Woody Shaw
Stepping Stones - Live At The Village Vanguard

Blue Note 80 Edition on 180g Vinyl!Two days after recording his best selling album, Go!, Dexter Gordon followed with another classic, A Swingin' Affair. The tracks are full of Gordon's unique and innovative improvisations supported by his returning line-up, with Sonny Clark on piano, Butch Warren on bass, and drummer Billy Higgins. A Swingin' Affair brings a relaxed and upbeat feeling to a hard-bop influenced band.

Tramp Records continues their pilgrimage to the soulful fringes of spiritual jazz and progressive rock and funk with their 3rd and 4th volumes of their "Peace Chant, Raw, Deep and Spiritual Jazz" series, and the world could not be more ready.Volume 3, the first LP, features artists who use their medium to welcome the return of the sacred feminine as in Lenny Marcus Trio's Mother's Day, and speak on afrocentric themes like Roland Hayes with his heartfelt Africa The Beautiful. Mineral King renders epic orchestral rock while Natural Life takes us even further on a ten-minute epic quest from a progressive fusion head, to searing tabla, into virtuosic guitar jamming and finally dropping into heady fuzz-soaked riffs and free-jazz fusion with their theme song. Rama Dyushambee sings a devotional song about divine source and healing, while Jule Farmer's Muhammad Ali stands strong at the crossroads between black spirituality and black power. Black Is provides a vibey lo-fi flute jazz meditation in their Themes and Variation while The Supa Lowery Brothers provide the requisite hard modal freedom funk.Peace Chant is the center of the mandala, representing the nucleus of the post-bop, modal jazz, avant-garde, transcendental, spiritual, ethnic, and freedom music universe without necessarily suggesting anything immediately identifiable as any of the above. This is the soundtrack to the raising of human consciousness and the salvation of society's very soul.

Tramp Records continues their pilgrimage to the soulful fringes of spiritual jazz and progressive rock and funk with their 3rd and 4th volumes of their "Peace Chant, Raw, Deep and Spiritual Jazz" series.Volume 4, the second LP opens with a gorgeous and lush Wurlitzer-oriented big band piece that among its many treasures also features the 17-year-old visionary-saxophonist-to-be, Steve Coleman in his alleged first recording! The contributions of Brother Yusuf Salim and Bus Brown, figures who should be very familiar to Tramp Records aficionados, are consecrated here with a live recording of Freedom from one of Brother Yu's last public performances. One of the two European contributions to the comp, Attitude, by Organic Pulse 'onesemble', reads like a double entendre, the word "attitude" meaning simultaneously one's disposition or state of mind, and also one's orientation relative to the horizon. The Peace Chant series continues to touch all the sacred meridians: more devotional music with James Scales & All Stars' Ser-Vi-Tude, trance music of non-dominant traditions with Donn Preston Group's Ghana-Cha!, a modal and blue organ trio offering from Tommy Jones, and closing with a rich and righteous ballad, Quernemoen, from the Wayne Powell Octet.Peace Chant is the center of the mandala, representing the nucleus of the post-bop, modal jazz, avant-garde, transcendental, spiritual, ethnic, and freedom music universe without necessarily suggesting anything immediately identifiable as any of the above. This is the soundtrack to the raising of human consciousness and the salvation of society's very soul.