Walter Bishop Jr's 4th Cycle, Keeper of my Soul (1973) plus more

 

And welcome to March...

Only album from this assemblage, which came out in 1973.  On the other hand, Walter on his own made quite a few nice records in the jazz or fusion style.

His discogs bio:

American jazz pianist and composer.

Born : October 04, 1927 in New York City, New York.

Died : January 24, 1998 in New York City, New York.

He was the son of composer Walter Bishop, Sr.. In high school his friends included Kenny Drew, Sonny Rollins, and Art Taylor. He began his musical career after World War II, and played and recorded with Art Blakey, Charlie Parker, Oscar Pettiford, Kai Winding, Miles Davis, Jackie McLean, Curtis Fuller, Terry Gibbs, Clark Terry, Blue Mitchell, and Supersax. In the early 1960s he also led his own trio with Jimmy Garrison and G. T. Hogan. He continued performing into the 1990s.

After studying at The Juilliard School with Hall Overton in the late 1960s, he taught music theory at colleges in Los Angeles in the 1970s. In 1983 he began teaching at The Hartt School of the University of Hartford. He also wrote a book, A Study in Fourths, about jazz improvisation based on cycles of fourths and fifths.

From 1973, the lovely Soul Village which, of course, appeared on the Frayker compilation.

The composition called Valerie, from Soul Village which came out in 1977, features such a great opening with the sax playing what sounds like sighs:

Calvin Keys' Proceed With Caution! 1974 [with lossless limited time only]

He made a few albums, sporadically, from the early 70s out on to the 80s and even down into the post 2000 years, those wonderful antisocial media dominated times wherein humanity reached such an apogee of perfect attention deficit.

From wiki:

Calvin Keys (born February 6, 1943) is an American jazz guitarist, known for the several albums he released for Black Jazz Records.

Keys has performed and recorded with Ray Charles, Ahmad Jamal, John Handy, Bobby Hutcherson, Eddie Marshall, Sonny Stitt, Pharoah Sanders, Joe Henderson and Leon Williams.

On this 1974 outing, Calvin supplies us with some quite lovely funky fusion in the jazzier side of things.  The track called Tradewinds features some really lovely smooth composition flowing just like a warm boat on a breezy sea:

Aterzamlade Verk

 

Beautiful all-instrumental RIO type guitar music similar to Samla Mammas (which even the cover resembles) or Lars Hollmer, with the folk / RIO mixture of instrumental craziness, first track:

I guess it doesn't happen every day we find something that has not even appeared on discogs, so far as I know that is. Even a search for the artists doesn't help all that much.

Let's just enjoy the music.

Milan Svoboda Quartet's Dedication 1990 [flac limited time only]

This compositional genius who has been featured multiple times across many posts here on this blog never lets up, in this 1990 outing he still can come up with some interesting sounds, well worth hearing.  Luckily, the contemporaneous catering to the silliness of smooth 80s fusion is kept to a minimum here and the level of original ideas is cranked up to I'd say about a 5 on the dial from terrifyingly dumb and simple 0 to extremist progressiveness 10 (like Orchestra Njervudarov would score a 9.5).

It's all instrumental of course, with a jazz quartet, Milan on piano, the music being much much richer than one would expect from a grouping of 4 thanks to extra keyboard parts added presumably.

On the basis of this one I'll probably purchase some more of his later LPs that are missing in the online discography.   Overall, sound of the music is very similar to the later material from the beloved Dane Palle Mikkelborg which has been posted here so many times in the past.  Still love his composing to death too.

Twilight:

Horizon:

Japanese Dido (Michiaki Kato and Shizuru Ohtaka) in Pagina (1989) and Ksana (1994) [limited time only]

So I don't know (how could I?) if these guys became successful in their home country of Japan with the simple and expressive beauty of the 1994 album Ksana, but it sure would be a shame if they didn't. It's just full of great songs and composition and almost nothing simplistic, a lot of influences from the alternative music that was prevalent at the time, the kind of breathy female vocalizing of Stina Nordenstam for ex, for those who are familiar with her (and back then almost 30 years ago, I really loved her music, she became big when 'Little Star' was used in the Leonardo di Caprio movie Romeo and Juliet if you recall.

The style is all over the place as you can tell from the descriptor on discogs:

Electronic, Jazz, Rock, PopArt, Rock, Ethereal, Jazz-Rock, Ambient, Dance-pop

But it's really mostly ambient jazzy alternative songs with a lot of emotion.

First album called Pagina is not as good as the later one, from the first, Fu-Mi:

From Ksana, the title track

The album closes out with Are You Ready for Love which absolutely blows me away with its tender and exquisite craftsmanship and beauty done in a waltz tempo with the intro of course reminiscent or perhaps a nod to Satie's Gymnopedies:

It could so easily have been a 'by the numbers' series of generic chord progressions on top of diatonic chords, but notice how the key keeps travelling or modulating from the beginning of I guess F major or thereabouts then moving into flat keys every few measures. Then the bridge which is instrumental presents us again with a totally different key change.  Also highly appreciated by myself is the fact the strings arrangement is not overdone in the least, it's a very light touch.  Not clear who is the arranger, on the first album there are too many credits to really get an idea of what's going on.