This Cosmic Jazz show dives into a bunch of new releases and checks out a couple of rarities from Don Cherry and McCoy Tyner. There’s so much great new jazz around at the moment that it’s difficult to keep up so check out the many links that are scattered through this blogpost and enjoy!
Your Brother’s Keeper – Cauldron from Where Rivers Meet
We begin with a new album from drummer Jake Long and his outfit Your Brother’s Keeper, featuring saxophonist elder statesman Gary Bartz, Released just a couple of months ago, the new band is born out of previous project Maisha (featured several times previously on CJ), with this first album Where Rivers Meet appearing on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood label. There’s electronics, dub, funk and more than a touch of spiritual jazz on this mix and, whilst the record is patchy, there’s some great playing from Bartz here – a saxophonist whose career now spans more than five decades. He emerged performing with Charles Mingus, Max Roach and Art Blakey before joining Miles Davis during the trumpeter’s electrifying early-1970s period. Bartz soon became a defining figure of the spiritual jazz movement through his celebrated NTU Troop recordings, creating a body of work that continues to resonate across generations of musicians and listeners alike. Perhaps the most celebrated of those 1970s records is his excellent live at Montreux recording from 1973, and featuring the epic I’ve Known Rivers (later covered by Courtney Pine). On this one, the leader fires off long, impassioned solo statements equally informed by head and heart. And then there’s the huge slab of electric funk that is Dr Follow’s Dance, featuring rare wah-wah sax acrobatics. On the new record, Bartz and Long are joined by Chelsea Carmichael on sax, Ali MacSween on synth, Axel Kaner-Lidstrom on trumpet), Twm Dylan on bass and Tim Doyle on additional percussion. It’s well worth a listen.
Chris Potter – Into Africa from Alive With Ghosts Today
From the ever-inventive Edition Records comes a new Chris Potter record – his seventh for the label. It’s a really interesting one too as there’s a clear theme: it’s the story of John Brown, the Christian Abolitionist who saw slavery as sin and, horrified by the state-backed violence of the pro-slavery armed forces, finally chose violence after years of facilitating the Underground Railway to assist escaped slaves. He was subsequently the first man in the States to be hung for treason. It’s a story that holds the complexity and tragedy of America in one moment, Potter says. It felt important to engage with it now. Potter’s approach is typically eclectic, with the opening title track a statement of intense intent, followed by the bluesy groove of Osawatomie Brown, with its echoes of Marvin Gaye in the bass line and its tough tenor stance. The violin is still a rare instrument in jazz but on this record Sara Caswell is a vital force. Guitarist Bill Frisell laces it together, sometimes resonating with his African heroes like Ali Farka Touré or rocking out as of old. Into Africa begins with a typically inventive tenor solo before some terrific ensemble playing (including some lovely bass clarinet from Rane Moore. All of Potter’s huge output is worth exploring but this new album is right up there with the best – check it out now.
Skerik – Air Garden from 061725
Skerik (or Eric Walton) is a tenor and baritone saxophonist from Seattle, Washington who uses a range of electronics and loops to create a unique sound. 061725 is his first fully fledged ambient album in a 30 year career and across six tracks he creates a series of dreamlike states, full of sonic textures that have come to be called saxophonics. An influence on this unique sound was Eno’s Music for Airports (1978) which his mother played around the house while he was growing up. Later, he was introduced to ECM Records and artists like Eberhard Weber, so deepening his connection to spacious, atmospheric compositions. You can listen to and buy the album here on Bandcamp. For more music in a similar vein, Neil recommends Anenon – listen to the title track from his latest Dream Temperature album.
Don Cherry – Desireless from Relativity Suite
Ah – now Neil has had this record since it first appeared on vinyl in 1973 and he’s played this 1 minute and 22 seconds of aural perfection innumerable times, every time marvelling at Carlos Ward’s gorgeous alto saxophone melody. CJ listeners will recall a similar enthusiasm for Ward’s more extended but equally beautiful solo on Abdullah Ibrahim’s The Wedding from the African Marketplace album. We didn’t acknowledge Ward’s death in January 2026 but this vastly under-rated alto saxophonist deserves much more attention than he received in his lifetime. He featured on many albums over the years although released only four under his own name. Ward was born in Panama City but moved with his family to Seattle where he began to study the clarinet. Joining the US military, Ward was stationed in Germany where he met and played with Albert Mangelsdorff and Karl Berger. In 1965, before returning to the United States, he met and spent time with Don Cherry who was playing with Abdullah Ibrahim, Ward went on to record 11 albums with Ibrahim including the superb The Journey (1978) and Water From an Ancient Well (1983). Ward was also featured on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle, recorded in 1965 and issued in 2021 – it’s one of only two live recordings of A Love Supreme, the other being recorded in Juan-les-Pins, Antibes. For more Carlos Ward, listen to him here on Bra Joe from Kilimanjaro from the recently released The Third World Underground album, recorded with Don Cherry and Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim). That album is available now on the WeWantSounds label on DL, LP and CD here on Bandcamp or in your local record store – but good luck with finding a copy of Relativity Suite!
Shabaka – A Future Untold from Of the Earth
Recording completely solo is a real challenge in jazz. Interaction between musicians is usually at the heart of the form but (as we’ve just heard with Skerik) it’s not always necessary. Of the Earth is built around multiple loops across a range of different reed and wind instruments. Shabaka is back on his A record built entirely from your own parts inevitably puts composition and editing in the foreground. The structural foundation of Of the Earth is the loop – rhythms of various shapes and sizes tumble out of silence and whirl in place, and when Shabaka lands on an interesting pattern he’s not afraid to let it play on its own for a few bars. More than this, Shabaka raps on the album: I’ve never rapped before but was actually inspired by André 3000’s courage in exploring new dimensions with fearlessness and sincerity; I decided to find my voice on this album. It’s often difficult to know where each tune is going – but that’s part of the delight of this album and surprises abound. Step Lightly even sounds like a bunch of school recorders for the first few bars before a kind of soca rhythm and metallic chimes kick in and the tune goes in a different direction. Worth an exploration – track it down here on Bandcamp or in you local record store.
McCoy Tyner – Goin’ Home from Asante
This neglected album has just appeared in a Tone Poet edition on Blue Note. Sadly that means parting with around £36 (€41) unless you can track down the original 1974 copy. However, unless you’re wedded to an original pressing, the Tone Poet reissue is the one to go for. This is a superb sounding reissue win a gatefold sleeve with excellent notes by Syd Schwartz that is well worth checking out. Pianist McCoy Tyner had been increasingly looking to Mother Africa for inspiration on his Blue Note recordings of the late-1960s on pieces like African Village and Message from the Nile. With Asante (recorded in in 1970), he brought those influences to the fore with a powerful set that’s rooted in the swirling percussive rhythmic bed laid by drummer Billy Hart and percussionist Mtumé. Buster Williams delivers those characteristic fat basslines, and guitarist Ted Dunbar is much more than just rhythm accompaniment. Alto saxophonist Andrew White (who was an equally good bass player on Weather Report’s Sweetnighter album as evidenced by his playing here on 125th Street Congress) makes up the rest of this exciting group. The wordless vocals of Songhai on the extended album opener Malika and the title track also contribute to the atmosphere of this terrific album. The music looks forward to the sounds that Tyner would create on his Milestone records including one of Neil’s all-time favourite albums, Sahara (1972) – here’s the extended title track. Indeed, it’s probable that the success of Sahara prompted Blue Note to reissue Asante some four years after it was recorded.
