New Albums - Page 161

If John Paul Jones is your go-to bassist, then you have some kind of reason to rejoice this year. All the Led Zepplin’s nine studio albums will be re-released in remastered, deluxe (and even super-deluxe boxed) editions, starting with Led Zeppelin I, II and III. Guitarist Jimmy Page oversaw the entire remastering process. Each deluxe edition not only includes the...

Bassist Meshell Ndegeocello has returned with her 11th studio album, . The album was “little labor but a lot of love,” Ndegeocello says of the album which is melodic, yet groove-driven and meditative. You can hear what she’s talking about in this clip of “Conviction” from the new record: Comet, Come to Me is available on , and as a...

Three jazz greats — Jamie Saft, Steve Swallow and Bobby Previte — prove that excellent music doesn’t always take long to make. The trio’s first record, , was recorded in about three hours in an upstate New York studio. Saft, who composed seven of the record’s 10 tracks, had high praise for bassist Swallow, who has played with Gary Burton,...

The 11th studio album from moe., , was supposed to have a completely different sound than the finished product. “Everything we started out to do turned into completely something else. An album that was supposed to be an acoustic based album recorded in a barn turned into a hard rock album recorded in Connecticut with a hip-hop producer. Go figure....

Sludge metal band Crowbar has released its 10th studio album, . It’s the New Orleans-based group’s first since 2011’s Sever the Wicked Hand and its first with bassist Jeff Golden, who replaced longtime bassist Pat Bruders after Bruders left to concentrate on work with Down. The album also comes during Crowbar’s 25th anniversary year. But although the guys are older,...

French bassist/composer Olivier Babaz has released his third album, . Paris-born and now Montreal-based, Babaz usually focuses on working with small, acoustic jazz ensembles, but this 11-song album straddles the line between jazz and acoustic rock. Babaz’s previous recordings include the Akoz Duo record La Lune de Kala and his own Midnight Cafeine. This latest album finds Babaz working with...

The Roots’ latest, is one of the group’s shortest efforts while still being a conceptual piece focusing on self-destructive cycles. With the low end provided by bassist Mark Kelley, the record is a deep, different offering from the group, which is now on its 14th album. The group’s drummer and bandleader Questlove even goes so far as to call it...

Bassist Martin Wind and his quartet are back with an album that pays tribute to the great jazz composer/pianist Bill Evans. The quartet includes Scott Robinson on tenor sax, Bill Cunliffe on piano and Joe LaBarbera on drums. LaBarbera also played in a trio with Evans. The album, , sees the quartet working with the Italian Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana and...

“Your life will be greatly enriched” by Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band’s sixth album, . Or at least that’s what bandleader Goodwin has to say. The 10-song collection (seven of which are originals) features the Grammy-winning band, featuring Rick Shaw on bass (he also plays with Johnny Mathis, Bill Holman, and Chick Corea,) in top form. Goodwin said the players...

Bassists Will Lee (The Late Show with David Letterman) and Roscoe Beck (Leonard Cohen, Robben Ford, The Dixie Chicks, Eric Johnson) provide the low end for singular guitarist/composer Oz Noy on his sixth album, . The album is a follow-up to the 2011 release of Volume 1, also featuring Lee and Beck. An Israeli native who has called the U.S....

Mark Egan (Pat Metheny Group, Sting, Arcadia, Roger Daltry and Joan Osborne) is showing off his stellar fretless bass chops on About Now, his seventh album. Egan, a contemporary jazz composer, recorded the instrumental album as part of a trio featuring Danny Gottlieb on drums and Mitchel Forman on keyboards, both musicians with whom he has recorded before — Gottlieb...

Linley Marthe, the bass virtuoso from Mauritius, has teamed up with vocalist Monika Njava in the new world music/jazz hybrid group, Island Jazz, which has released its . Njava sings in English and several dialects of Malagasy, the language of her home country, Madagascar, which lies west of the island of Maruitius — the birthplace of the now Paris-based Marthe,...