Jazz

Composer, pianist, leader and educator Django Bates has done just about everything, but in his 50th year he’s filled a gap by offering this tribute to his earliest inspiration, Charlie Parker. The idea, though, dates back to 2005, the 50th anniversary of Parker’s death, when Bates arranged tunes associated with Bird for a celebration event in Copenhagen. On this trio album he doesn’t play a bop style but lets loose his own piano pyrotechnics in ‘Scrapple From The Apple’ and other be-bop anthems. A final piece of contemplative musing creates its own space from a fragment of ‘Ah-Leu-Cha’, and if this is the least frenetic track, it’s also one of the most successful.

Few would claim that Duke’s 1960s Reprise albums contained his finest work, but four of them add up to lot of music. His great soloists wallow in the catchy melodies of Mary Poppins while Ellington ’65 and ’66 cover the hits of the day, sounding fresher now than the new takes of other leaders’ swing classics that make up Will The Big Bands Ever Come Back?. The fifth disc has Ellington’s tunes but not his whole band, on a 1963 small-group album for Atlantic with violinists Stephane Grappelly, Ray Nance and Svend Asmussen. Travelling the world and recording his own music on RCA, Ellington did so much in the 1960s that these recordings seem little more than a sidelight on his genius, but they’re still wonderful.

No matter how deeply it’s been mined before, the Blue Note vault is still a rich source of reissue gold. In what amounts to a relaunch of the XRCD audiophile format, Audio Wave has begun with a clutch of soul jazz classics. Soul Station has Mobley’s old Jazz Messengers boss Art Blakey on drums, with Paul Chambers on bass and bluesy pianist Wynton Kelly. This seemingly carefree album marked a turning-point for the light-toned tenor player, as 1961 would see him briefly and not very happily joining Miles Davis.

This month we review: Wayne Shorter, Camilla George, All About That Basie, and Omar Sosa & Yilian Cañizares

This month we review: Soft Machine, Bansangu Orchestra, Tony Kofi and The Organisation, and New York All-Stars.

This month we review: Stefano Bollani, Timo Lassy, Renee Rosnes, and Andreas Varady