This concert, which has lay forgotten for almost fifty years, is now available on CD. This concert, recorded June 22, 1964, established Albert Mangelsdorff as Germany’s international jazz star. Along with his quintet, he performs works such as Set ‘em Up, Far Out Far East, Okaka, and more.

Jean Michel Pilc had already planned on coming to Europe for concerts and master classes, and so a studio recording was arranged in the Netherlands. The result of both recordings is Parallel: a double album with two solo piano recordings, conceived in a completely new form, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The album is a fascinating and exciting journey into Jean-Michel's realm of composed and improvised music that makes one want to listen to it over and over again. Jean-Michel writes: "Most people believe that growing up and aging goes hand in hand with gaining knowledge and wisdom. It may be comforting to think that life teaches you things and there is often something true about it. However, for me there is a parallel, deeper reality at work. The more I know, the more I have to unlearn. The music of this album- created in the last years, in two very different sessions with the invisible ink of improvisation- deals with this mysterious and constantly growing part of the unknown: create, forget, and recreate."

When Brooklyn-born, NYC native Kenny Werner came on stage for his concert in Stuttgart in 1992, he had just begun experimenting with the possibilities of solo piano programs. Over time he grew into the role of a high-quality craftsman who drew his strength not from the struggle for innovation, but from the elegance and finesse with which he incorporated the pianistic possibilities of the keyboard tradition into his music. In artistic self-understanding he was one step ahead of his era.

Werner’s advanced position was also evident in the repertoire that he brought with him to the studio room of the SDR (Süddeutscher Rundfunk) in Stuttgart on 10 June 1992. Most of the compositions were standards associated with the “Great American Songbook”, which he took as a starting point for letting his own creativity play on familiar melodies and forms. It didn’t interest Werner to have the material fall apart in the postmodern fashion typical of the time. On the contrary, for him it was about the perfection of an interior design of the songs, which allowed him to savor the freedom within the set frame of classical jazz patterns. The evening in Stuttgart thus becomes a link in the canon of Werner’s style.

Born in Brooklyn, NY on November 19, 1951 and then growing up in Oceanside, Long Island, Kenny Werner began playing and performing at a young age, first recording on television at the age of 11. Although he studied classical piano as a child, he enjoyed playing anything he heard on the radio. In high school and his first years of college he attended the Manhattan School of Music as a classical piano major. His natural instinct for improvisation led Kenny to the Berklee School of Music in 1970. There he sought tutelage of the renowned piano teacher Madame Chaloff. Her gracious wisdom and inspiration became a driving force in Kenny’s conception: A music conscious of its spiritual intent and essence. From Boston, Kenny traveled to Brazil with the saxophonist Victor Assis Brasil. There he met Victor’s twin brother, Brazilian pianist Joao Assis Brasil. He studied with Joao, who provided another piece of the puzzle for Kenny’s conception that would lead to Effortless Mastery, his landmark opus on how to allow the master musician from within to manifest. Kenny Werner has been a world-class pianist and composer for over forty years. His prolific output of compositions, recordings and publications continue to impact audiences around the world.

On the occasion of his 50th anniversary, Avishaï Cohen offers a sumptuous present: 50 titles selected by his fans in a luxurious box set including 6 golden 180g vinyls. Deluxe edition limited and numbered to 2.000 copies worldwide! Each title has been commented by Avisaï Cohen in a beautiful 32-page hardcover book. Avishai Cohen, born in Kabri, Israel on April 20th, 1970, grew up in a multicultural family whose roots were found in Spain, Greece and Poland. At home, music was always in the air, with his mother Ora, an artistic influence, listening to both classical and traditional music. Avishais musical journey began when he was nine years old, when he began playing the piano. After moving to St. Louis, Missouri with his family at age fourteen, he continued to study the piano and began to play the bass guitar. The electric bass put a spell on him when his teacher introduced him to the music of luminary bassist Jaco Pastorius. Back in Israel, Avishai joined the Music and Arts Academy in Jerusalem to further explore the bass universe.

