Welcome. This is a sampling of songs that highlight the variety of reviews and liner notes you’ll find on this website.

Here’s an Apple Music playlist of the below tracks so you can listen while you browse.

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Dexter Gordon – Gingerbread Boy 
From the album Homecoming: Live at the Village Vanguard (1977)

Dexter Gordon, the most gifted and influential tenor saxophonist to emerge from the modern jazz movement of the 1940’s, played his first American engagement in four years at Storyville on Wednesday and Thursday. Mr. Gordon who settled in Copenhagen some years ago when the popularity of jazz was perhaps at its lowest ebb here, seemed surprised that the club was packed and the listeners almost aggressively adoring. He responded with a broad smile and some of the most accomplished and stirring improvisations heard here in recent years.
Robert Palmer, New York Times – 10/22/1976

Gordon’s attractiveness is built on his music but is not confined by it. He is one of the few charismatic men in jazz. His very image on a bandstand is reassuring, and perfectly complements the deep sanguinity of his sound, the effusiveness of his ideas, the galvanizing effect of his swing. He is six feet five with a powerful frame and a face that combines distinguished handsomeness and childlike glee. He introduced each selection at Storyville in a clear serious voice, ignoring the requests chattering back to him, and responded to the wild applause following each selection by smiling broadly and holding his tenor horizontally aloft, partly as invocation and partly in suggestion that the credit be shared with his mighty Selmer.
Garry Giddens, The Village Voice – 11/01/1976

Right from the opening 12-bar blues number, Jimmy Heath’s Gingerbread Boy, Gordon is off and flying, displaying his masterful technique and boundless inventiveness. Whether booming into the sonorous depths of his horn’s lower register or striding to the top of the tenor’s falsetto pitches, Gordon sings and swings with matchless joy through his instrument.
Owen McNally, Hartford Courant – 04/24/1977

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John Coltrane – Alabama
From the album Live at Birdland (1964)

Coltrane is a musicians’ musician – literally. His playing is brilliant but unfortunately only musicians and the avid jazz fan understand and appreciate his work – with some exceptions of course. The music Coltrane produces with his soprano and tenor saxophones has an urgent, intense drive that only a man with deep convictions about music could create. He seems intent on communicating, so intent that the notes often flow uncontrolled. The marvel of much of Coltrane’s recent playing, as on this album, is that his energy and brilliant technique have been harnessed. The result is a style that does convey, sometimes with great force, at other moments with poised beauty.
Don Lass, Asbury Park Press – 05/16/1964

One of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here. Perhaps it’s as so many thinkers have said, that it is because of the vileness, or call it adversity, that such beauty does exist. (As balance?) That is one function of art, to reveal beauty, common or uncommon, uncommonly. And that’s what Trane does.

There is a daringly human quality to John Coltrane’s music that makes itself felt, wherever he records. If you can hear, this music will make you think of a lot of weird and wonderful things. You might even become one of them.
Excerpts from the liner notes, by LeRoi Jones

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Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers – This is for Albert
From the album Caravan (1963)

Art’s drums, despite modern embellishments, never lose their basic drive.

Art’s respect for these basics stems from some bitter experiences. He was a big man in Pittsburgh 20 or so years ago. Then he was a pianist. “I had a 9-piece band,” he recalls. “I couldn’t read much but I could play in three keys and I could swing pretty good and I was doing all right.

“Then one day I was rehearsing the band for a new floor show. I came in real late – you know, big band-leader style. I didn’t like to rehearse anyway, because it meant I had to read. Usually I could get away with it, but this time one of the acts had an important piano passage I had to play. It was tough and I couldn’t make it at all. But there was this young kid standing by, and so he sat down and he played it and made me look real foolish. You know who he was? Erroll Garner.”

But Garner has always been known as a natural pianist with a great ear, but no reading ability whatsoever. Blakey’s explanation: “He’d heard that same passage on a record and he’d memorized it. So you know what happened? I’d been showing our drummers how to do certain things, so the owner of the club we were working in, he comes up to me and says, ‘Kid, from now on you play the drums and let this kid play the piano. No? You want this job? Then play the drums!’ And so I became a drummer.”

