JW 073 | DAVID MURRAY | LIVE AT THE LOWER MANHATTAN OCEAN CLUB .I remember being at this concert, for one thing it was a new place though it left with such swiftness that I' m not certain many remember it. And so the concert itself was wrapped in a fond freshness, as trendy as the word had become back then. But it was the music that all had trekked there for, that expectancy in these yet earliest days of David's New York incarnation, that he was expresser of something still being born.This record as the replicated context of a time and the expression of that time and that place, NYC 1977 is the intellectual prcis of what has gone past to bring us into that present and , as well, notice of important music to come. And so we have the great music David Murray continues to make today, although this record makes us remember, as well, three great musicians we wish were still here. Amiri Baraka.JW 114 | JOHN LINDBERG'S TRIPOLAR | [A] LIVE AT ROULETTE, NYC .Tripolarity, a clear extension of bipolarity and its inherent ramped-up link to mood swinging, adds a dimension that is steeped in the selection of the personalities representing the polarities and results in an overall musical message that by its innate construction "mood swings its collective ass off." TriPolar represents a triangulation of creative energy that is ever-shifting and intensely engaged in the moment at hand...therefore this live recording gives the listener a large taste of the band's dynamic. There is no treatment or medication regimen for TriPolar, most decidedly not, as it is not a disorder, but in fact, all is in order...therefore a state of being to be divinely celebrated and reveled within at each given opportunity. So there you have the natural design and reason behind the creation of this ensemble and the making of this album. We are free to unhurriedly be TriPolar, without fretting, or having seething desires...as the trees of our youth continue to be annihilated and we are surrounded by an increasing horde that seem intransient addicts of cesspool level modalities of existing, we play on, we play on...we will play on...in hope, healing intention and good fun..JW 124 | LESTER BOWIE w./ WILLIAM PARKER, PHILLIP WILSON | (2 CD)THE GREAT PRETENDER Lester Bowie ventured to bridge the gap between tradition and avantgarde, between pop and innovation. Where others got lost in no-man's land, he found himself again in the continuum of Afro-American music. Blues, jazz, rhythm & blues, spirituals, gospels, the return to the African sound and the bold desire to pursue something new. The Chicago Association for the Advancement of Creative Music / AACM, which Lester Bowie joined in the sixties, described it with those magical phrases 'Ancient to the Future' and 'Great Black Music'.