Simon Moullier – Ceiba from Ceiba
Vibraphonist Moullier is one of those random discoveries made by Neil as he explores new online sounds – but he has also appeared earlier on an Cosmic Jazz show this year when we featured the new Edition Records album by Ben Wendel. BaRcoDe included Moullier along with two other leading vibes players we know well on CJ – Joel Ross and Patricia Brennan. Ceiba is Moullier’s sixth album as a leader and the third release with his quartet – Lex Korten on piano, Rick Rosato on bass, and Jongkuk Kim on drums. The album also includes guest percussionist Keita Ogawa on two tracks. All original compositions, Ceiba is full of strong melodies and really effective interplay. Indeed, Joshua Redman notes that Ceiba is one of the best modern mainstream instrumental jazz records I’ve heard in years: gorgeous writing; flawless yet fearless playing; impeccably crafted from beginning to end.
As an improviser, Simon has that holy trinity: melody, feel and flow. And what a sound. It’s difficult to add more. Ceiba is available in DL and LP formats – again from here on Bandcamp or in your local record store.
Omar Sosa – Back Home to My Dwelling from We Are Not the Headliner
It’s thanks to promoter Rob Adams up in Scotland for this one – a brand new live recording from Cuban multi-instrumentalist and Grammy-nominated Omar Sosa. The new album has the frankly awful title We Are Not the Headliner, but get past that and you’ll have a great tiem with this music… The new record features Sosa’s new ensemble Quarteto Americanos – reeds player Sheldon Brown, drummer Josh Jones and bass player Ernesto Mazar Kindelán. The 11 tracks feature tunes the band has presented on tour over the past few years plus several new pieces, There’s special guest contributions from Natascha Atlas (vocals), Guillermo Gómez-Peña (spoken word), Reggie Stephens (spoken word), Tito Leliebre (percussion), and Camilo Landau and Kai Lyons (tres). For more Omar Sosa you could start with his excellent Mulatos album (2004) or that album’s rather good set of remixes – including this take on La Tra from Basephunk.
Nightmares on Wax – You Bliss from In a Space Outta Dub
Our final tune is from the outer edges of jazz – but it is excellent. With dub wizard Adrian Sherwood at the controls this set of remixes from the Nightmares on Wax album In a Space Outta Sound is predictably inspired. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of In A Space Outta Sound, George Evelyn (aka Nightmares on Wax) handed over the tapes to Sherwood who went on a heady version excursion with eight tracks from the original record, in the spirit of the reggae and sound system roots that informed the original album. You Bliss [not My Bliss as Neil referred to it in the show] is a reworking of the original You Wish with its charming sample of Judy Clay and William Bell’s lovely Private Number. As well as his trademark mixing desk wizardry, Sherwood also brought in some of the core On-U Sound players to add additional instrumentation and turn this collaboration into something which is much more than the sum of its parts. Neil absolutely loves this one! Available (of course) from Bandcamp and your local record store.
More from Cosmic Jazz soon…
The return of Neil is listening to…
- Eiji Nakayama – Aya’s Samba
- Joe Henderson – Fire
- Alfonso Soliano – Masth Chantani
- Akusmi – Rain Dance
- Curió Curió – Bem Querer
Our praises begin with Clifford Jordan’s wonderful self-titled tribute to John Coltrane from his superb Glass Bead Games double album – one of Neil’s undoubted favourites from the Strata East label. Writing for 
Terry Callier possessed a rich baritone that he deploys to great effect here on this vocal tribute to one of his heroes. It comes from his third and final album for the Cadet label and is full of richly-detailed arrangements as well as thoughtful political and social messages. Can’t Catch the Trane is one of the highlights of this impressive 1973 set along with a sensitive reading of Duke Ellington’s Satin Doll and the epic album closer Alley-Wind Song. I Just Can’t Help Myself has been reissued on vinyl and the demo versions of Can’t Catch the Trane and other titles are available on the excellent 2005 budget compilation Life Lessons: The Best of Terry Callier. It’s alto saxophonist Don Myrick (who featured in the Phenix Horns for Earth, Wind & Fire) on this perfect demo version. For those unfamilar with Callier’s work, a great place to start is with his excellent 1998 comeback album Timepeace, issued on Gilles Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud label. You can track down a copy 
No apologies for more music from Brian Jackson’s new album Now More Thank Ever, which has just appeared on BBE Records following the ‘teaser’ releases of some tracks in EP format. This time, our obvious choice is the inspiring Lady Day & John Coltrane, one of Gil Scott Heron’s most famous compositions. Most of this new release is another tribute – this time to the memory of Brian Jackson’s former musical partner who together gave us many memorable albums including Winter in America (1974) and It’s Your World and From South Africa to South Carolina (both 1975). Gil was the brother I never had and I was the brother he never had, said Jackson in a 2022 Guardian newspaper interview. We had so much in common: both only children who were raised by our mothers and estranged from our fathers. Our mothers pushed us to succeed academically and we both enrolled at Lincoln [University] because 
And now we come to the master – the icon whose centenary will be celebrated on 23 September this year. Here at CJ we’re getting in early, featuring several programmes that will include tributes to this giant of jazz. We begin with one of Coltrane’s later recordings, drawn largely from tapes discovered in 1994 by Alice Coltrane who plays piano throughout and who titled eight of the tracks featured. The album features Rashied Ali on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass. Garrison had actually left Coltrane’s group in 1966 but he came back for these recordings the following year. Stellar Regions is actually an early version of Venus which appears on the duo album Interstellar Space with with Ali on drums and Coltrane on tenor sax recorded just a week after these tunes. D avid Wild’s album liner notes are worth quoting in some detail: These recordings all have a similar aura. Among Coltrane’s final phrases, they are almost the last notes to be captured on tape, performances thus haunted by our foreknowledge that what will follow them is silence. More importantly and perhaps even more compelling, they represent a suggestion of the evolution his music would have taken had his life not been cut so short, a tantalizing glimpse of an unrealized future… these eight compositions, a day’s work from mid-February of 1967, stand alone as fully formed masterworks, explorations of the “late Coltrane” idiom. That makes clear the driving force that was pushing Coltrane forwards – for just a few months later in July 1967 he would be dead from liver cancer.
We started 2026 with a track from Ruby Rushton’s latest album – their fifth. This UK band is led by sax and flute player Edward Cawthorne – aka Tenderlonius – with Nick Walters on trumpet and flugelhorn, Aidan Shepherd on piano, Fender Rhodes and synths and Tim Carnegie on drums, with all band members making percussion contributions. All Ruby Rushton records are released on their own 22a independent record label. Oli Reeves in his notes to the vinyl album release states that This is a band still evolving. Trademark catchy riffs and heavy grooves are still there but are now heightened by a level of maturity and a sense of belonging that hadn’t been encountered previously. And this is why Ruby Rushton deserves more recognition amidst the ongoing surge of new British jazz artists. If you don’t know their music, check out 
And so we turn to another British saxophonist, Camilla George. She studied at London’s Trinity College of Music, where Jean Toussaint was a tutor and then she played with Courtney Pine’s Tomorrow’s Warriors big band. George plays alto sax and identifies Kenny Garrett as an important influence, which explains the addition of his tune Ms Baja featuring effective scatting from Zara Macfarlane. Her debut album Isang appeared in 2017 and was much praised at the time with critic John Fordham noting the saxophonist’s nimbleness, light sound and bursts of raw emotion recalling the 50s cool school as well as the Coltrane quartet. High praise indeed. Other than Ms Baja, the compositions on Isang are all her own and the band includes one of our favourite keyboard players on the UK scene – the always impressive Sarah Tandy. Second album The People Could Fly appeared in 2018 and was followed in 2022 by the even more diverse Ibio-Ibio in 2022 which included Daniel Casimir on bass, Shirley Tetteh on guitar, Winston Clifford on drums plus Senegalese kora player Kadialy Kouyate, acclaimed US drummer Daru Jones and Birmingham’s finest MC Lady Sanity.
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We first featured Joel Ross on Cosmic Jazz at the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020 following the release of KingMaker, his first album on Blue Note, and we caught up with him earlier this year exploring his gospel-influenced 2026 release simply titled Gospel Music. Before this was the excellent album nublues and we return to this outing with the title track. There are covers of Thelonious Monk’s Evidence and Coltrane’s Equinox and Central Park West, sitting alongside seven original pieces. The title track is an absolute showcase for Ross’s talent – something that Neil can verify, having seen him in 2023 performing in an all-star group with drummer Makaya McCraven alongside guitarist Matt Gold, electric bassist Junius Paul and trumpeter Marquis Hill.