Blakey’s disregard for basic drum technique caused his next major musical embarrassment. Chick Webb’s band was playing in Pittsburgh. In those days it was customary for visiting jazz dignitaries to challenge the town’s champs. By this time Blakey had become one of Pittsburgh’s finest. “Chick invited me into his dressing room and said, ‘Make a roll!’

“I did what I thought was good, but Chick just got up and – bam! – he slammed the door and walked out. And, you know, I just broke down and actually cried. A little while later he came back and said in a kind sort of way, ‘Look, kid, if you want to do this thing right, then practice a slow roll.” And I said, ‘But that makes your wrists hurt.’ And all Chick said was, ‘That’s great.’”
George T. Simon, Columbia State – 07/14/1963

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Gerry Mulligan & Paul Desmond – Blight of the Fumble Bee
From the album Two of a Mind (1962)

There was plenty of relaxed fun in the studio during during the sessions. Both Paul and Gerry are quick wits and quicker still is Judy Holliday [the long time partner of Gerry], who was a welcome visitor in the control room. While no one kept track of the quips that flew about during the sessions, one bit is preserved in the title of the fast blues that opens the second side of this album. While it was being played back one of the engineers asked Paul what the title was. “I don’t know” he said, “it’s a tune by Gerry.” Just then the tape reached the climax of the counterpoint passage in the chorus before the boys came back to the melody. “We might have to call it “Flight of the Bumble Bee,” somebody said. “Or,” said Judy thoughtfully, “Blight of the Fumble Bee.“
An excerpt from the liner notes, by George Avakian

This was the album I was listening to in 2016 when I decided to start cataloging liner notes. I wrote that “The stories and analysis contained on the back of jazz albums are slowly being lost to time. To combat this I’m going to transcribe liner notes and reviews with the goal of digital listeners having the same access to knowledge as the folks that originally bought the LPs once did.”
A note from the curator of The Jazz Tome

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Lee Konitz – You Go to My Head
From the album The Real Lee Konitz (1957)

The Midway Lounge in Pittsburgh [where this album is recorded] is a rather ordinary looking “establishment”: a long bar in a narrow room, with the bandstand behind the bar. (And how I love playing behind bars!!) Surprisingly, the sound was good; we enjoyed playing, and the people that came to hear us could; and most everybody was happy. One night the owner of the club came in (he’s a nice guy, but he chews tobacco!), and asked if we’d like to stay another week. This, of course, pleased us very much.

I feel that in improvisation, the tune should serve as a vehicle for musical variations — and that the ultimate goal is to have as much freedom from the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmical restrictions of the tune as possible — but the tune must serve to hold the chords and variations together. For this reason, I have never been concerned with finding new tunes to play. I often feel that I could play and record the same tunes over and over and still come up with fresh variations.

All that I can say to conclude this is that five musicians gave all they had at this particular time in their lives, and will be grateful to know that someone might experience pleasure from their efforts.
Excerpts from the liner notes, by Lee Konitz

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Ornette Coleman – Lonely Woman
From the album The Shape of Jazz to Come (1957)

Coleman can come as something of a shock to the normally attuned ear because his arrival has not been prepared in gradual stages (as, for instance, the arrivals of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane were). Coleman appears to have gone directly back to the basic foundation set up by Charlie Parker, to have shucked off the surface derivations which have been accumulating on it for 15 years, and to have taken off from this bare-bone launching pad in his own direction. His trumpet-playing partner, Donald Cherry, seems to stand in an equivalent relationship to Dizzy Gillespie and there are many times on this disc when they project a sensation that is very reminiscent of the early Parker-Gillespie groups—a sensation that is somewhat dimly based on sound and style, but much more clearly on creative intensity.
John S. Wilson, Down Beat – 12/10/1959

I believe that what Ornette Coleman is playing will affect the whole character of jazz music profoundly and pervasively, but l am not unique or original in believing that what he is doing is new and authentic. For two examples, Percy Heath, bassist with The Modern Jazz Quartet, has been praising him for over two years, often to deaf ears. “When I first heard Ornette and Don Cherry, I asked, ‘What are they doing?’, but almost immediately it hit me. It was like hearing Charlie Parker the first time: it’s exciting and different, and then you realize it’s a really new approach and it makes a really valid music.” And John Lewis, pianist and musical director of the Quartet said last winter after hearing him, “Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk.”
Excerpts from the liner notes, by Martin Williams

