Charlie Mingus
Blues & Roots (Clear Vinyl)

As the final chapter in the initial run of Jazz Is Dead releases, Remixes JID010 continues the creative catharsis of an exhilarating new chapter in jazz music. Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad tapped nine iconic creators to reimagine their personal favorites from Jazz Is Dead’s catalogue to-date, who created striking new versions of songs by Marcos Valle, Roy Ayers, Gary Bartz, Azymuth, João Donato, Doug Carn, Brian Jackson and The Midnight Hour. Holding the line taut like a bass string, Younge & Muhammad only invited those special musical alchemists who have previously participated in Jazz Is Dead happenings, or those who are slated to share that stage soon: Cut Chemist, DJ Spinna, Georgie Anne Muldrow, Akili, Shigeto, Pink Siiffu, Dibiase, Natureboy Flako, and Kaidi Tathum. It’s a family affair.The album blasts off with Kaidi Tathum’s reinvention of Marcos Valle’s wistful beachside stroll, transforming “Gotta Love Again” into a strutting, pulsating excursion equally at home in the club and headphones. Building off of Valle’s mellifluous vocalizations, Tathum harnesses the composition’s polyrhythms to build a soulful, jazz-house track that floats over ethereal synths and stutter-steps to a propulsive beat entirely unimaginable, yet true to the spirit of the optimistic and effortless original.On his remix of Gary Bartz’s “Soulsea” Cut Chemist taps into the big-beat atmospherics of his old running partner, DJ Shadow, to craft a moody, echo-laden, percussive down-tempo saxophone meditation. Creating drama over bombastic beats, Cut Chemist layers Bartz’s searching sax refrains over sparse keyboard bars. Brian Jackson’s mellow masterpiece dedicated to the recently departed jazz vocalist, “Nancy Wilson”, receives an epic overhaul by producer Shigeto with help from harpist Ahya Simone and DJ Dez Andres. More than tripling the original’s duration while adding layers of new sounds, Shigeto’s remix weaves in and out of movements that alternately showcase Jackson’s soulful flute work, Simone’s sparkling harp and Andres’ bubbling percussion. Imagine if Dorthy Ashby and Hermeto Pascoal dropped in on Miles’ In A Silent Way sessions...It might have been a foregone conclusion that Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad would give their Jazz Is Dead series the remix treatment, but that doesn’t mean this is your average remix album. Just like Younge and Muhammad fused their aesthetic with the musical masters they invited to collaborate with for Jazz Is Dead, the DJs, producers and musicians tasked with remixing songs from the catalogue tapped into the same jazz ethos, resulting in imaginative and sometimes radically reimagined versions of the originals.

The highly anticipated long player from DJ, producer and musician Lorenzo Morresi alongside 22a label boss, DJ, producer and musician Tenderlonious, sees them serve up 11 irresistible tracks inspired by Italo jazz funk and the Italian library sound."With this project we’ve done our best to deliver our own interpretation of this wonderful era of Italian music and rediscover a beautiful genre, whilst maintaining a strong respect and admiration for the sounds that the original Italian masters created. Their records impressed and inspired us and we hope it will be the same for our listeners today."

Mathew Halsall's Gondwana label out of Manchester is one of contemporary jazz's finest. His own work forms the vital backbone, but his A&R skill also brings on board the likes of Mammal Hands, a band driven by piano, sax and piano. Their ethereal sound captivates the mind and takes it on heavenly trips that can be loose and freewheeling and more tight and kinetic. Both of those styles are showcased on this superb 7" which now gets a welcome reissue. "Chaser" is a high tempo adventure on slick drums and urgent sax playing while "Prism" suspends you in clouds of pillowy sound.

