A certifiable slew of excellent reissues hit stores in 2024, so many in fact, that we’ve thematically doubled up them up to provide maximum exposure—part two. Part one is here.
10. Billy Childish – From Fossilised Cretaceous Seams: A Short History of His Song and Dance Groups (Damaged Goods) + Thee Headcoats – I Am the Object of Your Desire (Damaged Goods) A double dose of goodness from one of history’s greatest men. From Fossilised Cretaceous Seams is exactly what its full title promises, but nicely non-chronological, and at 33 songs just the right length to leave ears new to Billy Childish thirsting for more. That makes Damaged Goods’ latest Thee Headcoats reissue a logical next step.
From Fossilised Cretaceous Seams drives home how the assorted groups with Billy Childish as the common denominator are far from interchangeable. But on occasion, someone still floats the opinion that if you’ve heard one record by Thee Headcoats (or Thee Mighty Caesars or The Buff Medways), then you’ve essentially heard them all. Balderdash. I Am the Object of Your Desire is noticeably raunch-bluesier than the more Beat frenzied Heavens to Murgatroyd, for example. So, if you picked up Damaged Goods’ Murgatroyd reissue in 2023, you’ll be sitting pretty with this one.
9. Duck Baker – Breakdown Lane: Free Solos & Duos 1976-1998 (ESP-Disk) + Sandy Bull – Still Valentine’s Day 1969 (No Quarter) Baker is no stranger to this site’s year’s end lists, but Breakdown Lane differs from his prior appearances in that Baker is largely focused, per the title, on the freeform side of things. Excepting two duos with Eugene Chadbourne (including an excellent “Take the ‘A’ Train” that kicks off a late disc swing into song form with a solo “Straight No Chaser” as a finale), this is all solo, with Baker’s progressions quite comforting.
Still Valentine’s Day 1969 was first released by the Water label in 2006, but it was CD only, so this very attractive and nicely mastered vinyl edition is quite welcome, particularly because the performances (from The Matrix in San Francisco on February 14th and April 5th, 1969) capture Bull in strong form on electric and acoustic guitar and oud. Fans of Bull’s 60’s albums for Vanguard who’ve never caught up with this set should find Still Valentine’s Day 1969 very much to their liking.
8. Joe McPhee – Black Magic Man & The Willisau Concert & Tenor (Superior Viaduct) + Charlie Nothing – The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing/In Eternity with Brother Frederic (Real Gone) Joe McPhee is a giant of free jazz saxophone whose profile was significantly raised when Swiss businessman Werner X. Uehlinger initiated a new label, Hat Hut, with a string of McPhee reissues and archival releases. First was Black Magic Man (Hat Hut A), a live record directly connected to McPhee’s outstanding Nation Time, second was The Willisau Concert (Hat Hut B), a 1975 live recording with synthesizer player John Snyder and drummer Makaya Ntshoko, and then Tenor (Hat Hut C), an impromptu solo performance given after dinner in Switzerland in 1976. Superior Viaduct deserves serious kudos for bringing these records back into circulation.
Charles Martin Simon aka Charlie Nothing was an artist, writer, instrument maker, and musician whose first album, originally released by John Fahey’s Takoma label and reissued here, is his most well-known. It features the man blowing hard and alone on saxophone and flute save for the accompaniment of a gong, a conga drum, and a banjo ukulele. Each piece takes up an entire side, and it’s safe to say the album is still pretty contentious, at least in jazz terms. But skronky? Oh yeah. And psychedelic? Most definitely. Thing is, Charlie could definitely play (just not at the level of Joe McPhee), so this is more than just undisciplined huffing and honking.
7. Sun Ra – Lights on a Satellite: Live at The Left Bank & At the Showcase: Live in Chicago (1976–1977) (Resonance) + Rail Band – S/T (Mississippi) Any previously unheard work from the great Sun Ra is always welcome, and especially when it’s of a 1970’s vintage. It was a busy, wide ranging, and often wild decade for the bandleader, as these two live documents attest, both brought to light once again by the tenaciousness of Zev Feldman (the Left Bank release dates from 1978). There was a time when a significant portion of supposed jazz fans refused to take Sun Ra seriously. Thankfully, those days have disappeared to a flyspeck in the rearview mirror.
Similar to Sun Ra, Mali’s Rail Band was burning up stages in the 1970s, but it’s taken decades for the word to effectively get out. Developments in technology along with the crucial element, truly dogged diggers, have made it clear that the African continent was positively loaded with red hot sounds. That great, but it’s also sweet that these recordings can be appreciated today via the format in which they were initially released. The Rail Band was a state sponsored entity and essentially a hotel band in Mali’s capital Bamako. Contemplating a US hotel band being even half as inventively scorching boggles the mind.
6. Love Child – Never Meant to Be 1988-1993 (12XU) + Royal Trux – Twin Infinitives (Fire) As mentioned in 12XU’s promotional text for this superb Love Child anthology, Byron Coley once compared the band to a mythic lineup of the Velvet Underground that featured Moe Tucker, Doug Yule, and Angus MacLise. There’s no beating that description, but Rebecca Odes, Will Baum, and Alan Licht could also hit like a blend of the K Records aesthetic (whole lotta instrument switching goin’ on) but with a big infusion of New Yawk attitude and a guitarist who really liked to shred. In short, a glorious thing to hear.
While giving Love Child’s stone classic Okay? countless spins after its initial release, I recall thinking it was impossible for a band with that much talent to stay together. That was true, as Baum exited after Okay? to be replaced by Brendan O’Malley. When giving Twin Infinitives a roughly equal number of plays, I remember speculating that there was no way Neil Haggerty and Jennifer Herrema could sustain this level of fucked up grandeur for very long. Well, they didn’t, but they also sorta did, by continuously defying expectations. But make no mistake; Twin Infinitives is the one Royal Trux album you need if you can only own one. But what sorta fascist is going to say you can only own one? Tell ‘em to fuck right off and buy them all. You’ll be glad you did.
