The Sylvers are one of those acts that almost everybody recognises by their hit singles but far fewer people actually know as a complete album act. Hot Line was everywhere in 1976 — a perfectly
Art Pepper is one of those jazz musicians who is genuinely difficult to listen to without thinking about his life at the same time. Not because the biography intrudes — it doesn’t — but because
Jeff Beck made a lot of great records, but There & Back has always felt to me like the one where all the pieces actually came together at exactly the right moment. Released in July
There’s a particular stretch of Chic records — roughly 1977 to 1980 — where Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were doing things that nobody else in popular music was doing at the same time. The
Whenever somebody asks me what makes the vibraphone such a magnetic instrument in jazz, I always end up pointing them in one direction — Lionel Hampton. The man didn’t just play vibraphone; he owned it,
Tower of Power’s second album, Bump City, was the record that turned them from a promising Bay Area band into a genuine force in American funk. Released in November 1972 and recorded at TMI Sound
Kenny Dorham deserves to be better known than he is. He was one of the finest trumpet players of the hard bop era — technically accomplished, melodically inventive, with a tone that sat somewhere between
The Crusaders occupied a unique position in 1970s American music — too rooted in jazz to be dismissed as pure funk, too commercial and groove-oriented to sit comfortably in the avant-garde, and genuinely excellent at
There is a specific kind of satisfaction that comes from finding a genuinely good record at a charity store — the surprise of it, the feeling that this particular copy has been waiting on that
If you want to understand the moment when jazz turned from bebop toward something more spacious and modal, Milestones is the record to study. Recorded in New York in February and March 1958 and released
