Although Jimbo Ross has spent the last couple decades establishing himself as a top blues playing violist, he didn’t start out that way. Jimbo was originally a jazz guy who appeared on the famous Don Ellis recording, “Live at Montreux”, as well as many other jazz recordings over the years. After spending much of the 2000s playing blues, RnB and Zydeco, Jimbo has finally come full circle and returned to his jazz roots with his latest offering, “Jazz Passion and Satin Latin”. Notice that Jimbo plays the viola, not the more common violin or even ‘fiddle’. Viola players are rare in the jazz world, with LeRoy Jenkins and Jimbo being two of the few that are well known. Ross has added an extra treble string to his viola so that he can reach high violin notes as well as the viola’s usual deeper range.

The music on “Jazz Passion and Satin Latin” is a mix of bluesy hard bop, Latin jazz, some beautifully melodic contemporary tunes and a few ballads. The ensemble that Ross has gathered here does not go for flashy technique or gratuitous displays of practice room high speed scales. No, instead the solos are soulful and melodic and quite often steeped in the blues. You can tell Jimbo and his gang have been playing a lot of blues and RnB because their approach to jazz is not way different, which is kind of refreshing in a way. This is great outdoorsy party music, perfect for a backyard barbeque or visit to a favorite swimming spot. In the famous words of Lou Reed, ‘they play good times music’.

Although most of the songs on here are lesser known standards, one original by guitarist Joe Gaeta, “Don the Working Man”, has a gorgeous melody and nice chord changes. Hopefully we will hear more Gaeta originals on the next outing. Another nice melody comes with, “The Night has a Thousand Eyes”, a tenor sax version of this one was a big radio hit back in the late 70s, but it has since kind of disappeared, its nice Ross has brought this tune back. You get some up tempo bebop with “The Breeze & I” and “Indian Summer” and some energetic Latin jazz with “Delilah” and “Know it All”. Bluesy hard bop comes your way via Wes Montgomery’s “Jingles” and Gerry Mulligan’s “East Lag”.

Back in the mid 50s when Miles recorded “Miles Davis All Stars Vol 2”, the little ten inch LPs were still the norm and didn’t contain much more music than today’s Eps, therefore you get just two songs, Monk’s “Bemsha Swing” on one side, and the well known standard, “The Man I Love” on the other. This music was recorded during a famous session at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio on Christmas Eve 1954 that provided a lot of music for various albums and re-issues over the coming years. It’s an all-star group that Miles has assembled here, but most importantly is Thelonious Monk on piano. Miles and Monk, despite their admiration for each other’s skills, had a difficult relationship and this was famously captured on the opening part of “The Man I Love” in which they have a brief terse exchange followed by Miles telling Rudy to leave this exchange on the record.

Enough of the soap opera, how is the music, quite good actually and very interesting given Monk and Miles very different directions at this point. “Bemsha” opens up sounding very much like the Monk composition that it is, but when Miles enters with a flowing solo it takes a totally different direction. At this point in his career, Miles had left behind his bop roots and was developing the ‘cool’ style that would serve him well until about the mid-60s when things started getting heated again. The real star on both tracks though is Monk. His ability to bend and reshape phrases and rhythms is absolutely uncanny. Some 70 years later, there is still no one that can pull off what he could, his solos are attention grabbing and infinitely fascinating.

“The Man I Love” works well for everyone, but it does sound like vibraphonist Milt Jackson was a little agitated with Monk interrupting his opening as Milt plays a very busy and intense solo that pushes relentlessly at the beat. Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke do a fine job filling out the rhythm section, but they are both mixed a little low. You probably won’t find this little album at a reasonable price anymore, but these tracks show up on various comps, including “Miles Davis and The Modern Jazz Giants”. These two tunes are well worth checking out, first for Monk’s brilliant solos and secondly for Miles introducing a whole new approach to playing jazz.

“Sun Prints” is the fourth album as a leader for bassist Matt Booth, and although he is usually know for his avant-garde fusion work, for this album he toned things down a bit, but not too much, as there are still a lot of interesting twists and turns to be found here. Joining Matt are Steve Lands on trumpet, Sam Taylor on tenor sax, Oscar Rossignoli on keyboards and Peter Varnado on drums. These musicians are typical of the post ‘new young lions’ generation, very comfortable with post bop as well as fusion and the avant-garde. There aren’t a lot of obvious influences to site her except Sam seems to favor Michael Brecker on the tenor. Matt wrote all the tunes himself and aimed for a unified ensemble sound rather than just a vehicle for his bass playing. In fact, he quite humbly holds himself to just two bass solos on here while giving the lion’s share of the solos to the horns.

