Roy Hargrove & The RH Factor - "I'll Stay" (live At Jazz A Vienne, 2009) - (9:03) 154 BPM
Review: The Jazz A Vienne festival has been drawing jazz lovers to southeastern France every year since 1981, and now they mark their Covid-delayed 40th anniversary with a 14-track compilation featuring a blend of brand new material and classic live recordings from the festival itself - "hard bop, pure jazz classicism and hip-hop urgency united in a single breath," is how they put it. It's one of the vintage nuggets - The Milt Jackson & Hank Jones All-Star Quartet's 1997 recording of 'Delilah' - that provides the album's standout cut for yours truly, but with the likes of Lalo Schiffrin and Gilberto Gil nestling up alongside a host of younger artists, jazzbos of a more tradtional (but definitely not 'trad') mindset will find much to enjoy here.
Review: Parisian producer GUTS has covered a lot of musical ground over the past decade, from hip-hop to Afro-disco and space jazz, but most recently he's been working with a coterie of top-flight world music players and producers including Cyril Atef and Ben Abarbanel-Wolff. Together they've been touring extensively as a quintet, but they've also found time to record this album, which they describe as "flitting between Brazil, Africa and the Caribbean". The likes of Gilles Peterson or Mr Scruff will no doubt be in raptures, but even if you're not normally a great lover of world music there are still some gems to discover - see fast 'n' furious slap bass workout 'Matadou' for starters.
Review: Happy birthday Heavenly Sweetness! 10 years deep into their explorations, excavations and curations, French label Heavenly Sweetness look back over the decade and hand pick some of their favourite moments. With such a fine ear for timelessness and vibe, the whole collection runs with a soul and spiritual fluidity as one cohesive body of work; from the incredible-yet-so-gradual momentum of Chickenwing All Stars "Celestial Blues" to touching homages to the one and only Coltrane from both Patchworks and Byard Lancaster via slick spacebound feminist hip-hop from Sly Johnson and a stacks more, this is the type of collection you can lose entire weeks of your life to. Here's to another 10 years.
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