Tag: New Releases
Before we look ahead to the New Year, it’s important that we look back at some of the best EP releases of 2019, often featuring debut recordings from some of the most rising artists and groups, which this year included KOKOROKO, Neue Grafik, Ebi Soda, Still Moving, Nejrup, Rōnin Arkestra, IG Culture’s Likwid Continual Space Motion project, and many others.
With six incredible releases across multiple projects, and numerous collaborations with some of the most-forward thinking artists in the world, as well as ongoing performances that touched just about every corner of the globe, BeatCaffeine’s 2019 Artist of the Year is Los Angeles-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Mark de Clive-Lowe.
This was an incredible year for new album releases that spanned a wide range of genres. I even felt at times it was hard to keep track of all the great new music that was being released on weekly basis. Selecting my favorite albums was extremely challenging, yet still very enjoyable. I’m sure in weeks or even days from now, I will realize that I forgotten to include a worthy release, or discover an album that might of slipped by me.
As with just about every year, 2019 featured numerous great tracks from all corners of the globe. More and more it feels that artists are bluring the lines between these things we call “genres”, and I think that’s a good thing. In which was an almost impossible task, I have compiled my favorite 125 tracks from the past twelve months and have dived deeper into the top 25.
In what has turned into quite a productive year for Greg Foat, the London-based pianist follows up a number of incredible releases for Edinburgh’s Athens of The North label, including the one of the year’s best albums in The Mage, and released another brilliant full-length to close out the year, titled The Dreaming Jewels.
Every year their are a number of highly-anticipated releases that vinyl collectors and music fans cannot wait to listen in full, however some of my favorite releases are the ones that I didn’t see coming, and completely blow me away. This is certainly the case with the debut recording from the London-based cosmic groove quintet Natural Lateral.
Longtime Chicago jazz scene veteran, and newly residing New York City-based trumpeter and composer Jamie Branch follows-up her breakthrough and highly acclaimed 2017 debut Fly Or Die with a new brilliant full-length album on International Anthem titled, Fly Or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise.
Following up on her breakthrough 2017 album La Saboteuse, British-Bahraini trumpet player and composer Yazz Ahmed returns with a brilliant new record, titled Polyhymnia.
Over the past few weeks, the newer Paris-based jazz label Komos have released four brilliant records paying tribute to iconic artists that highly influenced the French jazz scene, including Henri Texler, Marion Brown, Don Cherry, and Randy Weston.
Following two incredible releases over the past few years in Art in the Age of Automation and the complimentary album Untitled (AITAOA #2) off of Gondwana Records, the London-based group Portico Quartet return with their fifth studio album Memory Streams that continues to explore the melding of jazz and electronic music.
