OREGON - Music of Another Present Era (1972) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Music of Another Present Era remains Oregon's most enduring masterwork. Achieving a perfect balance of musical traditions from the East and West, ancient to future, they set the stage not only for a new transculturalism in jazz, but also created a lasting template for the fusion of musics from world traditions that would flower over a decade later. The four participants in Oregon, oboist and pianist Paul McCandless, guitarist and pianist Ralph Towner, upright bassist and pianist Glen Moore, and the late multi-instrumentalist Collin Walcott, operated on the premise that melodic ideas and expansive harmonies all contributed to a music that didn't bridge cultures, but erased them and eradicated them. This is a place where the astute dynamics of classical music meet the freedom of post-bop jazz in an inquiry of world rhythms and harmonics. Standout tracks include "North Star," with its celebration of rural music and rhythmic invention; the up-tempo "Sail," which offers a killer trio of Walcott's sprinting tablas, Towner's frenetic 12-string playing, and Moore's inquiring bass; the intensely improvisatory "Shard/Spring Is Really Coming"; and the lilting "The Swan." This is fusion music, to be sure, but it's the kind of fusion musicians have been trying unsuccessfully to emulate for decades. Music of Another Present Era is one of the most poetic and groundbreaking records to be released in the 1970s. by Thom Jurek 
Tracklist:
1 North Star 5:54
2 The Rough Places Plain 3:14
3 Sail 4:32
4 At The Hawk's Well 3:09
5 Children Of God 1:09
6 Opening 5:32
7 Naiads 2:02
8 Shard / Spring Is Really Coming 3:29
8.1 Shard 0:29
8.2 Spring Is Really Coming 2:55
9 Bell Spirit 0:42
10 Baku The Dream Eater 4:22
11 The Silence Of A Candle 1:45
12 Land Of Heart's Desire 3:21
13 The Swan 3:51
14 Touchstone 5:55
Credits:
Bells – Collin Walcott (tracks: 9)
Classical Guitar – Ralph Towner (tracks: 1, 2, 10, 12, 13)
Double Bass – Glen Moore (tracks: 1, 6, 8.2, 10 to 14)
Electric Bass – Glen Moore (tracks: 3)
English Horn – Paul McCandless (tracks: 3, 11, 14)
Esraj – Collin Walcott (tracks: 10)
Flute – Glen Moore (tracks: 14)
Harmonica – Ralph Towner (tracks: 10)
Mellophone – Ralph Towner (tracks: 10, 14)
Mridangam – Collin Walcott (tracks: 8.2, 14)
Oboe – Paul McCandless (tracks: 1, 6, 7, 8.1, 9, 10, 12 to 14)
Percussion – Collin Walcott (tracks: 3, 10, 14)
Piano – Collin Walcott (tracks: 5, 8.1), Glen Moore (tracks: 4, 7), Ralph Towner (tracks: 1)
Reeds – Paul McCandless (tracks: 5)
Rhythm Guitar – Collin Walcott (tracks: 3)
Sitar – Collin Walcott (tracks: 2, 10, 11)
Tabla – Collin Walcott (tracks: 1, 6, 10, 12, 13)
Twelve-string Guitar – Ralph Towner (tracks: 3, 5, 6, 8.1, 10, 11, 14)
Violin – Glen Moore (tracks: 5, 8.1)

JIMMY GIUFFRE - Western Suite (1958-1998) FLAC (tracks), lossless

In late 1957, jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, composer, and iconoclast Jimmy Giuffre broke up the original Jimmy Giuffre 3 with Ralph Pena and Jim Hall. In early 1958, for a recording session, he formed a new trio without a rhythm section. For the album Trav'lin' Light, his new trio included Hall on guitar and the underrated trombone giant Bob Brookmeyer. For a year, they gigged together up and down the West Coast and played summer festivals, recorded, and even played clubs in New York. They became a trio of adventurous musicians for whom form was not an obstacle to creativity. As the year wound down, Giuffre wanted to document the trio once more, sensing its life was coming to an end. He composed the four-movement "Western Suite" with the trio's strengths in mind, as a way of documenting how they had come together as a band during that year. The piece itself stands as a crowning achievement in a career that included discovering the talents of Steve Swallow and Paul Bley and making the truly revolutionary recording Free Fall for Columbia three years later. The roots of that thinking lie in this set. Jim Hall's playing was dark, funky, ambiguous, sounding like drums and voices all at the same time -- particularly in the fourth movement. Brookmeyer became the pace setter. His lines were played as stage settings for the other two players to dialogue and narrate against. Giuffre, ever the storyteller, advanced the improvisation angle and wrote his score so that each player had to stand on his own as part of the group; there were no comfort zones. Without a rhythm section, notions of interval, extensions, interludes, and so on were out the window. He himself played some of his most retrained yet adventurous solos in the confines of this trio and within the form of this suite. It swung like West Coast jazz, but felt as ambitious as Copland's Billy the Kid. The record is filled out with two other tunes, one of Eddie Durham's, "Topsy," and the final moment of mastery this band ever recorded, the already classic "Blue Monk." The easy stroll of the front line with Brookmeyer's trombone strutting New Orleans' style is in sharp contrast to Giuffre's clarinet playing. Which carries the bluesy melody through three harmonic changes before he solos and then plays three more. Hall keeps it all on track, and somehow the piece sounds very natural this way, though unlike "Monk," there are no edges here -- everything is rounded off. This is as solid as any of the earlier or later Jimmy Giuffre 3 records, and two notches above Trav'lin' Light in that it reveals a fully developed sense of the responsibilities, possibilities, and freedoms of reinventing jazz for the trio. by Thom Jurek 

PAUL McCANDLESS - Shapeshifter (2004) Mp3

SUSANNE ABBUEHL - The Gift (2013) FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