At the beginning of the year, we profiled vocalist Ledisi and her tribute album For Dinah. Best known as an R&B singer, Ledisi is an excellent jazz vocalist too. In an Echoes magazine interview in 2025, Ledisi identified Dinah Washington as an under-appreciated artist, drawing attention to her influence on Aretha Franklin and Quincy Jones, noting too that There are only five people on my wall at home: my mom, my great aunt, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone and Dinah. This Dinah Washington original may have the same title as ‘The Tennessee Plowboy’ Johnny Arnold’s country number from 1950 but is a much more spirited number – and Ledisi does indeed do it justice. She’s supported on this track by Christian McBride on bass, McClenty Hunter on drums and Michael King on piano. Highly recommended.
The full length track on 1970’s Bitches Brew is over 20 minutes long and – uniquely for a jazz tune at the time – features over a dozen studio edits and loops from producer Teo Macero. Jazzwise noted that Miles would Never again would he turn himself, and the music of his time, inside out acknowledging Bitches Brew as the last epoch-making album to appear in jazz. Now whilst Cosmic Jazz might question this unequivocal statement, the influence of this double album on the world of jazz cannot be overestimated. I’ve written about Bitches Brew many times on this platform and elsewhere (see our first Miles @ 100 show) and so had to feature the album once more, choosing the second single edit from the 
Get Up With It is a rather misunderstood album in the Miles Davis canon. It emerged in 1974 and is the second of two sort-of compilations that emerged that year, the first being Big Fun. Both feature music from the 1970-74 period when Miles was wilfully bending genres – and Big Fun contains one of Neil’s favourite out-takes, the improbably funky 
An odd pairing? Not really: in 1982 Brian Eno travelled to Ghana where he spent time recording ambient sounds on a portable cassette recorder and then listening to the results on his headphones. In his liner notes to Ambient 4: On Land released later that year Eno noted that The effect of this simple technological system was to cluster all the disparate sounds into one aural frame: they became music. In the revised reissue notes he added that after returning from Ghana, Eno noted that the guitarist Robert Quine had given him a copy of Miles Davis’ He Loved Him Madly and that Teo Macero’s revolutionary production on that piece seemed to me to have the ‘spacious’ quality I was after and … it became a touchstone to which I returned frequently. 
Live at the Fillmore East is notable in that it records the final concert with saxophonist Wayne Shorter in Miles’ band. A few months after, he would join Joe Zawinul to create Weather Report – striking out in another direction completely. If Weather Report is new to you then compare what they do with Zawinul’s tune 
It’s About That Time originally appeared on A Silent Way (1969) forming the core of the side-long experiment that was bookended by the title track. This remix from a 2007 tribute-cum-reinterpretation of some classic Miles tunes features rapper Nas on vocals and his father Olu Dara on trumpet, Carlos Santana on guitar and Miles’ nephew Vince Wilburn, Jr. on drums and programming, with co-production by drummer Lenny White. The centrepiece of this unusual EP is the updating of It’s About That Time but there’s a 
Miles had returned to the studio in 1980, after a long hiatus during which he left the trumpet alone and focused on women and cocaine – according to his autobiography. He was certainly not in good health at this time but he recorded the patchy The Man With the Horn (1981) and then formed a live band with Mike Stern on guitar, Al Foster on drums, Bill Evans on soprano sax, Mino Cinelu on percussion and Marcus Miller on bass. It had been six years since Miles had played live and audiences were nervous about the outcome. They needn’t have worried. Miles subsequently won a Grammy for best jazz instrumental performance by a soloist but, characteristically, said that he didn’t know why… Neil saw this group in April 1982 when Miles performed three nights at the Hammersmith Odeon, London and where Back Seat Betty – a highlight of We Want Miles – was a standout. Writer George Cole in his excellent blog The Last Miles has written persuasively about this show – find out more 
Perhaps the most conventional of Neil’s choices for this second Miles special but, nonetheless, this final set of performances by Miles with John Coltrane is a must have. So What comes from a performance at the Tivolis Koncertsal in Copenhagen. It’s the same group that recorded the previous year (in 1959) the iconic Kind of Blue album with Wynton Kelly replacing Bill Evans on piano. These are intense performances with Kelly being an admirable foil for Miles’ modal constructions and Coltrane’s increasingly muscular solos. This anthology was released as part of the ongoing Bootleg series in 2018 and is available as a 4CD with a single vinyl edition of the complete Copenhagen concert also in the racks.
Betsu no Jikan is the culmination of a two-year exploration by guitarist Takuru Okada, improvising with 
Rubberband was recorded in 1985 but not released until 2019. As such, it qualifies as ‘lost album’ – with all the critical uncertainty that this status brings. Of course, it’s not a great Miles album – that would have been too much to expect. But there are many redeeming features – not least the vocals of Ledisi on this version of the title track. It’s a highlight of this patchy album, recorded when Miles had left Columbia Records and was heading to Warner Bros., and it’s very much a record of it’s time – there’s lots of synths and slap bass but there’s still the unmistakeable Miles tone liberally sprinkled across the record (and note that – uniquely on CJ – throughout this piece we will be referring to the trumpeter by his first name alone).
This celebrated soundtrack to Louis Malle’s film (1958) was improvised by Miles while watching a playback of the film in the studio. Miles was playing the Club Saint-Germain in Paris in November 1957 and was introduced to Malle by Juliette Greco (with whom Miles had previously had an affair). Later he was invited to a private screening of Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud (Lift To The Scaffold) before taking his group to the studio and improvising to a projection of extracts from the film. The result was this perfect soundtrack recorded in just three hours. The band he used was the Barney Wilen Quartet: Wilen on tenor sax, Rene Urtreger on piano, Pierre Michelot on bass and American expat drummer and bebop pioneer Kenny Clarke. In his autobiography, Miles claims he chose the studio for its gloomy, dark ambience and that’s translated into this stunning music. Just check out 
Very recently re-released, The 
Neil acknowledges that there are good reasons why this didn’t make the final cut on In A Silent Way, the album that first saw Miles breaking out of the classic Quintet structure and instead beginning to deploy a bigger cast of what would become the most important musicians in jazz. Splashdown is simply not good enough. But it is fascinating in these box sets to hear the evolution of what becomes some of the most influential music in the genre. By early 1969, Miles’ core working band had stabilised around Wayne Shorter now on soprano sax, Dave Holland on bass with Chick Corea on Fender Rhodes and Jack de Johnette on drums. For In a Silent Way, Miles added Tony Williams (again) and Herbie Hancock (again) and then included English guitarist John McLaughlin and Austrian keyboard player Joe Zawinul (who had been in Cannonball Adderley’s band). Significantly, this was the first jazz album to be extensively edited by producer Teo Macero whose techniques were informed by classical sonata form. The result was that the first and third sections of each of the two tracks on the album were the same. Check out this alternative take on the stunning 
Now, this is music to make you cry – indeed Neil knows people who do when they listen to this early example of work by the First Great Quintet as they were called – Miles on trumpet, John Coltrane on tenor sax, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums. As his star rose in 1955, Miles had formed his new quintet and – in order to fulfil contractual obligations – he went into the studio in 1956, recording in just two sessions enough material for four albums. These were subsequently titled Workin’, Cookin’, Relaxin’ and Steamin’. From Workin’, It Never Entered My Mind was a Rogers and Hart tune recorded by – among others – 
Another selection from one of the Columbia boxes, this track comes from the Complete Jack Johnson set, collected in 2003. Named for Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán, this track is also one that didn’t make the final cut on the Jack Johnson album (1971) – but it is a terrific piece, driven by Jack De Johnette’s rock-powered drumming and Steve Grossman’s stunning soprano sax. The album was conceived by Davis to accompany a documentary about Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion and was clearly inspired by the political and racial subtext of Johnson’s story. The musicians on the two day session also included John McLaughlin and Sonny Sharrock on guitars, Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea on keyboards with new electric bass player Michael Henderson setting an irresistible groove.