5. Mal Waldron/Steve Lacy – The Mighty Warriors: Live in Antwerp (Elemental) + Andrew Hill Sextet Plus 10 – A Beautiful Day, Revisited (Palmetto) The decades-long creative partnership between pianist Mal Waldron and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy is one of the most rewarding in the history of jazz. On this night in Antwerp, Belgium, September 30, 1995, the band is completed with bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Andrew Cyrille. The six pieces performed total nearly 99 minutes, extended four-way conversations that hit a sweet spot between advanced bop and the avant-garde. Monk figures heavily in a set that’s fathoms-deep but warm and yes indeed, swinging.
Like Waldron and Lacy, pianist and composer Andrew Hill never backslid into creative complacency. He didn’t give audiences what they wanted (which is what they already knew) but what they needed. Recorded and released in 2002, A Beautiful Day was already a great recording, but this vinyl edition of the original CD magnifies the collective achievement to stupendous result. It reinforces that Hill really was one of the greatest of pianist thinkers, up there with Monk and Waldron and Evans and Powell and Nichols and Taylor and Shipp.
4. Fanny – Live on Beat-Club ‘71-‘72 (Real Gone) + Heavenly – The Decline and Fall of Heavenly (Skep Wax) Fanny have been praised to the heavens on this website and elsewhere as one of the best and earliest bands made up entirely of women, namely sisters June and Jean Millington on guitar and bass respectively, Nickey Barclay on keyboards, and Alice de Buhr on drums. The consensus is that their four albums for Warners were all good with flashes of greatness, but these recordings made for German TV are absolute burners that firmly establish Fanny as one of the best bands of the ’70s. If the producers would’ve got out of their way, Fanny’s studio albums would’ve been monsters
Descended from ’80s UK indie pop band Talulah Gosh, Heavenly wasn’t made up entirely of women; there were more guys than girls in the band, in fact, but they were Riot Grrl adjacent, with guitarist-vocalist Amelia Fletcher the factor that put them near the head of the ’90s indie pop class. Aligned with Sarah Records in England and K Records in the USA, there are elements in Heavenly’s sound that can be misconstrued as twee, but in reality Fletcher and company were just sophisticated and savvy.
3. Art Tatum – Jewels in the Treasure Box: The 1953 Chicago Blue Note Jazz Club Recordings (Resonance) + Cecil Taylor – Live at The Cafe Montmartre (ORG Music) Art Tatum never played poorly, and he’s renowned for his solo work, but to my ear he sounds best in a group setting. There are solo pieces on Jewels in the Treasure Box, but the majority is a trio with Slam Stewart on bass and Everett Barksdale on guitar, and the group is truly clicking. Occasionally some cat disparages Tatum’s work, but I’ve never been in agreement with the disdain. To paraphrase New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, Art Tatum could (and did) make great jazz out of Christmas carols.
Cecil Taylor never played poorly, either. His recordings from the 1950s are to varying degrees fascinating, but they are not the work of a mature Cecil Taylor. The same is true of the early ’60s studio work for Candid and Impulse. He was getting there. It’s the two masterpieces for Blue Note where Taylor is really on fire, and after that his work could be overwhelming to those who were unfamiliar. In many ways, Live at The Cafe Montmartre is perfect as an introduction to Taylor, featuring a band that was truly open to expanding the pianist’s ideas; that’s Jimmy Lyons on alto sax and Sunny Murray on drums. Montmartre will still likely overwhelm ears new to Taylor’s work, but here he’s redefining the logic of the piano trio, a setting to which he would later return.
2. Isaac Hayes – Hot Buttered Soul (Craft Recordings) + John Cale – Paris 1919 (Deluxe Edition) (Domino) There are no extra tracks on Craft Recordings’ Small Batch edition of Hayes’ masterpiece. There’s just impeccable sound. And the songs. Sometimes a stellar sounding edition of an excellent record is all you need. Hot Buttered Soul is absolutely key in the formulation of funk, a record made with no meddling as Stax needed an instant back catalog after severing their relationship with Atlantic. This should’ve been (but wasn’t) a lesson. Artists work best when left alone.
There are some bonus cuts on Domino’s edition of Cale’s flawless 1973 album, and they are good ones that illuminate the making of the record, but it’s that core album that places it in this shared spot. Cale’s reputation for a long time was as an avant-gardist capable of severity. Any chicken will tell you. But Paris 1919 is an exquisitely crafted set of exceptionally intelligent pop songs, a record that’s always striving for beauty, but with a biting wit and a distaste for the rituals of authority. Like Forever Changes and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), it’s an album of which I never tire.
1. Charles Gayle/Milford Graves/William Parker – WEBO (Black Editions) These three players hit the jazz scene in consecutive decades, drummer-percussionist Graves first in the mid-1960s, bassist Parker after him in the early ’70s, and then saxophonist Gayle in the late ’80s, though it’s now common knowledge that Gayle had been active since the late ‘60s, he just didn’t get any records out. And so, the three were essentially contemporaries with direct connections to the original Fire Music impulse. Playing together was certainly a big deal, which is why this performance was recorded.
But of course, when the free jazz is this uncompromising, the record labels aren’t exactly lining up for the opportunity to put it out. It’s still hard to believe that Gayle actually landed a deal in the early ’90s that was connected to a major label. And so, WEBO’s emergence in 2024 is a major event. That the results don’t disappoint but rather far exceed expectations is cause for celebration, and is exactly why it’s in the top spot here.
