Christmas has come and gone, and I'm relaxing this morning drinking a little coffee and listening to some  'new' music that I thought you'd like to know about.

Mom gave me a copy of A Night At Birdland with the Art Blakey Quintet for a Christmas gift (thanks, Mom!), featuring Art Blakey (drums), Clifford Brown (trumpet), Lou Donaldson (alto sax), Horace Silver (piano), and Curly Russell (bass).

A Night At Birdland is part of the Blue Note 75 Anniversary LP reissue series of 100 titles which Blue Note considers important to its history, and is a live recording that was produced by Alfred Lion and engineered by Rudy Van Gelder.

A Night At Birdland was first released in 1954 as a 10-inch LP and then later as a 12-inch LP that contained music from a second 10-inch album (Volume 1 and 2, respectively). This reissue combines both Volume 1 & 2 on one album.

The music is fantastic, and this LP is recommended for that, and while the sound is middlin good, it is nothing to write home about, so don't expect that it'll be up to Rudy's studio recordings.

I absolutely love the Jazz Loves Disney album (on Verve) which Mom gave me for Christmas, thank you again, Mom!

This is a theme album of artists singing songs from various Disney albums, and the recording quality is uniformly superb, and the music is out of this world! It's also a two LP set, so it has double the goodness, and I predict you'll love every single song just like I do! Don't miss this one!

Artists include Jamie Cullum (Everybody Wants to Be a Cat), Melody Gardot (He's A Tramp), Stacey Kent (Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo, Give A Little Whistle), Gregory Porter (When You Wish Upon A Star), China Moses (Why Don't You Do Right), Raphael Gualazzi (I Wanna Be Like You), The Rob Mounsey Orchestra (A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes), Hugh Coltman (You've Got A Friend In Me), Anne Sila (Let It Go), Melody Gardot with Raphael Gualazzi (The Bare Necessities), Laika (Once Upon A Dream), and Nikki Yanofsky (Un jour mon Prince viendra).

What a fun album!

Every time I see an album recorded by MPS in Germany I buy it, as every one has been a knockout!

Walking The Line with the Oscar Peterson Trio, that Mom gave me for Christmas (thanks, Mom!), is also an exceptional album that I highly recommend.

Here's what the Acoustic Sounds website says about it:

"The newest package from the MPS Reforest the Legend series embraces the decade of 1970-1980, and covers a wide diversity of styles. Piano lovers can look forward to Oscar Peterson's trio classic Walking the Line, which finds the Canadian keyboard giant and partners bassist Georg Mraz and drummer Ray Price in top form.

This, another trio album and one with Peterson solo, were recorded at the Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer Studio in Villingen, Germany on November 10 through 13, 1970.

Once again sound engineers Christoph Stickel and Dirk Sommer have scrupulously remastered the original recordings. The resulting releases are high quality 180-gram vinyl pressings enclosed in record jackets containing the original artwork."

The music and the recording quality are excellent, another fantastic album from MPS!

Don't miss this one!

Here's another winner from MPS, The Hub Of Hubbard, that Mom got me for my birthday a couple of weeks ago (what a great Mom!).

Here's what the Acoustic Sounds website says about it:

"The newest package from the MPS Reforest the Legend series embraces the decade of 1970-1980, and covers a wide diversity of styles. From 1970, the The Hub of Hubbard presents trumpeter Freddie Hubbard with his quintet at an important crossroads in his career.

Hubbard, whose Atlantic recordings had straddled the boundary between hard bop and the avant-garde, sticks to bebop on this excellent recording. Performing in a quintet with tenor-saxophonist Eddie Daniels (no clarinet this time), pianist Roland Hanna, bassist Richard Davis and drummer Louis Hayes, Hubbard is in top form on four selections: "Without a Song," a ridiculously uptempo "Just One of Those Things," "Blues for Duane" and a ballad rendition of "The Things We Did Last Summer."

Once again sound engineers Christoph Stickel and Dirk Sommer have scrupulously remastered the original recordings. The resulting releases are high quality 180-gram vinyl pressings enclosed in record jackets containing the original artwork."

I found a copy of this on Discogs, a two LP set of Miles Davis' Ascenseur pour l'échafaud from Music on Vinyl.

A couple cool quotes from Wikipedia about this album:

"Ascenseur pour l'échafaud is an album by jazz musician Miles Davis. It was recorded at Le Poste Parisien Studio in Paris on December 4 and 5, 1957. The album features the musical cues for the 1958 Louis Malle film Ascenseur pour l'échafaud.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau, a jazz fan and Malle's assistant at the time, suggested asking Miles Davis to create the film's soundtrack – possibly inspired by the Modern Jazz Quartet's recording for Roger Vadim's Sait-on jamais (Lit: 'Does One Ever Know', released as: 'No Sun in Venice'), released a few months earlier in 1957.

Davis was booked to perform at the Club Saint-Germain in Paris for November 1957. Rappeneau introduced him to Malle, and Davis agreed to record the music after attending a private screening. On December 4, he brought his four sidemen to the recording studio without having had them prepare anything. Davis only gave the musicians a few rudimentary harmonic sequences he had assembled in his hotel room, and, once the plot was explained, the band improvised without any precomposed theme, while edited loops of the musically relevant film sequences were projected in the background."

This has quickly become one of my favorite Miles Davis albums, and I highly recommend it to you Miles fans.

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud' preceded Kind of Blue, and may have influenced its content, as Miles' was having an affair with the film's leading lady, Jeanne Moreau, and may have very well put down his feelings in Kind of Blue as a post affair lament.

A winner of an album that you won't want to miss!

Ok, that's it for now, time to get on with the day.

Thanks for stopping by, and as always, may the tone be with you!