We end this show with a wonderful tune from Miles’ favourite singer, Shirley Horn. This would be the final guest appearance on record from Miles – just a few months after recording this in 1991 he would be dead. But there’s no sense of loss of tone here – that unmistakable trumpet sound weaves around Horn’s vocal with the same mesmerising effect that we heard on It Never Entered My Mind. In a magazine interview Horn noted Well, I loved Miles so much. He got to be like a part of me. Of course, I knew about him many years before actually. I met him, but I was a married woman and I got a call. To this day, I don’t know how he got this phone number, but I was with my mother-in-law and my husband down in Virginia having breakfast and this party said, “This is Miles Davis. I want you to come to New York. There is some people, I think, you should get to know.” And I thought it was somebody, some friends playing a joke or something. So I thought about it and I thought that maybe I should go to New York. And she did… If you don’t know Shirley Horn’s unique vocal styling then Neil also recommends her later 1998 tribute to Miles which features a cover drawing by Miles of them both. It’s a fitting image to end this first Miles @ 100 show. There will be more.
It’s not easy to equal the original version of Rising to the Top from Keni Burke, but we think one of our favourite funk outfits Lettuce have cracked it. Founded in Boston, US, Lettuce are lead by drummer Adam Deitch and we love this take on the soul classic from the latest album Cook. Released in December 2025, the eleven tracks include funk, soul, jazz, hip-hop and more. As we noted in January when we featured the title track, Lettuce have been described as groovy, soulful and fresh – and we’d agree.
Neil came across the Japanese husband and wife team – neo-soul guitarist Toshiki Soejima and trumpeter/multi-instrumentalist Nahokimama – in an online search for some new music. Their 10 track album was released in December 2025 on the new Sterofox label and includes this chilled example of their craft. Check our 
Drummer Yussef Dayes has been making waves since he appeared on the South London jazz scene in 2016 with fellow Londoner Kamaal Williams on the self-titled Yussef Kamaal album. Better still was the collaboration on Blue Note with songwriter Tom Misch, What Kinda Music. Then on Brownswood in late 2020 came the Live at Joshua Tree EP with the ambitious 19 track release Black Classical Music following in 2021. Since then, Dayes has released another live EP (recorded in the mountains above Malibu) which will be joined by this new recording due in March 2026. It features the extraordinary Japanese vocalist and sanshin virtuoso Minami Kizuki and Dayes noted that Kizuki came with her vibes, and we just tapped in. And it was literally that feeling of when you’re on edge and you’ve just got to be listening, you’ve got to be in the zone, regardless of the circumstances. The drummer is joined by his longtime collaborators Rocco Palladino, Venna, Elijah Fox, and Alexander Bourt. We’d recommend both this album and the 
New Zealand/Aotearoa’s finest The Circling Sun have released two albums that have been on Cosmic Jazz turntables in recent years. Second LP Orbits channels the cosmic energy of 1970s spiritual jazz, filtered through synths, layered percussion, and an eight piece choir of Maori and Pacific Island singers. The personnel on this album includes Cameron Allen on tenor and alto saxes, John Bell on cornet and tenor horn, Guy Harrison on synths and Julien Dyne on drums and percussion and this track comes from the new download that features an additional three tracks. You can find it 
Producer, multi-instrumentalist and DJ Adam Scrimshire’s latest album is available on download and vinyl with the record being available from just £1 – but we’d recommend that you pay more as 90% of that money will go to three charities – The Refugee Council, MAP (Medical Aid for Palestinians) and Earth Percent. The album includes various guests – all friends of Cosmic Jazz – including Nat Birchall, Idris Rahman, Tamar Osborn and Faye Houston. New music blog 
Saxophonist Dave Liebman and the late pianist Ritchie Beirach formed Quest in 1981 with bassist George Mraz and drummer Al Foster. Later versions of the group had the equally talented Ron McClure on bass and Billy Hart on drums. You won’t find it easy to track down this extended take of the Billy Hart composition, Redemption where Dave Liebman very clearly channels his inner Coltrane – even Discogs doesn’t show it! Beirach is not as well known as he should be: for more information check out 
We end this show with an excellent tune from the live in the studio album from German collective Jazzanova. As far as Neil is concerned, Jazzanova don’t put a foot wrong – whether their studio albums or their remixes. This new record celebrate 20 years of Jazzanova’s groundbreaking debut album In Between with a new live reinterpretation. On its release in 2002, In Between set something of a benchmark for what would come to be known as nu jazz – a 
We began with one of the architects of bebop, the jazz movement that first marked the start of modern jazz. Charlie Parker was the alto saxophonist who broke the mould and took jazz forward and out of the dominant swing era. ‘Bird,’ as he was known, was an intuitive player who who based his improvisations not on the melody but rather a tune’s key chords. An early reliance on heroin and alcohol resulted in a mental breakdown and six months of confinement at the Camarillo State Hospital. Released in January 1947, Parker soon headed back to New York and engaged in some of the most rewarding playing of his career leading a group which featured Miles Davis and Max Roach. Relaxin’ at Camarillo itself was recorded in February 1947 with Howard McGhee on trumpet, Dodo Marmaroso on piano, Wardell Gray on tenor sax, Barney Kessell on guitar, Red Callander on bass and Don Lamond on drums. Parker’s importance? Simply that if he’d not existed, jazz would be very different.
