This kind of 'disco jazz funk', as it's called in the booklet, would have no doubt served the argument that the

Monk wasn't an album artist per se. Monk's Music [...] is contradictory: strident, reassuring, fractured, centered. It isn't perfect, whatever

This unusual set was one of the most successful uses of a gospel choir in a jazz context. Trumpeter Donald Byrd and a septet that

81-year-old Ethio-jazz Godfather Mulatu Astatke's self-covers album Mulatu Plays Mulatu could easily have been an exercise in ego, a

The instrumental base notwithstanding, it is both the tempo and shapeshifting rhythm which make the work so great. And there is more: a rich alluvial