Chronic Town is the debut extended play by American alternative rock band R.E.M., released on August 24, 1982, on I.R.S. Records. Containing five tracks, the EP was recorded at the Drive-In Studio in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in October 1981, eighteen months after the formation of the band.
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Os Afro-sambas is a 1966 studio album (that should not be confused with the album of the same name and different artwork recorded live) by Baden Powell and Vinícius de Moraes. The live album is ranked number 29 on Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Brazilian Albums.
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James Mercer and The Shins. A 2001 album which is a perfect soundtrack to it bucketing with rain outside my office while I try to convince myself that we are now technically in astronomical Spring.
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Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek’s latest album Yarın Yoksa. The show stopping intensity of Derya backed by the psychedelic soul of Grup Şimşek with production by Leon Michels has yielded a stand out record that challenges genre with a broad appeal and a powerful message.
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Insanely brilliant South African Jazz L.P. from 1974
Available from Bandcamp here
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1975 facsimile reissue of Mary Lou Williams’s magnum opus of religious jazz: Mary Lou’s Mass. Newsweek called the score “an encyclopedia of black music, richly represented from spirituals to bop to rock.” This is Williams’s “Music for Peace,” a landmark recording which addressed many of the social ills of the 1960s and 70s. It is perhaps the most openly religious jazz recording made at that time. In her own words, it is “Music for the Soul.”
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‘Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs’ is a Martin Phillipps passion project. A dedicated reimagining of his earlier unreleased songs that became his artistic farewell, a lasting legacy, and a reminder of his huge, underappreciated talent. The album has been finalised for release with the love and support of his band, family and friends.
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Diamond Jubilee is the seventh studio album by Canadian band Cindy Lee, the project of musician Patrick Flegel. A triple album (double CD), it was released on 29 March 2024 on Flegel’s own label Realistik Studios, available exclusively on YouTube or for purchase from a Web 1.0-style Realistik Studios website. On 23 October 2024, it was released on Bandcamp and physical pre-orders were made available.
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By the time drummer Pete La Roca recorded his debut album Basra in 1965 he had already appeared on 9 Blue Note sessions as a sideman and spent time in bands led by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. But it was another tenor titan, Joe Henderson, that La Roca brought in as the sole horn voice to front a dynamic quartet that was completed by what liner note writer Ira Gitler called “one of the most attuned rhythm sections in jazz” featuring bassist Steve Swallow and pianist Steve Kuhn. The resulting album is one of the great underrated gems of the Blue Note catalog featuring an expansive 6-track set that includes 3 compositions by La Roca (“Basra” “Candu” “Tears Come from Heaven”), Swallow’s tune “Eiderdown,” “Malagueña” by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona, and a stunning ballad performance of the standard “Lazy Afternoon.”
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The Jazzman label continues its excellent Spiritual Jazz compilation series with a focus on the SABA and MPS labels from Germany, who released tons of music by a diverse range of international jazz artists in the sixties and seventies. Few have heard of these labels next to colossuses like Blue Note and Impulse! - Spiritual Jazz 17 ought to change that, containing music from artists range from Elvin Jones to Pedro Iturralde and Hideo Shiraki.
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