Daniel Casimir – Safe (Part I) (feat. Moses Boyd, Nubya Garcia, Al MacSween & James Copus)

Bassist Daniel Casimir is a young lion of London’s jazz scene.  This is a one-off composition in preparation for a full album coming out later this year on Jazz re:freshed, and it features some of the best instrumentalists active today.  Observe the names on this track.  Each is leaving a Continue Reading

Andrew Paine & Richard Youngs – Bonus Disc

This has to be one of the most charmingly weird, frankly unclassifiable discs I’ve heard in a while.  Andrew Paine & Richard Youngs manage to pull together a collection that should sound like a mess, yet it’s a rather enjoyable one.  The music goes from lo-fi disco tracks (which for Continue Reading

Clara Engel – A New Skin

Clara Engel is based in Toronto, Canada.  Her work has been described as “Folk-Noir” or “minimalist holy blues,” and who am I to disagree?  This takes the best elements of neofolk, stripped-down to just voice, cigar box guitar, electric guitar, melodica and harmonica, and it sounds like a rare self-pressed Continue Reading

Hideki Umezawa & Andrew Pekler – Two Views Of Amami Oshima

Electroacoustic music inspired by painting and field recordings done in the Ryuku Islands off the coast of the Japanese mainland.  This definitely caught my attention.  Edições CN out of Antwerp, Belgium released this album in 2020, and it features the works of Japanese composer Hideki Umezawa and the Samarkand, Uzbekistan Continue Reading

Various Artists – Can You Feel It? Vol​.​2 Modern Soul, Disco & Boogie 1976​-​​84

Tramp Records out of German is gaining quite a following because of their high-quality compilations.  This one is a scorcher if you’re into funk-inflected disco.  At least as I understand it, and I’m sure the label can correct any errors I make, the artists were from around the Akron, Ohio Continue Reading

Rafał Mazur & Satoko Fujii, Guillermo Gregorio, Natsuki Tamura, Artur Majewski, Ramon Lopez – The Great Tone has no Sound

Though I cannot say I know much about Fundacja Słuchaj’s background, I can say that their releases tend to be excellent, releasing some of the bigger names in improvisational music.  This collection is no different. The personnel on this four-disc set is pretty phenomenal: Rafał Mazur plays bass, Satoko Fujii Continue Reading