Rabshakeh

I think it is oldish news. They have been gradually going up on Bandcamp for the last year. I'm not sure whether or not that constitutes a false alarm.

It looks like Black Saint and Soul Note are getting some sort of reissue programme.

Racer X with Paul Gilbert – Street Lethal Onyx - Bacdafucup This was big stupid fun back in the day.

Just a superb piece of music. One of the first major pieces I would play to anyone to illustrate how wonderful modernist music was. Without wanting to bring the tone down, I may be guilty of having fallen in love with Boulez after buying the Zappa record that he conducted as a teenager. That is a terrible, contemptuous, record (no more than Zappa's greatly overrated "serious" music deserved in my view, although I am still a big Zappa guy) and nobody comes out of it looking good, but it lodged the name in my head at a young age.

I read that. I was pleased to see it in the Guardian, which increasingly doesn't acknowledge this kind of music. One of the great masters of the 20th century, to my mind.

Interesting...

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll definitely look out for him when he tours. It slots in nicely with the likes of Scofield or Metheny without sounding at all like them.

Nir Felder - III A nice example of amiable populist guitar jazz that is pretty creative, recommended by someone on the board last night. Felder has some unique ideas. It feels a bit out of its own time, sadly.

Is it good?

Manilla Road – Crystal Logic

Faidra – Six Voices Inside

Marian McPartland – Piano Cocktail McPartland's royalty-free piano trio record for British library music label KPM. And now streamable on Spotify. I don't know whether they have to pay production houses like KPM or not.

LaMont Johnson – Burned By The Passion

I always see the left shoulder as a mitten peaking over the side of the guitar.

LaMont Johnson – Nine... A Mystical, Musical Allegory Really impressed by every one of his records so far.

Is that quite unlikely? I subscribe for the free stuff but I certainly don't pay for Ted (I pay for others). Substackers here can confirm but I think that paid subscribers are a fraction of subscribers. Ted should.still be making decent money from it, though. He's one of the bigger names on the platform.

Just watched it. Please would someone give me that sort of confidence. "If you go online, you get what you wanted..."

I think Ted Gioia should do a quality comparison between classic bagpipe Italo-library records and modern Spotify ghost bagpipe playlist tracks. Then write about it in short sentences. If Ted publishes that article, I will subscribe for life.

If it was Iridium, then he'd still be there.

Cecil Taylor and Feel Trio - Celebrated Blazons

Spotify is hiring real people and paying them. I don't think anyone suggests otherwise, do they? (At least until AI gets better.) Whether the results are any better than in the library music days is not clear to me: "Often very good" seems to overstate how good those records were. Retrospectively some that have been rediscovered are very good, others aren't but are good enough for sampling and often quite innovative in the way they used rhythm or synth sounds. But most library records were just as depressingly terrible as you'd expect. I don't hold out much expectation that Spotify's background jazz is going to age that well.

Oliver Lake Steel Quartet – Dat Love

I generally agree (although there are other periods when I sometimes allow myself to question whether he is just winging it...). But the Ghost Trance stuff always seemed to be designed with a view to securing funding, more than making music worth releasing. I'm impressed, looking back through the power of Google, at both how unanimously full of praise the critics were at the time, and just how many academic treatments of the music and concept are returned by a simple search. But what an amazing line up of musicians! Almost half of them went on to be future leaders. Not so young now, sadly, but for a long time the great hopes.

Papa Bue's Viking Jazzband with Wingy Manone & Edmond Hall – Papa Bue's Viking Jazzband With Wingy Manone & Edmond Hall More for the second side with Edmond Hall. One of my favourite arrangements of St. Louis Blues on record. Now dipping my toes back into this: Anthony Braxton – 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006 This is the first listen in over a decade, during which I have retrospectively warmed to some of Braxton's box sets. I still don't care for this one at all. I find it very charmless and undercooked.

Check out my NTS show at 3:30am when I’ll be playing somnambulant black metalgaze, buried playlistcore classics and narco-cumbia anthems.