Chesky debut, Inside the Moment, which debuted #25 on the Billboard Jazz Albums Chart, Camille Thurman returns for her sophomore Chesky effort. Supported by Jazz veterans Cecil McBee (Bass), Jack Wilkins (Guitar), Steve Williams (Drums), and Jeremy Pelt (Trumpet), Camille showcases her remarkable talent and potential both vocally and on saxophone on this collection of Jazz standards entitled Waiting for the Sunrise. 

Part of the Chesky Binaural + Series, all recorded with a single microphone, the band appears right before you with this spacious, lush and multi-dimensional recording. Now headphone users will hear the same three-dimensional sound and imaging as audiophiles have for the past 25 years with Chesky Recordings. Also these new Binaural+ Series albums capture even more spatial realism for the home audiophile market, bringing you one step closer to the actual event. You will hear some of the most natural and pure music ever recorded.

Camille Thurman: Voice and Tenor Saxophone

Cecil McBee: Bass

Jack Wilkins: Guitar

Steve Williams: Drums

Jeremy Pelt: Trumpet

1. I Just Found Out About Love

2. Some Of These Days

3. Tarde

4. After You’ve Gone

5. September In The Rain

6. The Nearness Of You

7. Easy to Love

8. I’m On Your Side

9. World Waiting For The Sunrise

10. If You Love Me (Really Love Me)

Alan Braufman - Valley of Search (Reissue) THE CONTROL GROUP June 29, 2018

The first ever reissue of the 1975 free jazz album originally released on India Navigation. 

What we know of Downtown New York comes from the countercultural and creative flowering that emerged in lower Manhattan in the 1960s, attributable to cheap live-work spaces called lofts. These were often abandoned and disused small manufacturing spaces and they became a nexus for artistic practice and life. From a jazz perspective, lofts were alternatives to the club scene, and they gained notoriety in the 1970s. Places like Studio We, Studio Rivbea, The Ladies’ Fort, Ali’s Alley, and Environ became central in the development of the new music. But even the underground had an underground, and the happenings at 501 Canal Street on the West Side were a point of activity in which a small but dedicated number of people took part. 

In 1973 a cadre of free improvising musicians relocated from Boston to lower Manhattan: pianist Gene Ashton (now known as Cooper-Moore), bassist Chris Amberger, and saxophonists David S. Ware and Alan Braufman. All had studied at Berklee College of Music, though they stood apart from most collegiate musicians. Ashton secured the building at 501 and the rent for the each of the four usable floors was $140 a month. The first floor became a performance space, while Ware and Braufman took the front and back of the second floor, respectively. Ashton was on the third floor with his young family, and Amberger was on the fourth. Later, drummer Tom Bruno and his partner, vocalist Ellen Christi would take Amberger’s spot. Along with bassist David Saphra and drummer Ralph Williams, the Braufman-Ashton unit became the house band, rehearsing regularly and performing in the storefront. 

Braufman was born in 1951 in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, moving to Boston to attend Berklee in 1968. In his own words, he “started playing clarinet at eight; my mom was deeply into the music, so she would play Mingus, Eric Dolphy and Coltrane. It grabbed me – there was something exciting about it that I didn’t hear in other music, so no matter what I was going to be a musician. When I was thirteen I got my first saxophone. I had a teacher who could teach me how to play but not how to improvise (which is what I wanted to do) so I had to figure it out. I didn’t know changes, but I could pick out the patterns that were happening in free music and I could figure out what to do. I would teach myself patterns and scales, figure out some harmonics – I was self-taught until I got to Berklee.” 

Braufman's sound — “Alan had a huge sound on alto and voice that was his, and that was rare in a town where you had lots of young players coming up” (Cooper-Moore) — was immediately appealing and rooted in such forebears as Jackie McLean. In Boston, he made other connections, including drummer David Lee Jr.’s wife-to-be who ran the coat check at the Jazz Workshop. The saxophonist parlayed that into working lights at the venue and, more importantly, a friendship with Lee that resulted in the percussionist’s place on this album. Braufman also sat in at the Jazz Workshop, which is how he met future mentor and collaborator Cecil McBee, whose partner Lucia, an artist, was also living in Boston — in this case, on the bandstand when the bassist was coming through town with Pharoah Sanders. Braufman later played on McBee’s debut Strata-East LP Mutima, recorded in New York in May of 1974 and a precursor to the bassist’s role in Valley of Search.

