The Listening Guide
🎶 The listening guide: five albums, released during the past twelve months, chosen around a weekly theme 🎶
This week, it’s tributes and continuations: albums that honour the legacy of jazz legends lost and living, by reimagining their compositions, or carrying their musical ethos forward with a new project. From drummer Ralph Peterson’s work with the Messenger Legacy, to Joyce Elaine Yuille’s take on a selection of Cole Porter classics, there’s plenty to explore.
Ralph Peterson and the Messenger Legacy – Onward and Upward
Elin Forkelid – Plays For Trane
Jerry Granelli Trio – Plays Vince Guaraldi and Mose Allison
Album of the Week
Our NQ Jazz Album of the Week is the new direct-to-disc recording from percussionist, composer, and bandleader Sarathy Korwar with Upaj Collective. His first release for the Night Dreamer label, it hears Korwar, Collocutor’s Tamar Osborn (saxophone), Achuthan Sripathamanathan (violin), Giuliano Modarelli (guitar), and Alistair MacSween (keys) playing with few preconceptions, in order to capture the “spirit of spontaneous improvisation”. The recordings were made at Artone Studio in The Netherlands in July, 2019. Support the project on Bandcamp.
Classic Album
On the day that his drummer and Cookers bandmate Billy Hart turns eighty, we tip our cap to this Eddie Henderson gem for our weekly classic album pick. Released in 1976 on Blue Note Records, it’s a sophisticated and robust jazz-funk LP, with a sweet blend of electric and acoustic instrumentation, contemplative and groovy numbers. ‘Inside You’ is hands down one of the smoothest jazz-funk cuts ever made!