Daniel Hersog Jazz Orchestra
Night Devoid Of Stars
Cellar Music
★★★★

It was Martin Luther King who said: “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”

Vancouver’s Daniel Hersog is a trumpeter, composer and arranger whose orchestra pulsates with fiery musicianship, exploring their way through “the social, political and racial cleavages” of our times.

The orchestra storms into Cloud Break with powerful solos by trumpeter Brad Turner and tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger.

Frank Carlberg’s piano chimes through Motion and Preminger’s solo burns, an ardent preface to his excitation on Makeshift Memorial.

The one non-Hersog tune is Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, an exposition of Carlberg’s beautiful pianism and a profoundly unsentimental rendition of a songbook ballad.

The album’s title tune is an ensemble message to the United States, 50-plus years after King’s murder

Harry Beckett
Joy Unlimited
Cadillac Records
★★★★★

Joy Unlimited was recorded in 1974 and never reissued until now.

I remember hearing the passion, poignancy and lucid beauty of Barbados-born Harry Beckett’s trumpet at the Plough in Stockwell during the same year, and hearing this record again made time stand still.

Here he is in jazz-rock mode with some prime British stalwarts — bassist Darryl Runswick, drummer Nigel Morris, pianist Brian Miller, guitarist Ray Russell and David Martin’s congas.

Beckett soars on the opener, No Time for Hello with Russell’s scintillating strings, while on the foot-tapper, Glowing, he is conversing as he touches the stars, loving every moment.

On Bracelets of Sound Russell is on an echoing rampage through his notes. When Beckett enters it is as if the band is on a newfoundland of timbre, discoverers on some musical ship.

Rarely has an album title been so apt: a marvellous revival, full of now-times groove.

Reid Anderson/Dave King/Craig Taborn
Golden Valley Is Now
Intakt Records
★★★★

Bassist Reid Anderson, drummer Dave King and pianist Craig Taborn first met as teenager in 1982, in their home town, Golden Valley, on the outskirts of Minneapolis.

Hence the long artistic comradeship of these musicians, begun four decades in rehearsal rooms in their suburb.

The album has a sizzling electronic sound — hear Taborn’s currents on City Diamond and Anderson’s pounding, galvanised bass.

All the compositions are by Reid and Anderson and radiate a strange intimacy as if they are bound by shared youth and the songs, pop and punk, that once enthused them.

Their sound is much bigger than a trio sound — hear the pounding rhythmic fullness of Song One, and High Waist Drifters: three musicians are holding a cityscape in their sonic trajectory and they’re not letting go.