As some of the critics have predicted, Richmond put together another quality cello album here again. Mike Richmond the Philadelphia-born award-winning bass player with vast experience including playing with Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Horace Silver, to mention a few is also a dedicated educator receiving a Teacher of the Year Award from New York University (1994). After the release of his previous album “The Pendulum” SCCD 31826 Richmond has been frequently performing cello as his main instrument. “Mike Richmond’s beautiful new recording – his 11th as a leader - is the first on which he plays cello exclusively .… Richmond and his quartet of seasoned players give the music a ‘singing’ quality something Richmond seeks in all his playing.” (Donald Elfman - New York City Jazz Record on The Pendulum SCCD 31826)

Harry PARTCH (1901-1974), one of the greatest and most individualistic composers of all time, who created dozens of incredible instruments for the performance of his music, created one of the most amazing bodies of sensually alluring and emotionally powerful music of the 20th century. Closely connected with his name is NEWBAND, an ensemble founded by Dean Drummond, which received custodianship of the original Harry PARTCH Instrument Collection in 1990 and has since been involved with resurrecting PARTCH's great works.

The best Jamaican musicians brought a substantial, masterful contribution to jazz. Their belated recognition reveals truly original, spirited and sophisticated styles. At long last, the rare, little known albeit greatest recordings of the founders of Jamaican jazz are gathered here, fully annotated in a 32-page booklet by Bruno Blum. They include strong personalities such as Wilton Gaynair, Cecil Lloyd, Billy Cooke; Ernest Ranglin’s quirky guitar playing and groundbreaking afro-jazz by Count Ossie’s drum orchestra, as well as the legendary Joe Harriott, Roland Alphonso, Tommy McCook, Don Drummond and Rico Rodriguez. These musicians, who were about to create ska and reggae, breathe stunning life into swing, mento, blues, hard bop and soul jazz. PATRICK FReMEAUX

This laid back program of classics by powerhouse jazz composers Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn adequately show Tommy Smith’s virtuosic saxophone playing. Smith does a fantastic job of keeping the composers’ intentions in mind, while still adding his own colors and textures to these classics. Smith is accompanied here by an all-star trio of musicians, including Kenny Barron, Peter Washington and Billy Drummond. Many of these tracks were recorded in just one take. This album was originally released in 1998, and is being re-issued here as part of Linn’s ECHO series.

2018 release. While conceived as a series of tonal paintings, somehow David Chesky's cornucopia of oblique ruminations on Trio In The New Harmonic suggest to this scribe something more declamatory, and poetically austere, like some non-denominational evening service at a distant Northern latitude and longitude, bathed in a wintery glow, with the faint promise of spring colors peeking through the firmament-illuminating a largely black and white canvas with pastel intimations of some elusive wakening. Chesky's is a chamber music chrysalis seeking to be reborn as a post-modern jazz trio in the left wing traditions of those American pianists, who while they were surely informed by the harmonic cycles of Tin Pan Alley song forms, and a blues/ragtime/swing based tradition of the piano in it's virtuoso approximation of post-bop orchestral power, were not beholden to it; seeking instead to depict a more abstract canvas, a painterly sense of the piano's potential for said chamber music sensibility in which, while there is considerable heat applied to the collective improvisational pot, things are consciously never quite fired up to a full boil.

Drummer with his quartet, feat. Chris Potter & Walt Weiskopf-sax, Peter Washington-bass.