Album opener, “In Tongues”, features an energetic DrumnBass rhythm and closes out with the horns furiously soloing at the same time. Likewise, the Wayne Shorter inspired waltz time of “For Your Consideration” works up quite a sweat for something in three time. “Ice Bear” cools things off with an almost trip-hop styled medium groove with floating atmospheric Fender Rhodes. Elsewhere on the album the band goes traditional post bop on “Old News” and brings in pedal steel guitarist Brian Seeger for the atmospheric “Interlude”. The steel guitar is a nice touch when it blends with the band, but sometimes it sounds like Brian is in another studio somewhere down the hallway.

Miles fans will dig “Optimal Chunks”, on which Steve purposefully channels Miles’ fusion work complete with echo effects and lots of dissonant electronics. But wait, there’s more, including a couple ballads and a Radiohead inspired number with more fast paced DnB drumming and frantic horn solos. The repeating hypnotic piano line in this one definitely recalls the Radio boys. The album closes out with a 12 tone composition as Matt still keeps that ‘outside’ element alive in his compositions.

Although Gabor Szabo was one of the first jazz artists in the mid 60s to play what we now call ‘fusion’, his name has just about disappeared into obscurity, which is a real shame. Gabor was a top notch guitarist and innovator combining different elements in his music and joining with Chico Hamilton to make some of the very first jazz fusion albums. Unfortunately, Gabor had long running problems with drugs and alcohol, which is why his life ended at a fairly young age, and also possibly why he is not honored and remembered as much as he should be. His life just ended too soon for him to make a lasting impression on the jazz world. Although he made many excellent albums in the 60s and early 70s, by the time 1976 rolled around, he was being pressured by the disco fad to come up with something more commercial, which led to this very well made, but also very commercial album, “Night Flight”.

In 1976, fellow jazz guitarist George Benson came out with his hugely successful album, “Breezin”. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Gabor‘s “Night Flight” soon followed. Obviously Gabor and the people around him thought they might have a chance to come up with a similar success following the Benson formula of orchestrated art pop with a touch of disco and plenty of tasty guitar solos to go around. Those CTI/Don Sebesky arranged lush orchestrated pop jazz records of the time were probably an influence as well. “Night Flight” is not a cheap hastily arranged album at all. A lot of work went into the arrangements, orchestrations and production of this album. It really has a nice full sound, but the music is fairly commercial and not what the average Gabor fan is looking for.

There is one killer track on here, the very funky “Baby Rattle Snake”. This would be a great cut for that DJ looking for something that no one else has. The rest of the album is okay, but not particularly remember-able. On the plus side, all through the album Szabo lays down an endless stream of guitar solos with a mix of bop swing and RnB rhythmic punch.

Is there any jazz subgenre that is more uniquely and purely jazz than bebop, the answer is no. Any other jazz subgenre seems to have an outside comparative, (free jazz - avant-garde composers), (post bop - French composers), (hard bop - blues and RnB), (fusion - rock and funk) etc. When played correctly, bebop stands alone as one of the most singular contributions to the musical world, but very few really play it right anymore. Since bebop got reduced to college classes taught to budding young musicians, there has been a lot of mediocre bop out there, both at the universities and at the clubs. But there are still those that can play bop with the requisite crazy abandon and flippant attitude as created by Charlie Parker and then furthered by Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy. This leads us to Portuguese drummer Joao Lencastre and his new album “Free Celebration”, one of the hottest avant-garde neo-bop albums to come out since the last outing by Walking Distance or Anthony Braxton’s superb Parker tribute.

Frantic and crazy bop in the style of Ornette and Dolphy are the backbone of this album, but not in a retro way at all. There are plenty of current modernisms in the mix too, such as jagged Mary Halvorson type guitar from Pedro Branco and plenty of noisy analog electronics from keyboardist Joao Bernardo. Through the course of the album the band veers off into many directions from free fusion to noisy chaos and then into something sentimental such as the track “Kathelyn Gray” or grooving hard bop on “The Third World”. For the correct bebop flavor you need a high flying alto sax player, and that comes from Ricardo Toscano, easily one of the best altoists happening today.

There is an eclectic mix of musical ingredients at work here, but this album never becomes one of those John Zorn style clumsy pastiche things in which incongruent elements are slammed together just for effect. Nope, all of this music grows and changes in very organic ways and with solid musical integrity. The track “Giggin” is a great representation for this band as it opens with blazing fast bop that grows more intense with shifting tempos pushing things towards chaos as a hornet’s nest of electronics enters and multiple soloists push things to the edge. “Free Celebration” is one of the best jazz records to come out this year.