News & Updates — classic albums

Has anybody ever said a bad thing about Eric Dolphy? One of the most respected jazz artists, even if he is not exactly a household name to casual jazz fans, any serious jazz head loves him, as well as every single musician that ever came into contact with him. He was known to give his last dollar to struggling musicians in gestures of kindness and compassion. He even gave so much to the groups he worked in that his own career as a leader was woefully brief. He was an amazing composer, improviser, alto saxophonist, flautist and pioneered the use...

The great Kaw/Creek saxophonist Jim Pepper was born today in 1941. His career covered jazz, pop, R&B, psychedelic rock and indigenous music and he is best known to '60s pop music fans as the composer of "Witchi-Tai-To". He also played clarinet, flute, sang and tap-danced. Pepper grew up in Portland OR and his first band of note was the Free Spirits, a mid-'60s NYC-based group that was one of the very earliest to explicitly fuse rock and jazz. The group also had Larry Coryell, Bob Moses & Chris Hills as members. They made a killer album in 1967 for ABC...

Massachusetts native Jaki Byard brought a wide range of styles and a dose of good fun into his piano playing. Also a saxophonist (often at the same time as piano!), he worked with Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Art Blakey, Roland Kirk, Sam Rivers, Charlie Mariano, Quincy Jones (on the groovy Smackwater Jack), Booker Ervin, Elvin Jones and others, including a duet record with Earl Hines. He even filled in for Duke Ellington at times when the leader was ill! He had been an educator in colleges since the late '60s and continued to record and tour around the world. Disturbingly,...

Happy born day to Jamaican roots singer Hugh Mundell, most famous for the classic "Africa Must Be Free By 1983". Born in East Kingston, Jamaica, he grew up with Earl Sixteen, Winston McAnuff and Wayne Wade. He cut an unreleased tune for Joe Gibbs, after which Mundell hooked up with Augustus Pablo for a bunch of productions from '75-78, becoming his Africa Must Be Free album. Mundell wrote all the tracks and two of them were recorded at Lee Perry's Black Ark studio. He performed just a handful of concerts in the Caribbean, US, UK and France. He also worked the...

An underrated jazz guitarist (and a custom instrument-builder), Attila Zoller was from Hungary. He started playing jazz in Budapest after WW2. After picking up his chops he went to Austria in '48 and then Germany in '54, where he played with notables Jutta Hipp and Albert Mangelsdorff. He backed several visiting American jazz musicians and in '59 won a scholarship to the Lenox School of Jazz in Western Massachusetts. While at Lenox he was roommates with iconoclasts Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. He worked with Benny Goodman, Herbie Mann and Chico Hamilton, as well as cutting music for films before...