Acclaimed vibraphonist Joel Ross returns with the release of his remarkable album nublues, a collection of ballads and blues as seen through the lens of one of the most creative modern jazz groups featuring Immanuel Wilkins, Jeremy Corren, Kanoa Mendenhall, and Jeremy Dutton, as well as special guest Gabrielle Garo. The band moves seamlessly across the blues-imbued musical terrain of this 10-track set which includes 7 new Ross originals and pieces by John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk.

Pat Metheny - "Bright Size Life (ECM Luminescence Series)" / With his first studio recording as a leader, Bright Size Life was the album that decisively put him on the map as a bright new force with something fresh to say in the context of contemporary jazz. Recorded in Ludwigsburg in December 1975, and produced by Manfred Eicher, the album features Metheny's regular touring band of the day - Bob Moses on drums and the virtuosic but then largely unknown Jaco Pastorius on bass guitar. "I could happily play all the music from Bright Size Life right now," said Pat Metheny in an interview for the Library of Congress in 2021. "It still seems viable; the arguments there still seem valid and worth thinking about. My sense at the time was that I wanted to make a record that might be the only record I would ever make. I hoped to make a statement on things that were important to me in terms of melody, harmony, trio playing, and even kind of life in general." Verve Label Group; ECM; Jazz; Catalog

Limited Edtion - Includes 16-page booklet. Little Girl Blue was Nina Simone's debut album and first studio recording ever. Recorded when she was 25 years old, it was a tremendous success and led to a fabulous career that would produce more than 80 studio sessions. It contains such perennial classics as "I Loves You Porgy" and "My Baby Just Cares for Me". THE COMPLETE ALBUM + 9 BONUS TRACKS - CD EDITION - 20 TRACKS - TT: 74:26 - LIMITED EDITION - INCLUDES 16-PAGE BOOKLET

Limited Edition - Includes 16-page booklet. Presented here is the complete original album Oscar Peterson Plays the Cole Porter Songbook, by the Oscar Peterson trio with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen. Recorded in 1959, this was Peterson's second attempt to produce a Porter songbook. For this extended edition, further Porter compositions recorded by Peterson on various occasions have been added, including all of the songs from the first Cole Porter songbook he had made in 1952 with Ray Brown on bass and Barney Kessel on guitar. THE COMPLETE ALBUM + 14 BONUS TRACKS - 2LPs ON 1 CD - CD EDITION - 26 TRACKS - TT: 77:40 - LIMITED EDITION - INCLUDES 16-PAGE BOOKLET

Limited Edition - Includes 16-page booklet. This release presents all of the master takes produced during the celebrated quintet sessions co-led by Gerry Mulligan & Ben Webster and originally issued on Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster. The first six tracks included here constitute the complete original album, which received a five-star rating in Down Beat magazine. THE COMPLETE ALBUM + 5 BONUS TRACKS - CD EDITION - 11 TRACKS - TT: 77:10 - LIMITED EDITION - INCLUDES 16-PAGE BOOKLET

Kenny Burrell/John Coltrane - Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane (Original Jazz Classics Series) [LP] / Craft Recordings

Double vinyl LP pressing. Recorded at Munich's Muffathalle twenty years ago, in September 2004, this previously-unreleased concert recording of the Tomasz Stanko Quartet is a fascinating document, capturing a developmental chapter in the music between the song forms of the Suspended Night repertoire and the improvised areas that the Polish musicians would explore on Lontano. The Munich show was a highlight in a year in which the Stanko Quartet played a record number of gigs, with extensive tours of the US and Europe. The great trumpeter himself is at his charismatic best here, playing superbly, clearly inspired by the energetic support and communicative power of Marcin Wasilewski, Slawomir Kurkiewicz and Michal Miskiewicz, the dynamic young players for whom he had been a mentor. The live album was produced by Manfred Eicher. Tomasz Stanko: trumpet / Marcin Wasilewski: piano / Slawomir Kurkiewicz: double bass / Michal Miskiewicz: drums

Billie Holiday - Lady Day's great recordings from the late 1950s. Her strongest and most famous performances. Lady Sings The Blues (1956) - Body And Soul (1957) - Songs For Distingu� Lovers (1957) - Stay With Me (1958) - All Or Nothing At All (1958)

NEW DAY

Vinyl LP pressing. Ornithology: The Best of Bird is a compilation bringing together 11 cuts from legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. Designed as an introduction to this influential artist, it covers Bird's prime years between 1945 and 1953, with cuts including "Ko-Ko," "Billie's Bounce," and "Groovin' High". Included on the back of the newly designed sleeve is a new essay by Grammy-Award winning writer Ashley Kahn.