"Every time I listen to the very first tones of Afterglow, I get struck immediately, as if by a force of nature. Suddenly, I am part of a natural phenomenon, that manifests right in front of me. At that very moment, everything else in the world doesn't seem to matter that much. There's only you and the musical synergy of two masterminds, who put their hearts and souls in every detail of their private conversation. Exactly the same feeling hit me over and over, when audio engineer Floren Van Stichel and I were part of the creation of Afterglow, in September2018. The sheer beauty of the music by Enrico Pieranunzi and Bert Joris was present at every single moment. The only thing Floren and I had to do was listen. We simply guarded the entire process. While performing together, Enrico once said: "Sometimes, the moment you don't play adds more significance to the things you do play". The same thing applies to being a producer. Being present was just enough. Nature took it's course and Afterglow saw the light of day." (Jasper Somsen)

‘Lyla’ is Avishai Cohen’s first release with Razdaz Recordz. Piano legend Chick Corea appears as a special guest performing a duet with the leader. Avishai Cohen is an Israeli jazz double bassist, composer, singer, and arranger. He began playing the piano at 9 years old but changed to the bass guitar at the age of 14, inspired by bassist Jaco Pastorius. In 2002, Cohen founded his record label, Razdaz Recordz. "I've always been interested in several genres of music, including jazz, rock, pop, Latin and funk," says Cohen. "I'm always packed with ideas. I decided to start my own label because I'm involved in so many different projects." Cohen's signature sound is a blend of Middle Eastern, eastern European, and African-American musical idioms.

Drummer Mark Guiliana is renowned for his work with Avishai Cohen for several years from 2002 to 2009. ‘Locked in a Basement’ is his debut album as band leader and producer. Hailed by The New York Times as “a drummer around whom a cult of admiration has formed,” Mark Guiliana brings the same adventurous spirit, eclectic palette and gift for spontaneous invention to a staggering range of styles. Equally virtuosic playing acoustic jazz, boundary-stretching electronic music, or next-level rock, he’s become a key collaborator with such original sonic thinkers as Brad Mehldau, Meshell Ndegeocello, Donny McCaslin, Matisyahu, and the late, great David Bowie.

When pianist Carsten Dahl went into the studio with his perennial fellow musicians, the bassist Niels Bo Davidsen and the drummer Stefan Pasborg, it was with a special dogma: Not to say a word throughout the recording. The album was created in a continuous sequence of first takes and everything was improvised without previous agreements or ideas except 'Falling Down' and 'How I Hear Beauty' based on some chords Dahl scratched down on a piece of paper in the studio. There is a natural, fluent and electric feeling in the music. The trio creates a series of intense pieces most of them no longer than 3-4 minutes, but together they constitute a suite-like process with stimulating variation in form and expression. 'To me Mirrors Within is the picture of the collective and the universal', Dahl says. 'In the music we mirror ourselves in one another. But the mirror can also break and behind it is black'. Hereby he insinuate the both bright and dark sides of his own artist life. He has spoken in public about trauma, therapy and medicine. Music, painting and poetry are his creative responses. Mirrors Within points in the direction of the inner landscapes of music, those places in the mind where music can become 'sound that bleeds, infect and flourish', as written in the Brøndums Encyklopædi. Dahl, Davidsen & Pasborg have developed a special musical dialect together. We are way beyond instrumental skills, which are top class, but it is about much more than that. The best way perhaps to summarize the activities is with the word: empathy. Not as a feeling, but as an ability to participate in a mutual human action which otherwise could not be realized.

The award-winning Dutch composer and bass clarinet player Joris Roelofs is also currently working on a PhD dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche, improvisation and the notion of freedom. On the album Rope Dance he is able to combine all of this, in a suite of twelve pieces inspired by Nietzsche – ‘by far the most musical of philosophers’ according to Roelofs. It is especially the parable of the tightrope walker in the opening section of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None’ that has provided him with inspiration for his own ‘Light-Footed Music for All and None’. It is not surprising that Nietzsche’s thoughts about free spirits, liberated from conventional constraints and belief systems, resonate particularly well with musicians working with improvisation and across genres. Roelofs has therefore been able to gather a group of highly versatile colleagues from the Benelux jazz scene to perform his music: pianist Bram de Looze, bass player Clemens van der Feen and Martijn Vink on drums. The album also confirms the multi-faceted talents of bassoonist Bram van Sambeek, following previous recordings on BIS of classical, pre-Romantic and contemporary concertos, as well as hard rock covers with the group ORBI (the Oscillating Revenge of the Background Instruments).

Caprice presents the luxurious double vinyl re-release of Jazz Furniture's classic debut album from 1994. Jazz Furniture was the name of a jazz group that spoke for themselves. They did this by, among other means, winning the 1994 Jazz i Sverige (Jazz in Sweden) award, which included a recording on Caprice Records. Jazz Furniture included: Magnus Broo, trumpet; Per ”Texas” Johansson and Fredrik Ljungkvist, saxophones; Esbjörn Svensson, piano; Dan Berglund bass; and Magnus Öström drums. Originating with the ambitious project, ”Swedish Jazz Future,” the group took the playful name, Jazz Furniture. The cover art shows what it is all about – Jazz Furniture crushes the old jazz furnishings, with great respect and finesse. With roots in the 1950s and 1960s, they set their very personal stamp on the music through their expressive playing style – reminiscent of the feeling one finds in rock music. Using rock’s terminology, it can be said that Jazz Furniture played a kind of ”trash jazz.”

