Genre
Not the conservatory canon: the stretches when the musicians took charge of the production, the tapes and the sleeves.
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Selection Jazz
Acid jazz
Eight albums
Eight British records from 1987 to 1993, grouped by the label that issued them. The name began as a joke at acid house's expense, and inside six years that joke had worked its way from a small independent to EMI's jazz vault and a Sony imprint.
Selection Jazz
Blue Note
Ten records
Ten records cut between 1957 and 1965, lined up by address. On one side the living room of Rudy Van Gelder's parents in Hackensack, on the other the studio he had built for the job at Englewood Cliffs. Nineteen days separate them.
Artist pick Jazz
Alan Braufman
Infinite Love, Infinite Tears
In May 2024 Bandcamp Daily asked a saxophonist who in 1973 shared a loft with David S. Ware what he was listening to now. Four of his picks, with the reason he gave for each, and one that is not on Spotify.
Selection Jazz
Azymuth
Light as a Feather
Before they were a band they were the backing group for half of Brazil. Then they started rehearsing at the keyboard player's house at weekends, and out of those rehearsals came a hybrid they called crazy samba. Five tracks to understand them, and Jazz Carnival is only the way in.
Genre Jazz
Strata-East and Black Jazz
The record stays with the player
In 1971 two jazz labels run by musicians opened in New York and Oakland. One left artists eighty-five per cent and the ownership of their tapes, the other was bankrolled by a country label. How they worked, and what stopped them.
The jazz we care about is rarely the records everyone already owns. The useful moments are the ones where somebody decided to do it themselves: Charles Mingus and Max Roach with Debut in 1952, Sun Ra with El Saturn in 1957, and through the seventies a run of labels kept alive by the musicians on them.
That decision changes the sound, not only the contracts. With no sales department asking for a single, a piece can run twenty minutes, open with a choir, or carry no recognisable theme at all. Much of what now gets called spiritual jazz comes from there, and so do the records hip hop producers spent thirty years hunting down.