[9mm_fan]

Alright, in an effort to make my long days at work a little more interesting, I thought I'd throw out the topic of quality albums slightly off the beaten track. (no Kind Of Blue!)

I guess my choice would be The Hanna Fontanna Band - Live at the Concord Jazz Festival. Jake Hanna (dr) Carl Fontana (trb) Herb Ellis (Gtr) Dave McKenna (pno) Herb Mickman (bass) Bill Berry (tpt) and Plas Johnson (sax)

Why? It's changed the way I (and countless other trombone players) think about jazz trombone. Wall to wall swinging jazz with killer solo's. Fontana's solo on Beautiful Friendship is deffintally one of the top 3 or 4 trombone solo's EVER!

[Jffxljtw]

While there's no shortage of overlooked gems from the past ( as a tenor player I'm always amazed that Coltrane-centric college jazz programs often seem to care not a whit that lesser known giants like Ike Quebec and Lucky Thompson once walked the earth), I'm thinking about a bunch of more or less current releases that nobody seems to know about.

A couple of years ago Astral Project came to town and played the Cotton Club. I was perfectly prepared to pay a $20 cover (which is more or less standard when they play in their home town, New Orleans) to sit in a packed and enthusiastic house. Instead it was dinner, seven bucks on top of that, and 30 people rattling around in the place. I expected every drummer in town to come out and see Johnny Vidacovich, an amazing player with an encyclopedic knowlege of New Orleans funk and street parade ryhthms and their contemporary applications. The only two who showed were Phil Belanger and Chris Haas.

These guys have been playing together for 20 years and have an absolutely telepathic rapport. I'm assuming the reason they're not better known here is the usual,ie. they're not from New York, L.A. or Toronto. There's a huge Gulf Coast music scene that's kind of off the jazz media radar. It's full of hellaciuosly good players and is firmly anchored in, but also a contemporary extension of, the musics' African American traditions. In short, it's my kind of jazz.

I'd recommend ANY of Astral Project's albums, but particularly their latest two, "Big Shot", and "Voodoo Bop".