Tag: Jazz
Originally released in limited quantities through Rough Trade Records back in December 2023, and now more broadly released through Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood label, London-based drummer phenomenon Yussef Dayes and his stellar quintet return with another brilliant live session, performing music from last year’s highly acclaimed Black Classical Music album, new originals and a superb cover of Jaco Pistorius’ “Portrait of Tracy”.
In what is arguably one of the most anticipated releases of early 2024, Paul Murphy’s superb Jazz Room Records will be issuing a must-own 7inch single this month from Japanese producer and bassist Takumi Moriya, featuring his brilliant new take on Joe McPhee’s 1970 soul-jazz classic “Shakey Jake”.
As a follow-up to their first European tour in May of 2023, the highly active and talented Tokyo-based trio Nautilus has recently released a live recording, taken from their last date of the trip at the legendary King Georg in Cologne, Germany.
Before we look ahead to this year’s forthcoming releases, let’s take a look back at another superb reissue from this past Fall from the Italian-based label Eating Standing in vibraphonist Enzo Randisi’s 1979 highly obscured self-titled album.
With the final “best of” list for 2023, I dive into some of our favorite tracks of the year. Out of all of the year-end lists, this is easily the most difficult to pull together given how many great tracks are worthy to be included in such a list. This year, I went about this differently. Instead of just listing the tracks, I also included the album, 12″ or 7″ that the track was associated with in hopes to encourage everyone to be purchasing the vinyl or digital releases (which is important for these artists and labels!). No commentary included with these, we’ll just let the music do all the talking.
Now in the final days of 2023, we take a look back at some of the essential compilation releases over the past 12 months. From tropical grooves to jazz dance, spiritual, soulful house and obscure selections from around the globe, there were many incredible must-own compilations to dive into.
We continue our deep dive into our favorite releases of 2023 with a look at some of the standout EPs. As usual, there were a number of quality releases, including four from legendary UK DJ Colin Curtis on his vinyl-only imprint label. Plenty of jazz dance, cosmic grooves, and all around good vibes to absorb with these selections.
As with new music releases, 2023 was an outstanding year for reissues and previously unreleased recordings. It feels like with every great new release or artists that breaks through on the scene, there are still so many records from the past to still discover and dive into as a listener. The quality of the actual reissue releases themselves also seems to improve in time. The care and work that goes into many of these releases is astonishing and handled like the artifacts that they truly are.
Almost another year around the sun, and that means it’s that time again (hard to believe), where we revisit some of the best releases of the year. In regards of new music, 2023 was another incredible year. As always, it was admittedly extremely challenging pulling together a “best of” list, however I’m excited to have been able to expand to 40 releases, which still didn’t feel like enough. As always, I’m sure I missed a few worthy selections.
Building off the foundation of last year’s superb Fusion Global Sounds compilation release (included on BeatCaffeine’s Favorite Compilations of 2022), Favorite Recordings comes back with the second edition of the series, featuring eight obscure jazz-funk and fusion tracks produced between 1976 and 1984 in various parts of the world.