Next up is one of the most popular pianists of the 1950-60s, Errol Garner, with a live take on Duke Ellington’s classic tune Caravan. This comes from a celebrated album with a celebrated cover – Concert By the Sea from 1955. Erroll Garner was another intuitive musician – unable to read music but a brilliant virtuoso with a unique sound. Like Oscar Peterson, he demonstrated that you can be both popular and sophisticated and it’s his free-form introductions, the stunning runs and – yes – his grunting while playing with a huge smile across his face that were all part of the Errol Garner magic. There’s a complete 
Yes – truly a genius of modern music, pianist Thelonious Monk once said that The piano ain’t got no wrong notes – and then set out to demonstrate that jazz truth. This early album (his first for Blue Note from 1951) is bursting with classic Monk tunes – Round About Midnight, Ruby My Dear, Epistrophy, Misterioso and Well You Needn’t. Of course, it’s an essential record for your collection – and you can get it in a great Blue Note Classics release from 2024. It demonstrates that – right from the off – Monk’s angular twists and turns on the keyboard along with unexpected changes of key and that percussive attack would shape all his future compositions. We’d recommend some of his Columbia collections from the 1960s too – like Solo Monk (1964), Straight, No Chaser (1965) and Underground (1968) – all three are great listening. And we haven’t yet said anything about Monk as a jazz fashion icon – just check out those suits, hats and sunglasses…
The title was long thought to be a reference to the Chicago Transit Authority, but composer Jimmy Heath is recorded as saying that it was simply the initials of a former girlfriend. Whatever, this tune has almost become a jazz standard with recordings by Miles Davis, Lee Morgan and Chick Corea – 
Tubby Hayes was the crown prince of British tenor sax players in the 1960s and remains a massively underrated jazz musician who was as good as any tenor player of the day. An early death at the age of 38 cut short his recording career but there’s still a good body of work to check out. Unusually, Neil recommends starting with the later albums and working backwards. If your budget can stretch to it, then an admittedly expensive starting point is the Complete Fontana Albums box set – eleven of ‘Tubbs’ best records including two of Neil’s favourites, Down in the Village and Mexican Green. The tune Down in the Village was later recorded in an excellent jazz dance version by Japanese favourites Quasimode – 
We’re back to 1957 for this unusual Miles Davis version of a Jackie McLean tune, which originally featured on McLean’s debut album from 1955. You can only find it on the 2CD Legacy version of this album – but it’s easy to track down an inexpensive copy 
Charles Lloyd was one of the most popular jazz musicians on the American west coast scene in the 1960s and this tune comes from his first album for Atlantic, recorded in 1966. It includes the ambitious reworking of Autumn Leaves into a sequence bookended by two Lloyd compositions, Autumn Prelude and Autumn Echo. Here Lloyd has a stellar band – Keith Jarrett on piano, Cecil McBee on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. Dream Weaver was followed in 1967 by Forest Flower: Live at Monterey, a wildly successful album that became one of the first million-sellers in jazz and catapulted Lloyd to international fame. Neil s a long-time Lloyd fan and has almost all of records on either vinyl or CD, including all those late iconic ECM releases. Now recording again with Blue Note, Lloyd is just released his latest album – Figure in Blue, a tribute to Duke Ellington. You can hear Defiant, Tender Warrior on the Blue Note website 
And now onto those promised remixes. Bird Up is a 2003 album of Parker remixes and – as is often the way with these things – something of a mixed bag. It’s unlikely to feature in any future Penguin Jazz Guide but this take on Relaxin’ at Camarillo is a great twist on the original – probably because it features the great M’Shell Ndegeocello on bass, along with programming by Chris Dave (sometime drummer for Robert Glasper) and Hammond B3 from Ray Angry (most recently on a great project called Plumb with David Murray). Relaxin’ (thinks Neil) is the standout tune on this Hal Winer project but elsewhere Hubert Laws, Ravi Coltrane and Dr. John are can be found contributing to these radical reinterpretations. Ndegeocello was born in West Berlin but raised in Washington DC and played in the city’s go-go bands in the late 1980s before diversifying into a wide range of different genres. Now on Blue Note, her last two albums (The Omnichord Real Book and No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin) are well worth exploring. Apparently, her surname means free like a bird in Swahili…
The Blue Note Revisited project from 2004 is a rather more successful take on the jazz remix album. It has a host of big names hard at work trying to update the jazz experience for Generation Y (and everyone else) – LA Funk Mob, Kenny Dope, DJ Spinna, Jazzanova and 4 Hero to name just a few of those involved. As a result, it works – with Japanese remix royalty Kyoto Jazz Massive’s treatment of Kudu being a notable success. Brothers Shuya and Yoshihiro Okino, both DJs and remixers in Kyoto, have a good track record in reworking this kind of material: their 2021 album Message From a New Dawn included the excellent 
We were saddened to hear of the death in August of Latin piano supremo Eddie Palmieri, a musician who exemplified a progressive approach to the Latin genre but whose exploration was always firmly rooted in its tradition. Massively influned by jazz, it was trombonist Barry Rogers who would introduce Palmieri to the work of the then Coltrane pianist McCoy Tyner whose use of block chords became a signature of Palmieri’s own sound. He experimented by employing a jazz aesthetic both in live performance and on his recordings, based on the Cuban descarga (or jam session) concept. Arrangements were opened up with band members as soloists and Palmieri began incorporating a newly developed post-Castro revolution Cuban rhythm known as mozambique. Palmieri went on to create two versions of his hugely influential band La Perfecta, recording the classic Vamonos Pa’l Monte in 1971 – one of Neil’s favourites. In 2005, Palmieri teamed up with longtime trumpeter and band member Brian Lynch to record Simpático. The album has an all star lineup including Phil Woods, Lila Downs, Donald Harrison, Conrad Herwig, Robby Ameen and more. In 2007 it won a Grammy as the best Latin Jazz recording.
We have played this tune on the show previously – way back in February 2009 and soon after its release. Saxophonist and flautist Finn Peters had long immersed himself in dance, hip hop, Afro-Cuban, electronica and contemporary classical musics, before returning to his jazz roots with the excellent Su-Ling album in 2006. The follow-up Butterflies album featured pretty much the same quintet as Su-Ling but added (in a very subtle way) strings, a Balinese gamelan ensemble, kora, synths, a few choruses of birdsong and some inventive sound processing. The result was a jazz album – of sorts. There’s an emphasis on composition, and the birdsong elements inevitably remind us of Hermeto Pascoal from Brazil or the contemporary classical sounds of Olivier Messiaen – yes, it’s that kind of record. Guitarist Dave Okumu, pianist Nick Ramm and Peters himself – mostly on flute – solo around some beautifully subtle rhythms. Butterflies is based on the traditional Balinese tune Butterfly and includes elements of gamelan. Significantly, the producer here is eclectic composer, remixer and band leader Matthew Herbert whose own albums have often included sounds from all kinds of sources – including on Plat de Jour, the food industry… For a, er, taste of the music try 
Recorda Me is one of Neil’s favourite Joe Henderson compositions, and he’s here on this record with Tyner on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Al Foster on drums – what a quartet! This was recorded in 1991, some 28 years after Tyner and Henderson first recorded together on Henderson’s debut Blue Note record Page One in 1963. This record is an no-overdubbing all-tube amplification recording on the Chesky label – and it shows in the highly detailed sound. There’s a mix of standards and originals including Cole Porter’s What is This Thing Called Love? and Victor Young’s Beautiful Love. This is not Tyner at his most fiery or Henderson at his most squally but it’s great to hear this quartet together. Sadly not available on vinyl but you might be able to track down the CD.
I think we all thought that there would never be another Alice Coltrane record after Transfiguration, recorded in in 1978. But – some 26 years later – Coltrane released what was to be her last album, Translinear Light. Coltrane’s son, saxophonist and composer Ravi, produced the record and plays saxophone on 5 of the 11 tracks. The rest of the band is pretty star-studded: Charlie Haden and James Genus appear on bass and Jack DeJohnette and Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts are on drums. Alice Coltrane plays her signature Wurlitzer organ and piano. There’s real beauty on this record – the traditional 
The spiritual vibe is continued with this powerful slice of Japanese jazz, courtesy of the Jazzman label’s Spiritual Jazz series. Their 8th collection was a 4LP/2CD release and one of the highlights of this ongoing series. Tachibana was a rare record, even by Japanese standards. Initially, a private pressing by jazz enthusiast Yojiro Tachibana who wanted to make a recording in the venue he owned. As the excellent liner notes tell us, the band was three students – leader and pianist Tohru Aizawa was studying medicine at graduate school, while drummer Tetsuya Morimura and bassist Kohzo Watanabe were studying law. Saxophonist Kyoichiro Morimura (Tetsuo’s brother) was a teacher. The resulting music is surprisingly accomplished and a testimony to the adventurous jazz spirit of these four musicians. The Tachibana record was subsequently reissued on the BBE label in 2018 – you can find it 
Neil’s selection ends with another tune played back in 2009, the lyrical II (Suspended Variations) from Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stańko. Stańko, who died in 2018, began working with this trio some ten years before the release of Suspended Night in 2004. Pianist Marcin Wasilewski went on to record several great records for the ECM label but he’s here at his most Bill Evans/Keith Jarrett-like supporting Slawomir Kurkiewicz on bass and Michal Miskiewicz on drums. There are ten Suspended Variations on the album, each of which offers their own inventive charms but – for Neil – the standout is the rhythmically compelling Variation II. This is a highly recommended record and – if you don’t know the work of Tomasz Stańko – a great place to start.
Neil recognised that a tune from this album was played on the show in May 2013. The record has, sadly, probably gathered dust on Derek’s shelf ever since. This is undeserving and so it’s long overdue a revival. Steve Turre is a player of the trombone and seashells (see below), born to Mexican-American parents but brought up in the San Francisco area. He’s played with some significant people in the jazz and Latin worlds, they include: Ray Charles, Art Blakey, Dizzie Gillespie, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, Pharaoh Sanders, Max Roach, Horace Silver and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Phew! It was the latter who introduced him to seashells as an instrument and this 2004 album is made up of Kirk numbers except for one Turre original (One for Kirk). In the liner notes Turre writes that every time he played with Rahsaan he made the audience FEEL something and that Rahsaan’s spirit is alive. He’s still touching people through his music, and it still stands up. That observation still stands today. The musicians here include Vincent Herring, Dave Valentin, Mulgrew Miller and Buster Williams.
The African diaspora though the Americas is an area of great interest and concern to Grammy award-winning Puerto Rico-born saxophonist David Sanchez and this is reflected in the title of this selected tune Africa Y Las Americas. Like Steve Turre, he has worked with an impressive list of musicians from the jazz and Latin worlds and this 1995 album includes: the late Roy Hargrove on trumpet, Danilo Perez on piano, Larry Grenadier on bass, Adam Cruz on drums, Milton Cardona and Jerry Gonzales on percussion. It is more jazz than Latin but a Latin sensibility is infused throughout. The sleeve notes refer to Sanchez playing straight ahead jazz but here he’s chosen to employ a more indigenous style – the folk element of his country. Africa Y Las Americas begins with prominent, but subtle, percussion to underpin the track but there’s also Sanchez and Roy Hargrove merging and inter-changing their sounds. Music of its time, but still relevant today.
This album brings forth a number of surprises. To find saxophonist Davis Murray, with a reputation for the progressive and even the avant-garde, playing the songs of Nat King Cole may not be what you expect. To learn that Nat King Cole, who did not speak Spanish, recorded all these numbers is perhaps even more surprising. For Derek, to find this album on his shelves was also something of a surprise – but what is life without surprises? The tunes are taken from two albums that Nat King Cole recorded on 1958 and 1962 in Spanish and Portuguese. Cole had a huge following in South and Central America and his friend and manager Carlos Gastel suggested that to make such recordings was a way to acknowledge that audience. David Murray is clearly another Cole admirer as this album, released in 2011, testifies. He assembled a group of top Cuban musicians and in 2010 he recorded the tracks with this band in Buenos Aires, adding tango vocalist Daniel Melingo. Two months later he went to Portugal to add strings. This track (quizás meaning maybe or perhaps) was composed by Cuban songwriter Osvaldo Farrés in the 1940s and includes the husky, after-hours voice of Daniel Melingo, who went to Spain to score films for Pedro Almodovar and returned to Argentina in the late 1990s, to promote tango. Many of our listeners may know the tune as Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps – recorded by many including Doris Day and Gregory Porter.
Derek is almost ashamed that he has not played music by the late Michael Brecker for some time. The BBC Radio 3 jazz profile describes him as the most influential saxophonist in the post-Coltrane tradition – a view few would disagree with. He played with a variety of people and in a variety of styles from hard bop with Horace Silver to fusion with Billy Cobham and Steps Ahead, to pop/rock with James Taylor and the Brecker Brothers Band with trumpeter brother Randy Brecker. Their band was more likely to be played on a soul rather than jazz show and heard on the dance floor rather than in a jazz club. We are, however, pleased to report that we have squeezed one time, a tune of theirs into a Cosmic Jazz show. Like many of Derek’s selections this time there is more than a hint of Latin rhythms in the tune El Niño, written by pianist Joey Calderazzo. You can also find Don Alias on percussion providing some Latin textures and (again) Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts on drums. A great tune, with great artists – and something more that needs to be re-visited.
Derek has two albums by pianist Rodney Kendrick. They both deserve greater exposure. The Randy Weston tune Gnawa in Paris is on this 1993 Verve recording and reiterates so much that has been found in Derek’s selections and is what he certainly loves. We have here a leader who comes from a family of musicians, who has played with musicians from different styles – Abbey Lincoln, James Brown, George Clinton, Harold Melvin, Clark Terry, Frank Morgan, Stanley Turrentine, Freddie Hubbard, George Benson and more. There is a statement of the African American diaspora, there is a solid dose of percussion (three percussionists in fact on this track – Chi Sharpe, Aeron Walker and Big Black) providing a festival of rhythm. But above all there is memorable, inspiring, improvised music. Rodney Kendrick takes a pounding lead on piano, Graham Haynes is on forceful and uplifting cornet, Houston Person on tenor saxophone, there is Tarus Mateen on bass along with those three percussionists. Derek has got the message – search through those shelves a bit more…
Comin’ Home Baby was recorded in 1961 by Herbie Mann before lyrics were added by Bob Dorough and was then popularised in 
This 1969 title track is an arranger’s masterclass. The sidemen here include Freddie Hubbard, Hubert Laws, Roland Kirk, Bob James, Grady Tate and more. The walking bass comes from Ray Brown and Valerie Simpson is on vocals – she was later to find fame as one half of soul duo Ashford and Simpson. This version of a tune from the musical Hair (who remembers the hippie anthem Aquarius?) has more than a touch of David Axelrod in the complex arrangement that soars and dips across its full 12 minutes. Also on Walking in Space is an, er, killer version of the late Benny Golson’s Killer Joe and there’s a great take on Edwin Hawkins’ Oh Happy Day to close the album. This one is well worth seeking out as a perfect example of Creed Taylor’s CTI records of the time.
The opening riff of Summer in the City is perhaps more famous now as the basis for the hypnotic 
We shouldn’t forget that Quincy Jones put together the charity record We Are The World, so this extravagantly star-studded album which includes brief ‘e-appearances’ from Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, Ella Fitzgerald and George Benson and genuine contributions from Herbie Hancock, George Duke, Chaka Khan and the Brothers Johnson has some familiar limitations. Overall, it’s too diffuse but the track sequencing works and there are some memorable tunes too, including I’ll Be Good to You, Setembro (Brazilian Wedding Song) and the concluding The Secret Garden. Birdland has Joe Zawinul on keyboards – naturally…
Now this one is better than anyone could have expected. Miles Davis died just four months after this 1991 live recording from Montreux. The record featured both the Gil Evans Orchestra and the George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band – an idea conceived and conducted by Quincy Jones. The focus is on Evans’ stunning arrangements for those seminal albums Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain and although they can’t match the originals, the results are well worth a listen. Although gravely ill, Davis is (mostly) on fine form and there’s excellent backup from Wallace Roney and Kenny Garrett.
Haynes replaced Max Roach in Parker’s later quintet before Coltrane used him whenever Elvin Jones wasn’t available – you can hear him on After the Rain (see below). In the 1960s and 70s Haynes worked with Gary Burton and Stan Getz ,but it was his association with Chick Corea that was to prove one of the most durable. Beginning with the landmark Now He Sings, Now He Sobs trio album (1968) with Corea on piano and Miroslav Vitous on bass, Haynes was to feature in a series of excellent trio records for ECM with Dave Holland taking the bass chair. He went on to record with guitarist Pat Metheny on before leading his own appropriately named Fountain of Youth band well into the new century. Before this, Haynes led the Hip Ensemble – another band title that befitted his accolade as one of Esquire magazine’s best-dressed men in America. We need to reflect on this incredible legacy: from pre-swing bands to post-bop, into fusion and out into the world of 21st century jazz – Haynes was an in-demand player throughout all of these stylistic changes.
We opened this tribute to Roy Haynes with a classic from Coltrane’s first album on Impulse! Records, issued in 1963. The record is something of a mixture, with both live and studio tracks recorded from 1961 through to 1963. Two are from the celebrated Live at the Village Vanguard record and two come from Van Gelder studio recordings. When regular drummer Elvin Jones was unavailable, it was Roy Haynes who was Coltrane’s preferred choice and so he appears here on perhaps what is the standout tune, After the Rain. Haynes is also on My Favourite Things: Coltrane at Newport (1963) where you can hear him on the 23 minute take on 
Unusually for Pharoah Sanders’ Impulse! albums, Thembi (1971) has shorter tunes recorded with two different ensembles. Sanders is on tenor and soprano saxes, plus an assortment of flutes, a bailophone, a cow horn and small percussion. Lonnie Liston Smith is the dominant voice on his own composition, Astral Travelling, but there are also delights from Michael White’s violin on the title track and an intense, five-minute bass solo by by Cecil McBee on Love. Interestingly, Astral Travelling was Liston Smith’s first outing on Fender Rhodes: he recounts that I saw this instrument sitting in the corner and I asked the engineer, ‘What is that?’ He said, ‘That’s a Fender Rhodes electric piano.’ I didn’t have anything to do, so I started messing with it, checking some of the buttons to see what I could do with different sounds. All of a sudden I started writing a song and everybody ran over and said, ‘What is that?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, I’m just messing around.’ Pharoah said, ‘Man, we gotta record that. Whatcha gonna call it?’ I’d been studying astral projections and it sounded like we were floating through space so I said let’s call it ‘Astral Traveling.’ That’s how I got introduced to the electric piano.
This 1977 Galaxy Records album was re-released on CD along with the same year’s Vistalite – and it’s well worth looking out for this ‘twofer’. There are currently 
This was one of the first records out of the gate in the Blue Note Tone Poets reissue series and it’s an essential album for any jazz collector. If you can find one, get the beautiful gatefold Tone Poet version – it’s a visual and sonic feast you will keep coming back to. The record originally appeared on the Solid State label in 1968 and, remarkably, it was only Corea’s second album. There are five original tunes with the titles emerging from lines in the I Ching. This trio recording has Corea on piano, Haynes on drums and Miroslav Vitous on bass – a group that was later to record a series of superb albums for the ECM label. It’s a wholly successful grouping: you can hear that it’s Chick Corea, but there’s a freedom of expression here that’s picked up by Haynes and Vitous, with the result that this is a near-perfect piano trio album.
Haynes chose a perfect title for this album – recorded when he was 79 years old, the music is that of a much younger man. Recorded live in 2002 at Birdland in NY, Haynes leads a quartet that also features pianist Martin Bejarano, saxophonist Marcus Strickland and bassist John Sullivan. Question and Answer is a Pat Metheny tune, first recorded in 1990 on a trio album with Metheny and Dave Holland, but this is a wonderfully spirited version. The rest of this excellent record has no fewer than three Thelonious Monk tunes and a great jazz waltz take on Greensleeves, clearly inspired by Coltrane’s version.
Portuguese singer Sara Tavares sadly died in November 2023 at just 45, leaving behind a small legacy of music. Although Portuguese was the main language of her songs, Tavares’ repertoire includes multilingual songs mixing in Portuguese Creole and English, sometimes even in the same song. Her third album Balancê showcased more of her Cape Verde roots and is highly recommended. You might also be able to track down an excellent 3 disc package of Balancê, her breakthrough record Mi Ma Bô and a live concert from hometown Lisbon on DVD. Derek was lucky to see Sara Tavares at the London Jazz Festival in 2006.
Swiss Movement is a great title – the music was recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1969 and acknowledges the precision of these two jazz giants. Sadly, McCann died in December last year but his back catalogue is still widely available. Compared to What is a protest song written by Gene McDaniels and first recorded by Roberta Flack for her debut album First Take (1969). For the Montreux album, McCann is on piano and vocals and Eddie Harris is on his Varitone tenor sax. They’re joined by Benny Bailey on trumpet, the great Leroy Vinnegar on bass and on Donald Dunn on drums. A 30th Anniversary edition included the additional track 
Vocalist Fritz and musician Ferge originally met as teenagers while skateboarding in their home city of Nuremberg. An immediate chemistry between the two swiftly extended to involve crack jazz quartet Nujakasha, who have become an integral part of the FXF set-up both live and in the studio. FXF have previously released three well received jazz-infused albums, but for their upcoming new record Good Mother they deploy gospel choirs, vintage strings, soulful Rhodes chords and wah-wah guitar pedals to give the entire record a distinctly ‘70s film soundtrack vibe. Adults features Blue Note trumpeter Takuya Kuroda, London-born soul singer Jerome Thomas and Barcelona native singer Ceeopatra.
Just reissued in the ongoing Blue Note Tone Poet vinyl series, this is an essential McCoy Tyner album from 1972 and unique in that it features Alice Coltrane on harp. Also on board with Coltrane are Gary Bartz on alto with Wayne Shorter on tenor, Ron Carter on bass and Elvin Jones (of course!) on drums. Reviewing the album for jazz.com, Jared Pauley notes that This performance matches the superb quality of previous Shorter and Tyner albums where members of the Davis and Coltrane groups recorded together. The opening track 
We’re huge fans of Fumio Itabashi’s many renderings of the Japanese folk tune Watarase and have featured several versions on previous shows. But this is from his debut 1979 album Nature, reissued on Soul Jazz a few years ago and more recently on Mule Musiq. The record features bass players Hideaki Mochizuki and Koichi Yamazaki, drummers Kenichi Kameyama and Ryojiro Furusawa, soprano saxophonist Yoshio Otomo and vibes player Hiroshi Hatsuyama. For a different aspect of this album check out the spiritual jazz-inflected closing track Ash.
From the album Elastic Rock (1972) – and a newly remastered 6CD box set featuring every track released by Nucleus for the Vertigo label between 1970 and 1975 – comes this perfect slice of jazz rock. The trumpeter and flugelhorn player Ian Carr saw the potential in fusing these two musical sensibilities and Nucleus was the result – at the same time as Tony Williams was pursuing new paths with his band Lifetime and Miles Davis was experimenting on the album In a Silent Way. With saxophonist and keyboard player Karl Jenkins, the late drummer John Marshall, saxophonist Brian Smith, bassist Jeff Clyne and guitarist Chris Spedding, Nucleus recorded the ground-breaking Elastic Rock in January 1970, with the album receiving widespread praise. On a series of influential follow up albums, Carr guided a diverse band of musicians through some of the most innovative music of the time. The bargain 6CD box set is a good place to start and both Belladonna (1972) and Alleycat (1975) have recently been reissued on vinyl.
Vibes player Cal Tjader rose to fame during the 
The current crop of recent Edition Records signings include saxophonist Donny McCaslin whose new album extends the jazz boundaries even further. That’s not surprising given his most famous credential as the man behind David Bowie’s Black Star album. As he explained to Edition, the new album is a hybrid of jazz-rooted music but [one] that was acceptable to a rock audience and we knew it had to come from a sound and from the soul. It wasn’t about just getting the right music and the right musicians playing it. It was about the right sound which required the right mixer and producer. And in this case, it was Dave Fridmann [The Flaming Lips] who has never worked in jazz. But it‘s that very thing that gave us the edge. The result is I Want More – and the clue about how it sounds is in that album name. The album begins with Stria and it certainly sets the tone a captivating track which sets the tone for what is to follow. Throughout the album there’s a tight interplay between McCaslin’s tenor sax, Jason Lindner’s synths and Wurlitzer, Tim Lefebvre’s electric bass, and Mark Guiliana’s drums – and there’s a distinctive producer’s sound here too. A CJ recommended listen.
