2024: a groovy year!

The sleeve notes of The Banger Factory’s new double album, Magnus Opus (Banger Factory Records) says it all: “It’s a celebration of unity, love, togetherness and faith in the transformative power of music.” Twenty musicians well met in Brixton play with tremendous verve, spirit and collective power.

There are new compositions like instigator Mark Kavuma’s The Return of Johnny B, pianist Noah Stoneman’s June or Theo Erskine’s Solecism; time-pressed melodies like Fools Rush In or Evenin’ and rampant faithfuls like Mingus’s Opus 4.

Trumpeter Kavuma, guitarist Artie Zaitz, vibes virtuoso David Mrakpor and veteran tenor saxophonist Mussingi Brian Edwards all have their solo moments, and the music rings out like a sonic blessing.

In June 1970 as the summer awoke in Norway, the US pianist Bill Evans brought his trio, including bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Marty Morell, to the Konigsberg Jazz Festival. The never-before-released recording of their concert is now for all to hear on Elemental Music.

If there is one word which Evans means to me, it is “touch.” The trio play a succession of ballads with a union of thoughtful, winsome elegance and deep emotion. Hear Turn Out The Stars, Quiet Now or Who Can I Turn To? to embrace the essence of Evans’s lyricism. It’s a beautiful record that has been in unheard slumberland for far too long.

One night in 1987 in Fukuoka City, Japan, the Sheffield-born free guitarist Derek Bailey found himself playing live in concert with drummer Sabu Toyozumi. It was an astonishing tryst, with Toyozumi provoking some wild and deep spirit in Bailey’s musical soul, causing him to play with an unleashed intensity, making sounds which shake all timbral categories.

The session is now released on the Lithuanian NoBusiness label and called Breath Awareness. I remember that when I first heard Bailey at the 1976 Communist Party-organised Moving Left Show at the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, I wondered “What is this?”, so far-fetched his soundscape seemed. Those moments came crackling back to me as I listened to the 25 minutes of the first track, My Jimmy, with Bailey rampant and Toyozumi sound-by-sound with him completely. Here’s an album that will crash into your consciousness like few others.

Eyes on the Horizon (Long Song Records) it’s called, and it’s the music of a startling internationalist quartet led by New York bassist Joe Fonda, who with plummeting profundity earths the piano beauty of Japanese virtuoso Satoko Fujii, the bristling Mississippi soulfulness of Wadada Leo Smith’s trumpet and the percussive dynamism of Milan-born drummer, Tiziano Tononi.

The album is Fonda’s tribute to the veteran master, Wadada. Almost all the tracks “are connected to my experiences with Wadada over the years,” he declares. He remembers Wadada saying to him, “I love brightness!” and the light of his horn shines from all the tracks: beautiful!

Three discs of British musical history are found on Progress (Jazz in Britain), from Gordon Beck’s Gyroscope quintet of 1973-74. 

With the treasure of Beck’s pianism are saxophonists Brian Smith and Stan Sulzmann, Frank Ricotti on vibes, Ron Mathewson’s bass and drummer Tony Levin, recorded live in London, Liverpool and Edinburgh.

“The music we were aiming for encompassed the already accepted structured jazz — the composition, rhythm etc, with an attempt to cross the barrier to unstructured playing,” asserted Beck.

Hear how they do it in a festival of sound. My favourite tracks? Vrene with Mathewson’s twangingly brilliant bass solo, followed by Nice One with Levin’s drums splashing, Sulzmann’s soprano sax taking flight with Beck and Ricotti palavering urgently: drama in sound!