Cuneiform Records released this gem by The Microscopic Septet in 2017 and it has held up well. From the label’s Bandcamp site:
“Since storming back into action in 2006 after a 14-year hiatus, the radically old-school combo has continued to evolve and extend its reputation. The new album builds on the band’s longstanding love of that most basic and profound musical form, bringing the same reverently irreverent and insistently playful approach to the blues that has marked the Micros music from the beginning. The blues provide another avenue for the band to explore jazz history while forging a sound quite unlike any other ensemble.
Simultaneously embracing the past and the future makes perfect sense when you consider the fraught time and place that gave birth to the Microscopic Septet. In the early 1980s the New York jazz scene was divided, sometimes bitterly, between the emergence of the ‘new traditionalists’ as typified by Wynton Marsalis and the experimentation and stylistic mash-ups of the emerging downtown players. Rejecting allegiance to any particular camp or faction, the Micros forged their own path with an ethos succinctly summed up by co-leader Phillip Johnston: “Break all the rules and respect all the saints.”“
