Music Monday: Dolphy, Shorter, and Brooks

This weekend marked a few notable anniversaries. Not only was it the 60th anniversary of Muhammad Ali defeating Sonny Liston to win his first heavy weight championship, but as my colleague and friend Sharon Carson reminded me, the recording of Eric Dolphy’s timeless classic, Out to Lunch (1964).

I’ll just post it here without comment. If you haven’t listened to it in a while, now is a great time to take in this landmark album which seems to look both forward to the Coltrane revolution and backward toward bop and even swing at the same time:

Also celebrating an anniversary this past week is Wayne Shorter’s Adam’s Apple which was recorded (in part) 2 years later. If Dolphy’s album looks to the past and present at once, I’ve always felt that Shorter’s Adam’s Apple marks the end of Blue Note’s mid-century sound. It’s simply brilliant and offers the barest hints of the revolution in improvised music that was to come:

I don’t just listen to albums celebrating anniversaries (although this next album was recorded live on the 10th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination). It’s Roy Brooks and the Artistic Truth’s Ethnic Expression (1973). It ticks a couple boxes for me. It is not only a big band from the 1970s, but also embodies the explosive creativity of loft jazz. The Afrobeat is just a bonus:

Here’s a hard to find bonus album recorded on February 25, 1957. I’ve not been able to find it on the streaming services: Taylor’s Wailers. The album features Art Taylor in drums, Ray Bryant on piano, Donald Byrd on trumpet, Jackie McLean on alto, Charlie Rouse on tenor, and Wendell Marshall on bass. Coltrane plays on track 2 with a slightly different ensemble featuring Paul Chambers on bass and Red Garland on piano.

It’s worth a listen: