If all works well with the US and German Mail you’ll find a review on these pages soon for Conscious, the new album by the fabulous Julie Dexter.
Her Dexterity album has really grown on me since its release and I may rank it even higher than I did with my review ages ago. If you haven’t got a copy of it, I can wholeheartedly recommend it. It still sounds fresh and is full of great, inspiring music.

That’s the thing I love about the internet: you meet people who like the same music as you. By chance I chatted with someone (hey, Neil, I’m talking about you) about British soul music from the good old days…well, in our case this means the early 90s. And I mentioned the label Misty Oldland had released her Got Me A Feeling before Columbia/Sony signed her (i.e. BoogieBackRecords), he told me he know Misty and that she’ll release a new album in 2005. The album Forest Soul will hopefully be available soon and as soon as I get a copy from Misty, you can read a review here. Check her website mistyoldland.com [flash required] for more infos and please click contact and send her a p-mail (psychic-mail)…I couldn’t stop laughing when I tried this feature :-)
Since I haven’t found the original BoogieBack release of Got Me A Feeling among my endless number of vinyl records, you just have to look at the cover of the 5″ CD…luckily my CDs are sorted alphabetically, so I may found a CD faster than a 12″ or LP.
edit: here’s a nice site about Misty Oldland’s releases so far.

I’ve only read it yesterday that the organ wizard Jimmy Smith died on February 8th, 2005 :-(

Better late than never…I have this album for some time now but due to my state of hibernation (guess I’ve mentioned it now often enough…lol), I review it but now…since this is classical big band jazz, that’s timeless anyway it really doesn’t matter that the review wasn’t written soon after the album’s release. And after listening to the album the fourth time now, I really wonder why I haven’t listened to it before…it’s that good.

George Gee has founded his own label GJazz Records and Settin’ The Pace is its debut release. And what a fine record it is. It just has written class and quality all over it. George and his 17 piece band bring us the right combination of jazz standards, original compostions (by producer/music director Frank Foster), instrumentals and vocal tracks. Featured vocalists are the impressive Carla Cook as singer on three songs (Lover Come Back, The Very Thought Of You and Autumn Leaves) and Lance Bryant on I Don’t Want To Learn To Sing The Blues.

Of course George gets some extra points for including my favourite latin jazz instrumental Mambo Inn here. It’s a real pleasure to hear this in a big band arrangement with lots of percussion by Renato Thoms.
Songs like Bass In Yo’ Face or the title track Settin’ The Pace really show that there’s nothing that can beat real musicians with real instruments. If they come together and have some fun on the recording session and it’s captured on record than you have an album like this that is an enjoyment to listen to. Furthermore Settin’ The Pace prooves that big band jazz still can sound as good as it did in its heyday.

For more infos visit gjazzrecords.com.

Just to give it a mention, because the nice folks at headsup.com sent it to me…The album Out Of Nowhere by Two Siberians is, well, quite different from what we recommend here at jazz-not-jazz and I’m afraid this is the wrong site to judge this record, but it’s out now…somwhere in the tundra or a record store near you :-)

Since the nice folks at Heads Up kept sending some records during jazz-not-jazz hibernation it’s more than fair to review the new album No Boundaries by Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Touted as Zulu Goes Classical on Heads Up’s website No Boundaries is indeed an interesting concept that combines South Africa’s a cappella band par excellence Ladysmith Black Mambazo with the strings of the English Chamber Orchestra. Having recently discovered the magic of strings on Alice Coltrane’s World Galaxy and Lord Of Lords albums, I must admit that I really like the idea and - what’s even more important - the result.

I especially like the original compositions here like the opener Jabulani, an update from their early album Thandani, or Ngingenwe Emoyeni (Wind Of The Spirit Of God), that’s maybe the song on the album that sounds the most one might expect a Zulu band to sound like.

Dona Nobis Pacem, which is taken from the Missa Brevis for Youth Choir by Isak Roux is one of the stand-out songs for me with it’s gospel-inspired handclapping.

The only thing that’s not working in my ears is the inclusion of the tenor Robert Brooks on two songs (J.S. Bach’s Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring and F. Schubert’s Sanctus (Heilig, Heilig, Heilig). First of all this won’t work for me because I’m not into classical music and on the other hand it just sounds to forced to me to marry classical European music and Zulu music. Whereas on songs like Walil’ Umtwana (The Child Is Crying) or Amazing Grace/Nearer My God To Thee it’s just done with ease and great credibility.

All in all an ispiring album that’s worth to check out if you’re musically open-minded.

For more infos visit headsup.com and mambazo.com.

Thanks to Katherine Cole from Beautiful Nubia’s management in Canada we will soon review his new album Awilele. In the meantime you can listen to some sound snippets on cdbaby.com, visit beautifulnubia.com, or just read the review we wrote for his Jangbalajugbu album.

My favourite British latin-soul-house-jazz combo Bah Samba will soon release a new, their second album. If you’ve missed their debut on the now defunct Estereo label, you can read here what you’ve missed so far :-)
And Bah Samba’s bio is still available here.
For more info visit the band’s site bahsamba.co.uk or read the press release of the Bah Samba 4 Album:

oh, and a review will follow as soon as I have the album.

mmm…I really don’t know much about php and mySQL yet, but I wonder why I sometimes have two posts of the same article here…could it be that I’m pressing the save button of the wordpress webinterface too fast? Or is it just a great conspiracy against people who change the default layout? :-)

While the Fertile Ground album was certainly “old news” this is a real news. The Yellowjackets will release their new album Altered State on March 25, 2005 on Heads Up

Although Yellowjackets have released numerous albums, their Time Squared release was my first Yellowjackets album. This was certainly because I was more into vocals all the years and I only recently discovered my love for instrumental jazz (and then I’ve gone to the other extreme with discovering the opus of Alice Coltrane - but more about that in another post soon).

Altered State brings us eleven original compositions amongst them a full vocal track in the shape of The Hope, that features Jean Baylor on vocals and has a nice gospel influence with the Perri sisters on background vocals (although Sharon, Lori, Carolyn and Darlene are renamed Perry here).

The ten instrumentals Bob Mintzer, Russell Ferrante, Jimmy Haslip, and Marcus Baylor have created are all fine and flawlwess and perfect for a lazy day at home although some songs could’ve been improved with adding a little more depth to them in my opinion. Especially the inclusion of the bass clarinet here and there reminds me of smooth jazz’ icon Kenny G. but maybe it’s just that this particular instrument is forever spoiled for my ears :-)

For more infos visit headsup.com and yellowjackets.com.

Of course there were some great albums released during jazz-not-jazz’ hiatus. One of them is Fertile Ground’s Black Is… album released on Blackout Studios/Counterpoint Records.

Who owns Fertile Ground’s Spiritual War or Sesaons Change album will know that they are one of the best bands out there that offer a great melange of soul, jazz, poetry, reagge and dub. In their music you find echos of soul’s music icons like Stevie, Marvin, Donny, or Roberta.

All songs are lovingly sung by vocalist extraordinaire Navasha Daya adding even more depth and spirituality to the music. Listen for Spiritual World with its Yoruban prayer for example (”Cause down here is something different/ Adding experiences to my soul/ It may be viewed just like a prison/ But it’s necessary for my growth/ In this schoolplace world we’re living/ Our personality we must control/ We must keep a higher vision/ Remembering our purpose and our role“)

Live In The Light, the first single, offers what we all loved about 70s soul music. A funky upbeat groove and lyrics that dare to voice an opinion (”So let’s stop the war, stop poor, stop for peace/ Stop the bomb, stop the bush, stop the beast/ Stop for love, stop the lies, stop the fights/ Stop the deaths, stop the hate, live the light“).

And the good things continue with songs like Another Day, the spoken words entry An Artist Prayer or one of my favourites Yellow Daisies, although I could virtually name every song on Black Is… as favourite song. They are all great and if you’ve missed this album on its release in autumn 2004 make sure to get it now.

For more infos visit blackoutstudios.com and counterpointrecords.co.uk.

Yes, I know…long time no see and no new reviews since a long, long time. But then - life’s not always what you want it to be and you get stuck somewhere and are hoping for better times. Ok, I still wish for some brighter days, but - what’s more important for this site - I finally feel inspired to re-vitalize jazz-not-jazz.de. To make things a little easier, I’ve just gone the blog-road and this site will be more or less a blog with miscellaneous categories to come. Since the software I’m using (wordpress) also offers a search function, I think the end result will be more or less the same only that things will be a little more state of the art and each entry in this blog will have its own url.
As you may have noticed from the url blog.jazz-not-jazz.com we now also have subdomains :-) Another reason why it was time to move to a new webhost who offers more features for a reasonable price. All in all I don’t pay more for my four domains now, but I have more features and more storage.
So after I have updated some of the sites of the old jazz-not-jazz (which can still be accessed via jazz-not-jazz.de/old_index.html), I hopefully find the time to set up a forum for this site. Right now you can already leave your comment here in real time…before I had to fill it in manually since the old site was HTML only.
To cut a long story short, jazz-not-jazz is back and I’ll fill this site with life again!