On her third offering for ECM, her first in six years, vocalist/composer Susanne Abbuehl utilizes the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, Sara Teasdale, and Wallace Stevens to explore solitude as it embraces desire, and the mysteries of nature. Though she has employed poetry as source material before, it has never been to this extent. Here, she has written the music for all selections but one, Wolfgang Lackerschmid's "Soon (Five Years Ago)," for which she provided lyrics. Backed by her longstanding pianist Wolfert Brederode, flügelhornist Matthieu Michel, and drummer/percussionist Olavi Louhivuori, Abbuehl moves inside the natural and sometimes angular rhymes of her sources, inhabits their rhythms, and delivers them as tender yet authoritative songs. Her restrained, refined approach not only carries their more subtle meanings across, but reveals their considerable power. (Check the brooding, hungry tension in Teasdale's "The Cloud.") Abbuehl uses Dickinson's poems most of all. The writer may be regarded as a mysterious, solitary, even tragic being, but the singer also unmasks just how many worlds -- even observed from the confines of a room -- her poet's imagination reached. On both versions of "This and My Heart," the singer makes the firmament respond to her offering: "It's all I have to bring today...This, and my heart, and all the fields/And all the meadows wide...." Michel's horn emphasizes Abbuehl's delivery as his smoky lines travel, fluttering, skittering, and intoning through a labyrinth; Louhivuori dances around the kit as a conduit for them, and Brederode becomes the respondent universe. Desire is a motivational force in many of these poems; from the earthiness of discovery in Dickinson's "Forbidden Fruit" and its ethereal projection in her "Wild Nights," to its certain spiritual and carnal expression in Teasdale's "By Day, by Night," to the unfettered wildness in Bronte's "Shadows on Shadows." Even in Stevens' "In My Room," solitude is the place where desire not only wants inherently what it wants immediately, but where its language provides it form to observe and project: "From my balcony, I survey the yellow air/Reading where I have written/The spring is like a belle undressing...." (Abbuehl offers a ghostly trace of the Beach Boys' tune of the same name in her refrain, not as humor but as an empathic device.) Throughout The Gift, Abbuehl's music and phrasing are strikingly intuitive and wholly artful; they transcend genre barriers. Her band's articulation of these compositions and the illumination they provide her voice are nearly symbiotic in their support; they create dimension and layered textures that add shades of meaning under her delivery. The Gift offers delight, tension, longing, and an opportunity to hear where written and sung speech are mirror images in the heart of language itself.  by Thom Jurek
Tracklist:
1 The Cloud 5:10
Susanne Abbuehl / Sara Teasdale
2 This and My Heart  3:39
Susanne Abbuehl / Emily Dickinson
3 If Bees Are Few 1:39
Susanne Abbuehl / Emily Dickinson
4 My River Runs to You 5:21
Susanne Abbuehl / Emily Dickinson
5 Ashore at Least 7:36
Susanne Abbuehl / Emily Dickinson
6 Forbidden Fruit 2:04
Susanne Abbuehl / Emily Dickinson
7 By Day, by Night 4:03
Susanne Abbuehl / Sara Teasdale
8 A Slash of Blue 1:33
Susanne Abbuehl / Emily Dickinson
9 Wild Nights 6:40
Susanne Abbuehl / Emily Dickinson
10 In My Room 4:53
Susanne Abbuehl / Wallace Stevens
11 Bind Me 1:22
Susanne Abbuehl / Emily Dickinson
12 Soon (Five Years Ago) 3:15
Susanne Abbuehl / Wolfgang Lackerschmid
13 Fall, Leaves, Fall 4:04
Susanne Abbuehl / Emily Brontë
14 Sepal 1:31
Susanne Abbuehl / Emily Dickinson
15 Shadows on Shadows 4:03
Susanne Abbuehl / Emily Brontë
16 This and My Heart [Variation] 4:27
Susanne Abbuehl / Emily Dickinson
Credits
Drums, Percussion – Olavi Louhivuori
Flugelhorn – Matthieu Michel
Piano, Harmonium [Indian Harmonium] – Wolfert Brederode
Voice – Susanne Abbuehl

NGUYÊN LÊ QUARTET - Walking on the Tiger's Tail (2005) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Guitarist Nguyên Le explores a wide span of modern styles throughout Walking on the Tiger's Tail. Some of the up-tempo pieces are essentially fusion while other selections look towards the folk-jazz of Oregon (helped out by the many horns of Paul McCandless), world music and post-bop jazz. The bassless quartet finds each of the musicians assuming the role of the bass at one time or another, and so effectively that one rarely notices its absence. Le's passionate guitar solos, the mixture of stylists and styles, and the inventive originals (which include some impressionistic ballads) make the music completely unclassifiable as anything but stimulating 21st century creative jazz.  by Scott Yanow
Tracklist
1 Wingless Flight 4:38
Nguyên Lê
2 Yielding Water 6:02
Nguyên Lê
3 Totsu! 7:55
Nguyên Lê
4 Snow on a Flower 5:34
Nguyên Lê
5 Jorai 5:05
Nguyên Lê
6 Butterfly Dream 5:52
Nguyên Lê
7 Walking on the Tiger's Tail 8:21
Nguyên Lê
8 Bee 5:25
Nguyên Lê
9 Evening Glory 4:59
Nguyên Lê
10 Zamora 6:39
Nguyên Lê
11 Eventail 5:07
Nguyên Lê
Credits
Drums, Percussion – Jamey Haddad
Producer – Nguyên Lê
Electric Guitar, Guitar [Electroacoustic], Electronics, Composed By, Liner Notes – Nguyên Lê
Oboe, Soprano Saxophone, Sopranino Saxophone, Oboe, English Horn, Bass Clarinet – Paul McCandless
Piano – Art Lande