Recorded in 1985 after a break from the studio and time spent living in Barbados and Liberia, this one-of-a-kind album in Nina's catalog features standards as well as original compositions revisited by a rejuvenated Nina. Horns and backups singers join her on "Porgy," "It's Cold Out Here," "You Must Have Another Lover," "For a While," "Touching and Caring" and more. CD or vinyl, with new artwork! Verve.

HERE FOR A WHILE

The chromatic harmonica may look like a simple toy or a novelty but it is actually one of the most difficult of all instruments to play. Stating a bebop melody with the ease of a saxophonist has only been achieved by a small handful of jazz harmonica players, most notably Toots Thielemans and Hendrik Meurkens. For his new project 'The Jazz Meurkengers', Meurkens decided that a new swinging jazz album was long overdue so he contacted pianist Steve Ash, bassist Chris Berger and drummer Andy Watson to help him deliver the hard-bop groove of Winton Kelly, Jimmy Cobb and Wes Montgomery. The album features four standards, five Meurkens originals and special guests Ed Cherry and Nick Hampton.

Reissue. Life Enigma is a 2001 album by French jazz fusion artist Jean-Luc Ponty.

FORWARD

Vinyl LP pressing. The late-1960s and early-1970s were a wildly creative period for Bobby Hutcherson with the vibraphonist freely exploring a wide range of stylistic possibilities from post-bop and the avant-garde to fusion and Latin Jazz. The cutting-edge 1969 session Medina-which wouldn't be first released until 1980 as part of the LT Series-documented one of Hutcherson's most remarkable band line-ups featuring two of his frequent collaborators-Harold Land on tenor saxophone and flute and Joe Chambers on drums-along with Stanley Cowell on piano and Reggie Johnson on bass. The set presented a pair of original compositions each by Hutcherson, Cowell, and Chambers that explored a variety of moods from the churning rhythms of "Avis" and "Medina" to the more atmospheric realms of "Comes Spring" and "Orientale."

Vinyl LP pressing. With it's warmth, power and clarity, the music has the distinctive hallmark which makes Haffner probably the most popular drummer/bandleader in Europe, known from his albums and from thousands of concerts in more than 100 countries. And at the same time it marks an evolution in his music. Indeed, perhaps one of the key factors behind Haffner's success is that his music will always contain elements of the familiar alongside the new, and that Haffner always brings the audience along with him to participate in the flow of his ideas - and also in the 'life rhythm' which he communicates so brilliantly, and instills in everyone around him. A versatile approach and the highest level of musicianship are also factors which Wolfgang Haffner has in common with his fellow musicians on 'Life Rhythm'. At the core is his regular, completely 'played-in' trio with keyboard player Simon Oslender, also a drummer and a band leader in his own right, and Thomas Stieger, one of the most sought-after bassists on the German pop and jazz scenes. They are joined by trumpeter Sebastian Studnitzky, Haffner's regular collaborator since his ACT debut 'Shapes', and Finnish guitarist Arto Mik�l�, a real discovery with remarkable variety in his sound. Haffner also welcomes some unique musical personalities to bring their own highly individual colours to the band: Nils Landgren has been a good friend and touring colleague for more than 20 years. Also appearing are saxophone icon Bill Evans, Sting's guitarist Dominic Miller, Balkan beat star Shantel, the refined bassist Nicolas Fiszman, oud virtuoso Thomas Konstantinou and Bruno M�ller, one of the finest of German jazz guitarists.

Originally released in 1962, jazz multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef's album, Eastern Sounds, fuses hard bop with middle eastern music as he is joined by Barry Harris on piano alongside Ernie Farrow (double bass/rabaab) and Lex Humphries (drums). Original Jazz Classics Series is pressed on 180-gram vinyl at RTI with all-analog mastering from the original tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and presented in a tip-on jacket.

