“Boogie, sans bullshit. Dirty roadhouse music. Juke Joint jamming. Too rock for blues, too blues for rock, the music is hungry, hard and mean.” — Chattanooga Pulse

Guitarist, singer, harmonica player, and songwriter Mark Porkchop Holder is a founding member of the seminal Tennessee punk rock blues band The Black Diamond Heavies (with John Wesley Myers aka James Leg, and Van Campbell of the band King Mud). Mark Porkchop Holder plays the blues, and his music is the sound of the truth. He has...

“Frankfurt '86 is the third in a continuing series of classic Allan Holdsworth live performances. In this performance at the 1986 Deutsches Jazz Festival in Frankfurt, Germany, Allan Holdsworth is accompanied by Gary Husband on drums, Jimmy Johnson on bass and Kei Akagi on keyboards.
Gary Husband also contributed some very personal liner notes to the package. The performance of Frankfurt '86 was beautifully recorded and filmed and was originally broadcast on German Television.
The sound....

“This is the fourth release in the continuing series of classic Allan Holdsworth live performances. In this performance from the Leverkusen Jazztage Festival in Leverkusen, Germany, Allan Holdsworth is accompanied by Chad Wackerman on drums and Dave Carpenter on bass.
Chad Wackerman not only wrote some very personal liner notes on the package, but also did an interview that is a DVD extra. Leverkusen '97 was beautifully recorded and filmed and was originally broadcast on German television....

Allan's 1976 first solo, which was recorded around the time he was in the USA as a member of the Tony Williams Lifetime.
This is a hard album to find because Allan absolutely hated it and did everything he could to stop it from being available, claiming that these were merely rehearsals and should not have been issued.
Based on my knowledge about his control-freak-ism and his general unhappiness about basically everything he recorded, my guess is that his claims do not represent 100% fact...

There are millions of Billie Holliday comps out there, but this one is priced RIGHT and every one of them features Lester Young. So it is a great place to start.

"A Musical Romance gathers some of the most romantic songs Billie Holiday recorded with Lester Young, including "The Man I Love," "Time on My Hands (You in My Arms)," "I Must Have That Man," and "Who Wants Love?" Essentially a collection of some of the love songs featured on the excellent Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on...

“The phenomenal strength of Dave Holland’s bass pushes Steve Coleman and Jack DeJohnette into their most powerful work to date,” opined the Sydney Morning Herald. “The subtlety of Coleman’s inflections, the poise and complexity of his lines, are at the service of a very deep musical feeling. He is the best altoist to have emerged in a long time.”

John Hollenbeck is one of the great up 'n' coming composers in jazz/new music today. His work as a composer for his large ensemble as well as for the great Claudia Quintet has won him great acclaim from the public and the critics (he scored the #1 slot..

John is one of the great composers of the present day, whether it's for smaller ensembles, such as his amazing Claudia Quintet, or for one of his large ensemble projects.
This is the latest from his big band and it's another fabulous release of unexpected melodies which are highlighted by brilliant tonal colors from the arrangements, which are also by John. Hugely recommended...

Really happy to be able to offer this spare, lovely masterpiece again! Mark was the leader of the new wave band Talk Talk, and gradually, as the years went by, their albums got more and more fragile, acoustic and arty, pleasing the critics while bumming out the suits, as the big sales dried up. Seven years after the band broke up, he released this, his only solo work in 1998. Nicely orchestrated around piano/harmonium, clarinets, harmonica, trumpet, flute, English horn, guitar, bassoon, bass and drums...

"The music on Viandra was recorded and mixed between 2001 and 2007, amidst all the other projects that sent Hollmer packing up his accordion and rushing to the airport for the next flight out of Stockholm. The music itself is as...strangely -- sometimes as magically -- wonderful as anything Hollmer has recorded in his solo career. Lars dominates on keyboards and accordion...while the strings and Berckmans' double reeds are secondarily the most dominant voices...more striking is the mood that he brings...