As Cooper-Moore tells it, “when we moved to 501 Canal Street… that’s when I got to really play with Alan. When we started putting on concerts, we used the same musicians but [depending on the day it] would be either his band or my band. It was around that time Cecil Taylor did a concert at Carnegie Hall with his orchestra, and Gary Giddins, who was writing for the Voice, wrote very badly about David S. Ware. Tom Bruno was living at Canal Street then, along with Ellen Christi. Philip Polumbo, a bass player and painter, was living on the top floor, and they were all working at the Village Voice. Tom said, you know, ‘we gonna get back at this guy Gary Giddins,’ so they mimeographed these posters, little sheets about how Gary was an idiot and he couldn’t hear, he really didn’t know the music and he should come down to Canal Street sometime and hear what’s going on there. So one week when it was Alan’s band, Giddins showed up and reviewed us, and we got good press. He thought that the space was loud but the headline read ‘Taking Chances at 501 Canal’ and then people started coming.” The article, in the June 13, 1974 issue of the Voice, discusses the music as it relates to figures like Taylor and Don Cherry, and notes the programs’ “kaleidoscopic densities” and that Ashton and Braufman’s linkage is what pushes the music forward. 

Valley of Search is a document of the music at 501 Canal, but it’s also a document of relationships — people who lived or worked together and were humanly close. Braufman met Bob Cummins, the founder of India Navigation Company, at a party at McBee’s apartment in Harlem. The label had just been conceived, and Braufman would be its second artist. McBee, Lee, and Williams were obvious foils for their place in the saxophonist’s work and life, the latter providing a bevy of instruments that he would later apply to work with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. In late 1974, Cummins set up microphones in the building’s storefront, documenting two short sets by the band with no alternate takes or additional cuts. 

Invoking with a dulcimer and bowed bass drone undergirded by flits of percussion, Ashton chants the Bahá’í prayer “God sufficeth all things above all things, and nothing in the heavens or in the earth but God sufficeth, verily he is in himself the knower, the sustainer, the omnipotent. God sufficeth all things above all things…” granting the music’s higher search a stirring, declaratory shout amid mountain strings. Soon, liquid alto keen, harried screams, and rhapsodic piano chunks edge a dense fracas toward the sharp, sinewy groove and foamy crests of the following movement. One would imagine that the music on this recording reflects the overall feel at 501; the compositions are among those that were in their book at the time, fleshed out with a powerful array of percussion, whistles, and cries, McBee’s bass steadily thrumming and in counterpoint to burred, throaty alto and briskly twined piano. 

When Bruno and Christi moved from the fourth floor down to the first, that was the end of performances as they had been at 501 Canal; Ashton relocated to his home state of Virginia soon after, before returning to New York in 1985 as Cooper-Moore. Braufman would go on to work with drummer William Hooker and his own more commercially-leaning groups (as Alan Michael) before relocating to Salt Lake City, where he resides today. Valley of Search has enjoyed a cult status among followers of this music, and it captures a unique and very alive historical slice of New York’s creative improvised underground. 

Clifford Allen, Brooklyn | March 2018

1. Rainbow Warriors

2. Chant

3. Thankfulness

4. Love Is For Real

5. Forshadow

6. Miracles

7. Ark Of Salvation

8. Little Nabil's March

9. Destiny

Alan Braufman – Saxophone

Cooper-Moore – Piano, dulcimer, recitation

Cecil McBee – Bass

David Lee – Drums

Ralph Williams - Percussion

Originally released in 1975 on India Navigation

Recorded by Bob Cummins

The Cookers - The Call of the Wild and Peaceful Heart (2016) SMOKE SESSIONS RECORDS

by GERALDINE WYCKOFF / offbeat

Hard bop supreme is served up by the Cookers, a truly all­-star ensemble that includes veterans who helped develop and shape the sound. In order to understand the scope of these musicians’ experience and magnitude it’s imperative to call out their names: bassist Cecil McBee (trumpeter Miles Davis, saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Wayne Shorter), trumpeter Eddie Henderson (lessons from Louis Armstrong, pianist Herbie Hancock), drummer Billy Hart (Davis, Hancock), tenor saxophonist Billy Harper (pianist Randy Weston, drummers Art Blakey, Elvin Jones and Max Roach) and pianist George Cables (saxophonist Sonny Rollins and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard). Trumpeter David Weiss, the youngest member, came up with the idea of putting these hefty musicians together with little notion that nine years later they would remain a unit. With the release of The Call of the Wild and Peaceful Heart, which, like 2014’s Time and Time Again, includes the band’s newest member, alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, the Cookers have put out five outstanding albums.

The name of the album—also the disc’s first cut—tells a lot about the music. Penned by Harper, it rhythmically opens ever so slowly and peacefully. Later it explodes with the wild excitement of Harper’s tenor.

It’s Harper’s pen at work again on the lovely ballad “If One Could Only See.” Cables’ gentle piano sets the soft mood with the purity of Henderson’s trumpet leading, as if singing, the tune. All of the original material is written by members of the Cookers, enabling each composer to bring that side of his musical personality to the project.

Diversity defines the spirit of The Call of the Wild and Peaceful Heart as it runs free while referencing musical touchstones from the past. The Cookers continue as master chiefs of the bandstand.

Beyond Forever