Ray Anderson (born October 16, 1952) is a jazz trombonist. Trained by the Chicago Symphony trombonists, he is regarded as someone who pushes the limits of the instrument. He is a colleague of trombonist George Lewis. Anderson also plays sousaphone and sings. He was frequently chosen in Down Beat magazine's Critics Poll as best trombonist throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. After studying in California, he moved to New York in 1973 and freelanced. In 1977, he joined Anthony Braxton's Quartet (replacing George Lewis)and started working with Barry Altschul's group. In addition to leading his own groups since the late '70s (including the funk-oriented Slickaphonics), Anderson has worked with George Gruntz's Concert Jazz Band. In the '90s, he began taking an occasional good-humored vocal, during which he shows the ability to sing two notes at the same time (a minor third apart). Anderson has worked with David Murray, Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, Dr. John, Luther Allison, Bennie Wallace, Gerry Hemingway, Henry Threadgill, John Scofield, Roscoe Mitchell, Randy Sandke's Inside Out Band, Sam Rivers' Rivbea Orchestra, Bobby Previte, George Russelland others. Anderson is a member of Jim Pugh's Super Trombone with Dave Bargeron and Dave Taylor. He received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a series of solo trombone concerts. Anderson has frequently returned to his early love of New Orleans music for inspiration. His Alligatory Band and Pocket Brass Band, featuring tuba player Bob Stewart or sousaphonist Matt Perrine and trumpeter Lew Soloff, are rooted in it's tradition. Since 2003 he has taught and conducted at Stony Brook University.

Dmitri Shostakovich was a versatile composer: popular and serious styles came to him with equal ease and are frequently found together in the same work. In his twenties, before the heavy hand of Soviet officialdom slapped him down in 1936, music of every kind poured out of him: symphonies, operas and full-length ballets but also a great amount of music for film and theatre. Here Andrew Litton leads the Singapore Symphony Orchestra in a program which explores this lighter side of a composer who is otherwise often regarded as unrelentingly serious.

The album opens with Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1, which Litton conducts from the piano. Consisting of three brief movements, it is the only truly original work on the disc, written in 1934 for a competition aimed at making ‘Soviet Jazz’ more respectable. The remaining suites are all reworkings of existing music, such as the ballets The Age of Gold – about the adventures of a Soviet football team visiting the decadent West – and The Limpid Stream, portraying a group of entertainers visiting an idyllic collective farm. The Suite for Variety Orchestra is a compilation that the composer made in the late 1950s from three film scores, a ballet movement and four piano pieces. Closing the album is Shostakovich’s 1927 orchestration of a Broadway classic, Vincent Youmans’ "Tea for Two," which had become a hit under the title "Tahiti Trot."

REVIEW:

Entitled Jazz & Variety, this album encompasses four of Shostakovich’s more popular-style suites, mainly drawn from his ballet and theatre scores. These range from the poker-faced, Kurt Weill-like stylization of 1920s dance music, complete with plunking banjo, in the Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1 (1934), via the Prokofiev-like burlesques of The Age of Gold – a 1930 ballet about the vicissitudes of a Soviet football team in the wicked West – to the more straightforwardly traditional ballet numbers of The Limpid Stream(1935/45) set on an idyllic collective farm, and the Suite for Variety Orchestra put together from various pieces from the 1950s.

One item, the Waltz from the Jazz Suite, recurs twice: more fully orchestrated in The Limpid Stream, and in yet a third arrangement with a different, more banal middle section, in the Variety Suite. The collection culminates in Shostakovich’s twinkling orchestration of a version of ‘Tea for Two’, entitled Tahiti Trot (1927). Yet, in the middle of all these frolics, the searing intensity of the extended Adagio from The Age of Gold reminds us of the other, tragic side of Shostakovich.

Andrew Litton and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra lavish more care and subtlety on these pieces than the quality of invention in some of the music maybe deserves, additionally flattered by BIS’s spacious recording – though the Jazz Suite might have more bite in a drier acoustic. Still, this is a superior collection for those who relish this lighter, sometimes naughtier side of Shostakovich.

-- BBC Music Magazine