Music Monday: Smith and Myers,

The past week or so has been a fun one for music, but I’m going to try not to get too preoccupied with recent releases to ignore my continued journey through music released years ago.

But first, an album that I’m incredibly excited about even through I’ve only listened to it twice: Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers’s Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens. It is GORGEOUS. I am not going to try to review it (in fact, I’ll leave the review to The Guardian and places like that). Two octogenarian AACM musicians coming together to produce something that is both as contemporary and compelling as the latest Shabaka Hutching’s album.

Here’s a sample of it:

I’ve been enjoying some Ravi Coltrane lately owing, in part, to an appearance on Christian McBride’s Sirius FM radio show. I hadn’t listened to him for a long time and had completely missed his appearance on Jack DeJohnette’s 2016 album In Movement with Matthew Garrison. I thoroughly enjoyed the interplay between these three very accomplished and very comfortable musicians. Coltrane is strong across the album which is from ECM so available on most streaming platforms. 

You can get a sense of it here on the title track: 

There are some albums that have floated around the edge of my awareness for so long that I have no choice to eventually sit down and play them (even if I can only play them on YouTube). Roy Brook’s 1972 album The Free Slave is one of them. Woody Shaw on trumpet, George Coleman on tenor, Hugh Lawson on piano, and Cecil McBee on bass. It’s a live date with too much funk, soul, and hard bop to reduce to some kind of platitude. It’s not a blowing session in the classic sense, but the performers are in good shape and the rhythm section is tight enough to give everyone a chance to do their thing: 

Enjoy the music!