News & Updates — classic albums

One of the great left-field albums came from former Buffalo Springfield bassist Bruce Palmer, with his seemingly unmarketable (at the time) Eastern-tinged folk-jazz oddity The Cycle Is Complete, released in 1970 on Verve to little fanfare and nearly no promotion. Palmer's only album as a leader, he was given complete artistic control only for him to come up with an unexpected psychedelic improvisational (almost in the realm of "spiritual-jazz" a la Pharoah Sanders) spacey folk record with members of Kaleidoscope, Caribbean percussionist Big Black and young Rick James (billed as "Rick Matthews"). Verve had no idea what to do with...

Happy birthday to the alto sax icon Marion Brown! He made so many great records, from the ESP Disks to the records with Gunter Hampel, the awesome early '70s trilogy (Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, Geechee Recollections and Sweet Earth Flying), some records for Freedom and Baystate and on and on. Plus he started his Sweet Earth label out of Western Massachusetts. He played with John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Stanley Cowell, Harold Budd and others and was an educator and a fine artist (drawing, painting). I was fortunate enough to meet him in the '90s. His son Djinji was in...

Today we honor another underrated reedsman of the '60s/70s creative jazz scene, Makanda Ken McIntyre. While his main axe was the alto sax, he recorded on many different wind instruments: flute, oboe, bass clarinet, tenor sax, soprano sax, bassoon. In addition he was a capable pianist and drummer. He wrote or arranged hundreds of tunes, incorporating bebop, blues, calypso, avant-garde into his style. He composed for jazz combos, chamber groups, orchestra, woodwind quartets, film & television scores and made several classic, if under-known, albums as a leader. He had a long and distinguished career as an educator, both in the NYC schools...

Sending out a birthday to salute to Clifford Thornton, a cult free-jazz composer (and former Black Panther Party Minister of Art) who released a spate of classics from '67-'75 on various independent labels. In some ways he could be likened to the Eric Dolphy of his generation, a multi-instrumentalist artist who greatly impacted contemporary musicians around him while remaining out of the general public's eye. From Philly, he was a cousin to jazz drummer J.C. Moses. At seven he started learning piano and as a teenager studied with Donald Byrd and played with jazz tuba player Ray Draper. After moving...

One of the three great Kings of blues guitar, along with BB and Albert, Freddie King was a commanding singer and an awesome electric guitarist with fast fingers. He was a huge influence on Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and other pale-faced blues-rockers. Originally from Dallas, he started playing guitar at six. He moved to Chicago as a teenager and started absorbing all the killer blues happening in the city. He started playing in bands in the early '50s and worked with Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers, Robert Lockwood Jr and others. When King got the call to cut...