Martyn Joseph - Troubled Horses - VINYL LP

Double vinyl LP pressing. As if from the farthest reaches of space, a tremendous positive energy has come to us via Light on a Satellite It is Sun Ra's music, played by his Arkestra, more than 30 years after the legendary band founder's earthly demise - or, in other words, after his reported ascent to Saturn. Under the direction of Marshall Allen, the NEA Jazz Master (2025) and multi-instrumentalist, who celebrated his 100th birthday on May 25, 2024, Sun Ra's big band has arrived safely in the 21st century, after traveling Sun Ra's space ways for almost 70 years. This album pays tribute to the lifetime achievement of Marshall Allen, who leads the Sun Ra Arkestra since 1993. Recorded in Studio A at New York's Power Station on June 16, 2024, the album celebrates the mastery of the exceptional musician Marshall Allen as a multi-instrumentalist, arranger, bandleader, teacher, and guardian of Sun Ra's unique legacy. Perhaps this day will one day become part of the collective jazz memory, for what we are experiencing here is a simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, projected into the future, a time machine traveling through 100 years of jazz, out of the free approach of the Sun Ra Arkestra and in it's signature groove right into the heart of swing - with a century-old jazz master as captain. That in itself is a superlative. We are even more inspired by the power with which the virtuoso Marshall Allen continues his life's vocation. As a tribute to the life's work of Marshall Allen, Frank Kleinschmidt of IN+OUT Records invited the Sun Ra Arkestra into the studio with 24 musicians in the largest possible line-up, with the goal of documenting the music in it's polyphony and expansion in space and time in the best possible way. It is not only the variety of instruments used, but also the fact that musicians from four generations come together with a repertoire that spans 100 yea

Vinyl LP pressing.. In the early 1960s, the approach Martin Carthy took to folk music was nothing short of revolutionary, albeit a relatively quiet revolution befitting of his humble nature. You wouldn't find Carthy's music clambering up the singles charts; his was not a face adorning the teen magazines. Instead, his influence was felt at a grass-roots level. He plied his trade in the folk clubs, which is where the likes of Bob Dylan and Paul Simon sought him out, enamoured of his traditional repertoire and keen to learn songs like 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Lord Franklin' directly from him before adapting them for their own purposes.

In upstate New York, deep in the seam between the Catskills mountains and the Hudson Valley, a richlyswelling, spellbound sound emerges, eddying and flowing like the local Esopus Creek, or in theslipstream of the grander Hudson river, carrying the flotsam and jetsam of our hopes, dreams, fears. Asound composed of organic and electronic; guitars, keys, brass, strings, woodwind, drums - and a voiceof incantations, tapping streams of consciousness that similarly eddy and flow.Spiritually, literally, psycho-geographically where else does Mercury Rev's ninth album Born Horsesspring from? This cascade of gleaming, glistening psych-jazz-folk-baroque-ambient quest that searchesit's soul but can never truly know the answer? A sound and vision linked to their exalted past whilst quiteunlike anything they have created before?The answer is somewhere between the homes of founder members Jonathan Donahue (the hamlet of MtTremper) and Grasshopper (the town of Kingston), in their veins and brains of their now-legendarytapping of musical cosmology, and the vital presence of new permanent member Marion Genser (keys),plus long-term ally Jesse Chandler (keys) and guests Jeff Lipstein (drums), Martin Keith (double bass)and Jim Burgess (trumpet). A place that feeds off the levitating mood of their last album, 2019'sexpansive tribute Bobbie Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited, and the instrumental psych explorationsunder the names of Harmony Rockets and Mercury Rev's Clear Light Ensemble, and the spiritualguidance of avant-garde artist Tony Conrad and Beat poet Robert Creeley, to whom Born Horses isdedicated.Born Horses opens with 'Mood Swings'. A trumpet, evoking mariachi and the windswept terrain of thedesert prairie, opens up to a dynamic panorama of sound, wandering through and enveloping Jonathan'sintimate recitation, conflating memories and confessions of feelings trapped and unwrapp