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Joe Henderson – Power to the People
From the album Power to the People (1970)

There are a lot of musicians around who purvey uncontrolled emotion by the truckload. It all tumbles out at you, and you’re knocked over. Then you play the record again, just slightly removed from the impact of that first hearing, and somehow it’s a little flat, not quite what you thought it was. The reason, generally, is that art is not meant to reproduce experience directly. When it can do so at all, it can do it only once. (Art can do something more valuable: it can reflect experience and add to it intelligence, patterns, sets of relations.) At the other extreme, there are those ultra-cool cats who can lay down a coherent, perfectly structured solo every time. Each phrase symmetrical, every chorus exquisitely balanced. And your response is: yeah, well, what else is new?

Joe Henderson avoids the pitfalls of both these extremes. For he is one of those very rare artists possessed of both fire and ice – emotional depth and a strong shaping intellect. He can tear your guts out, as the agonized screams of the title cut of this album fully indicate, and he does so with total honesty. He can reach way into you because he has first reached into himself. But later, when you hear him shriek again in the same places, the power is undiminished, because it all fits, it’s right, it’s led into and away from, and no less spontaneous for that. In this latter paradox you have the central miracle of successful jazz. Whitney Balliett called it “the sound of surprise.” Right on. I’d add that jazz at its best is the sound of surprising inevitability.
Excerpts from the liner notes, by Alan Heineman

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Charles Mingus – Moanin’
From the album Blues & Roots (1960)

Outside of maybe Ornette Coleman, Mingus is producing the most provocative music in jazz. There’s little beauty as we know it in the Mingus philosophy; it abounds in anger, tension, sarcasm, and, above all, raw, naked emotion. The blatant minor seconds that are found throughout are like drops of acid. The wild, almost-cacophonic ensembles threaten to degenerate into chaos at any moment. I doubt if there are any aside from Mingus who completely understand his message; but despite everything, I get the feeling that this is vital and important music.
Don DeMichael, Down Beat – 05/26/1960

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Jimmy Woods Sextet – Coming Home
From the album Conflict (1963)

The material in this album took form in the past year because it was the right time for it. As I grow and become more mature, I feel better able to understand things happening in our society. I have had tensions and anxieties all along. First, naturally, they arose because of my race. I experience and am aware of this as is every Negro. For me life has been a time of conflict on many levels.

The world situation has much to do with it. This is something which affects us all, either directly or indirectly. I’m affected by everything that happens, but I don’t have much to say about what happens. The only way I can say anything is through playing. Through playing I can find relief from many of the tensions I experience being a person here in America. This is the only way that I can be myself.

Since music is a part of me, when I feel conflict, anxiety, tension, love, or any emotion, it comes out in this way. To be frank, often I have no direction and no control over what I do. It just comes out. But when it comes out, I try to analyze it, and try to understand it. That applies to the music in this album. I didn’t set out to create an album called Conflict, and write material to conform to that idea. The material was suggested to me by the feelings I had within. After it was written, I could analyze it and see what it means to me. The album will be heard in different ways by every person who listens to it. I don’t expect anyone would have the same feelings about it that I do.
Excerpts from the liner notes, by Jimmy Woods

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Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong – Isn’t This A Lovely Day?
From the album Ella & Louis (1956)

Ella and Louis is one of the very, very few albums to have been issued in this era of the LP flood that is sure to endure for decades. Ella, to start with, is superb. There is a purity of style (with no loss of warmth) in her singing here that results in not the slightest furbelow. Everything fits and flows with a pulsating inevitability, a clarity and wholeness of sound, and a supple mastery of phrasing that should make this album daily listening for all aspiring female singers.

As a result of the fact that he hasn’t sung many of these songs for years, the challenge awakens the whole musician in Louis; and because the melodies and the lyrics are fresh to him, there are no pat routines for him to fall into. Hearing him here is a joy; and hearing him interweave horn and voice with Ella is often euphoric.
Nat Hentoff, Down Beat – 11/14/1956