With "daring and visionary spirit," to quote a Downbeat review from 1976 after the album's release, master improvisers John Abercrombie, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette forged a unique vision of trio interplay on their first joint effort under the Gateway moniker. The trio tackles Holland and DeJohnette originals with a visionary idea of what three-way conversations in jazz could sound like. As The Observer remarked in an article of the time, "the telepathic ensemble playing and perfect execution make it difficult to believe that this music is almost completely improvised." The players' respectively unique instrumental signatures had already fully crystallized here, hinting at the music to come.

CAREER ANTHOLOGY VOL. 1 1923-28

Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings is the first official release of the 'Saxophone Colossus' Sonny Rollins' European tour in 1959 with bassist Henry Grimes, and drummers Pete La Roca, Kenny Clarke and Joe Harris. Freedom Weaver includes an elaborate booklet with rare photos by Ed van der Elsken, Jean-Pierre Leloir, Bob Parent and many others; lead liners by jazz scholar Bob Blumenthal, and new interviews with Rollins himself, Branford Marsalis, James Carter, Joe Lovano, James Brandon Lewis and Peter Br�tzmann. Mastered by the legendary mastering engineer Bernie Grundman.

There are lots of outstanding Joe McPhee LPs. Nation Time being chief among them, but there's also Pieces Of Light, Oleo�and Topology. The Poughkeepsie, New York-based multi-instrumentalist, by now an international star of free music, has amassed a daunting discography, no doubt. If you want to peer deeply into the soul of Joe McPhee, however, there's no way around it, you need to spend some quality time with Tenor. Tenor is McPhee's first solo record. He did not set out to make it. It was an afterthought, quite literally, born of a gathering of friends at the Swiss farmhouse of cellist Michael Overhage. A beautiful meal, some drinks, warm conversation, and... why not, an impromptu recital. Hat Hut producer Werner X. Uehlinger was there and a year later issued it as McPhee's third LP for the label (Hat Hut C in their famed letter series). "The existential blues 'Knox' sets the stage, indicating that this will not just be a toss-off postprandial singalong. 'Good-Bye Tom B.' carries on with aching melancholy, through burred notes and hushed harmonics. The relatively jaunty 'Sweet Dragon' is also emotionally loaded with Ayler-esque vibrato, slurs, wipes, and blasts of tone. The side-long title track comes without a theme, as a kind of pure investigation of the horn, it's potential, it's limits, it's expressive capacity. There have been few solo sessions as comprehensive and devastating as this spontaneous after-dinner diversion in rural Switzerland in 1976. We're very lucky someone pressed record." -John Corbett (excerpt from the liner notes)

Verve Records releases the latest editions in it's breakout Great Women of Song series, which pays homage to the ground-breaking work and lasting impact of some of the greatest female vocalists of all time. Like her idol Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae could own a ballad and make it all her own. She could also swing every bit as hard as her other main influence, Ella Fitzgerald. Coming up during the bebop era and under the musical sway of Thelonious Monk, Carmen made a series of recordings for the Decca label that would cement her reputation and launch a career that close to 50 years. Whether in small groups or backed by a studio orchestra, Carmen McRae recorded definitive versions of songs that make up the backbones of jazz and the Great American Songbook.

Jazz pianist Mal Waldron's 1962 album, The Quest, features Eric Dolphy (clarinet, alto sax) and Booker Ervin (tenor sax). Recorded at Rudy Van Gelder Studios in New Jersey, the album contains seven cuts that fall somewhere between hard-bop and avant-garde. This new edition of the album is released as part of the Original Jazz Classics Series and is pressed on 180-gram vinyl at RTI with all-analog mastering from the original tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and presented in a Tip-On Jacket.

Dave Brubeck Quartet - The Classic 1950s Albums / This superb 4-CD collection brings together eight original albums that Dave and the quartet released during the 1950s, the era generally considered to be the great man's golden years. Serving as both a wonderful starting point for those new to Brubeck's music, and as a divine reminder of his finest work for the rest of us, this set remains a must-have collection for just about anyone who has been blessed with ears and a love of music.