The word ‘eparapo’ means ‘join forces’ in Yoruba but it’s also the title of a tune by the late, great Tony Allen – drummer for Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti and lifelong friend and mentor of Dele Sosimi who also features on this album. The force behind Eparapo is bassist, composer and producer Suman Joshi who’s a longtime member of Dele Sosimi’s Afrobeat Orchestra. Vocalist on My Beautiful City is Ghanaian percussionist Afla Sackey and the band members include Tamar Osborn – saxophonist, composer, producer and bandleader of Collocutor – and trumpeter Graeme Flowers. My Beautiful City has been on heavy rotation on Jazz FM in recent months and deservedly so. You can find the album (and a bunch of remixes) 
We bookend the show with another sad jazz-related death and, just as Derek saw Sara Tavares in 2006, Neil saw and met Amp Fiddler at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival in 2004 in a great triple bill along with Gilles Peterson and trumpeter Harry Beckett. Joseph ‘Amp’ Fiddler was a native of Detroit who played with George Clinton, Moodymann, Prince, the Brand New Heavies, Maxwell and many more. Perhaps even more importantly, he was a huge influence on hip hop producer J Dilla, also a native of the Motor City, introducing him to Fiddler’s Akai sampling drum machine on which the young Dilla began to create his celebrated beats, including the now iconic Welcome 2 Detroit. You can still find the 20th Anniversary edition 
We like to acknowledge what is going on around us in relation to the jazz world and so it was to our sheer delight that BBC Radio 3’s five hour-long episodes of Composer of the Week – almost universally the reserve of classical composers – was devoted to the work of John and Alice Coltrane. Presented by Kate Molleson, a specialist in new classical music and with contributions from Kevin Le Gendre, the jazz broadcaster and writer, this is something to search for on BBC Sounds – 
So this one is a kind of backhand tribute to 
This new record came out just last week and in time to reflect Nikki Iles’ appearance at the last night of the London Jazz Festival with the celebrated NDR Bigband. Reviews of the show emphasise the sheer excitement of this concert – a testament to both the quality of Iles’ writing and the musicianship of the Bigband. Soloists included Percy Pursglove, Ingolf Burkhardt and Claus Stötter on trumpets and Fiete Felsch and Frank Dell on saxes, with dynamic, exuberant solos from guitarist Phil Robson added into the mix. The new album Face to Face is very much recommended here on CJ.
Neil can personally vouch for the validity of the rave reviews for McCraven’s appearance at the LJF – what a performance from the ‘beat scientist’ and his Chicago-based band! Along with the London Contemporary Orchestra conducted by Robert Ames, McCraven was joined on stage by his current core Chicago band – a quintet with Joel Ross on vibes, guitarist Matt Gold, electric bass player Julius Paul (wearing an on-stage outfit that made him look like a jazz version of Bootsy Collins!) and trumpeter Marquis Hill. As Chris May’s All About Jazz review noted, each was outstanding: Hill soulful and sonorous, Gold raw and off kilter, Ross mercurial and emphatic, like Cecil Taylor with sticks, McCraven colossal, a Buddy Rich for our age (in the best way). Each selection from the album was transformed into a charged up, intense performance that saw McCraven delivering some powerhouse drumming. Neither flute nor harp featured as on the record – instead the LCO string ensemble created a beautiful counterpoint to the quintet. When interviewed by All About Jazz, McCraven said This is a record of my compositions that feature odd time signatures and different types of rhythms. At the crux of my concept since I started writing and playing drums is that I like to play complex rhythms. In these times—it’s in the title. To hear more current McCraven and music from In These Times, check out 
Also at the LJF this year, saxophone master Charles Lloyd is one of CJ’s perennial favourites. His distinctive tone on tenor is what drives this reflective take on Julie Styne and Sammy Cahn’s enduring American standard. Many listeners will be familiar with some of the more famous takes – in both vocal and instrumental versions. How about those by 
Japanese born, now US resident Grammy-winning pianist and composer Hiromi has built up a substantial reputation both in Japan and internationally since her 2003 debut album Another Mind. Desert On the Moon comes that debut’s follow up and the energy, dexterity and fluidity of her playing is readily apparent on this beautiful and refreshing number. What the music illustrates – as indeed does all of her work – is a willingness to experiment and cross the boundaries from jazz to pop to classical. She is quoted as saying I don’t want to put a name on my music. Other people can put a name on what I do. It’s just the union of what I’ve been listening to and what I’ve been learning. There is a creative and not always predictable energy about her work which recently saw her perform at the London Jazz Festival with both a new piano quintet and her regular group Sonicwonder whose new album can be found 
It is not always possible in the time available, but we try to play more than one tune from a new album that we select. Radio selections often play a one-off choice, frequently of one of the outstanding tunes of an album. Many of us have been caught out through being induced to pay money for an album from the lure of a single audio-friendly track. This is one reason why pianist Harold Lopez-Nussa appears for a second time on the show – but, additionally, we simply love the music. Afro En Toulouse acknowledges that in the last year, along with his drummer brother Ruy, Lopez-Nussa moved from Cuba to Toulouse in South-West France. Prominent on this tune is Barbaro (Machito) Crespo on congas, bata and vocals, maintaining those sonic links with Cuba, but Lopez-Nussa notes that this new Blue Note album Timba a la Americana is very different to his previous records, admitting that for the first time I play electronic sounds without any shame. Of course, here at CJ, we fully acknowledge and celebrate the presence of electronics in jazz.
Exactly the same reasons as above apply to the selection of further tune from another Blue Note debutant, drummer Jonathan Blake. This time, our choice is the title track from his album Passage. It’s dedicated to the memory of his father, jazz violinist John Blake Jr. who was the composer of this title tune. Not surprisingly, the number is played with emotion, passion and great virtuosity by top-notch musicians. These include another outstanding Cuban pianist David Virelles, prominent in Passage from the opening bars, but much of the tone and feeling is set by the alto saxophone playing of Immanuel Wilkins, definitely one of the young jazz players of the moment. Other members of the quintet are the much-lauded vibraphonist Joel Ross (qv. Makaya McCraven above) and bass player and composer Dezron Douglas. This is definitely an album with a contemporary New York feeling and sound.
Hammond guru Brian Auger is going through something of a renaissance at the moment. Two new box sets (both on vinyl and compact disc) have being going down a treat with listeners and probably the best of these Oblivion Express records is 1973 Closer To It! album. Happiness Is Just Around the Bend is Augur’s own composition and is a really strong vocal debut for Augur himself. The second side of this album features covers of jazz classic Compared to What and a surprisingly good take on Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues. The whole album is highly recommended – you’ll be able to track down a copy on 
Something of a crate digger’s favourite back in the day, an original copy of the Sabu Martinez album Afro Temple album used to change hands for up to $3000. Neil has had a reissue for decades but our choice is an edit from the New York DJ Danny Krivit – a DJ with a very interesting background. As he recounts in 
What are we doing playing this tune on Cosmic Jazz you may ask? There are several answers. It links with our previous show where we had Alphonse Mouzon playing drums for McCoy Tyner, no less. It also takes us back to a tradition on the show whereby we end the programme with a tune that stretches the musical boundaries. There is also the not so inconsequential issue of the personnel on the record: Herbie Hancock on piano and Michael Brecker on sax – and his little early sax break is worth more than a cursory listen. Mouzon played with several distinguished jazz artists, although he ventured into the pop and disco world. Certain sections of the jazz listening public, often comfortably off themselves, have been quick to criticise such moves by jazz artists yet they ignore the difficulties any musician has to earn a living – especially in this current era of paltry download revenues. Jazz artists have more difficulties than most and so we should respect their right to a living. Enjoy the record – we love it. More from Cosmic Jazz soon.
There’s a funky theme to my ten choices this time. We begin with neglected Blue Note trumpeter Eddie Gale on Black Rhythm Happening before searching out UK premier remixers Bugz in the Attic who give 4Hero’s Hold It Down more than a little re-rub. Next is that hypnotic bassline from Abe Laboriel on Herb Alpert’s second disco hit Rise followed by more Brian Auger and his Oblivion Express with another track from that great record Closer To It! That sly funk masterpiece Cucumber Slumber from Weather Report, featuring the great Alphonso Johnson on bass, comes next. Derek reminded me that Marvin Gaye’s classic Let’s Get It On celebrates a 50th anniversary this year as does the O Jay’s magnificent slavery-themed album Ship Ahoy which contains the oft-covered For The Love of Money. Next was Flora’s Song (piano by Chick Corea), one of the stand out tracks from Airto’s superb CTI album Free which seemed to complement the funky Ohlos Coloridos from Brazilian singer Sandra de Sá before ending with more bass from Bobby Hutcherson’s San Francisco album and the evocative Ummh. If the spirit moves ya…