- The highly anticipated follow-up to Eastern Flowers and Wabi Sabi - The staff used on Natura Morta is the following: 9 violins, 4 violas, 3 cellos, 1 flute, 1 piano, 1 electric piano, 1 cembalo, 1 twelve-string guitar, 1 electric guitar, 1 trumpet, 1 flugelhorn, 1 tenor horn, 1 marimba, 1 electric bass, drums and percussions // On Natura Morta, Sven Wunder is exploring art as a bridge between nature and the human ability to judge and observe in eleven musical compositions with brightly colored textures and an emphasis on vibrant melodies. Throughout human history, we have depicted the world we live in through art. By reworking what we see in the world, the simplest things have helped us understand the beauty of nature and to evaluate the material world that we have created around us, as a window to a constantly changing reality, through our own perception. It is that absolute reality that appears in the seam of human and nature and that can be revealed through art. Still life painting, also referred to as Natura Morta ("dead nature") in Italian, stretches back to ancient times. Some of the earliest works, found in Pompeii, depict commonplace objects such as fresh autumn fruits alongside man-made objects such as a small amphora and a small terracotta heap with dried fruits. These two-thousand-year-old paintings give a snapshot of Roman life, and also creates a link to time and space. A slice of life has been created by binding the earth's pigments with extracts of oil, made from nuts and seeds, painted with brushes, made from a variety of fibers, such as trees and hair from animals. While life wanes with each brushstroke, by shifting reality into the past, art exists to make us come alive, being a living image of a dead thing, a surface and a symbol with symbolic powers of its own. Still life works celebrate material and ephemeral pleasures by returning to nature as the ultimate source for our standards in art as well as in life itself. Natura Morta collects pieces from a continuous variety of melodies - supported by a decisive rhythm section - creating a musical kaleidoscope of ever-changing colors. Sven Wunder brings life into this rich assortment of musical implications by fusing and combining melodic instruments with each other in a setting that spans from a classical to a modern idiom. The author evokes this panoramic portrait by articulating an instrumental dialog between a chamber orchestra and a jazz ensemble. The result is a musical celebration of material pleasures that also serves as a reminder of the brevity of human life. This album was produced with financial support from the Swedish Arts Council.

Anteloper is the duo of jaimie branch (trumpet, synths, vocals) and Jason Nazary (drums, synths). Their new album Pink Dolphins was produced by Jeff Parker (Tortoise, The New Breed), using improvisations the duo recorded at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. The album cover art was a collaboration between illustrator John Herndon (also known as drummer for Tortoise) and jaimie branch (whose digitally treated watercolor technique just keeps getting better). The duo's previous two albums - 2018's Kudu (issued on vinyl for the first time in January 2022) and 2020's in-progress report Tour Beats Vol. 1 - both acted as 'proof-of concept' experiments, merging synths, raw experimental desktop electronics, gadgets, and efx with the energy and attitude of punk and an insatiable thirst for extended outer space jams. Pink Dolphins presents a fully-molted and firing-on-all-cylinders expression of the duo/project, as realized by Parker in the lab.

Il fut l’un des grands hérauts du Gwo ka Moden dans les années 1970 et 1980. Redécouvert en 2016 par Digger’s Digest et le label Heavenly Sweetness, le Guadeloupéen Edmony Krater revient avec un nouveau disque, An Ka Sonjé, où il explore ses souvenirs d’enfance et de nouvelles inventions musicales.Il aura fallu attendre la réédition de son mythique album Ti jan pou vélo pour que l’on puisse redécouvrir tout le talent que possède Edmony Krater. Surnommé le Sun Ra de la Guadeloupe, le chanteur, percussionniste avant-gardiste et trompettiste (paie ton CV d’enfer) avait collaboré dans le passé avec le regretté Claude Nougaro mais on s’est réellement intéressé à son art grâce au label parisien Heavenly Sweetness qui a eu la brillante idée de le mettre sous un piédestal. Trente ans après son dernier disque, il nous présente son nouvel album intitulé An ka sonjé.Ce que l’on remarque directement chez Edmony Krater, c’est tout simplement le fait qu’il reste attaché à ses traditions gwoka les décennies passantes. An ka sonjé ne déroge pas à la règle et nous embarque les yeux fermés sur l’île de la Guadeloupe avec son mélange de jazz, funk et ragga sur des morceaux vivifiants et exotiques à l’image de « Nou kontan », « A pa jôdi » mais également « Mi yo rivé » et « Lagè » qui sont de purs délices venus d’ailleurs et qui fondent sous la bouche. Avec comme principal moteur le tambour Ka et les harmonies pianistiques de son collaborateur Franck Souriant sans oublier ses cuivres chaleureux et ses basses funky, le musicien guadeloupéen nous étonne et nous évade à coup sûr.