BEST little know Jazz Album that you ever heard?

simonmoon:

Nice to find another RiO fan -- we’re few & far between.

But I have to disagree on one issue: the RiO bands span a huge breadth of styles -- and so does the term "jazz." If Cecil Taylor’s atonal piano improvisations are jazz, if Mahavishnu Orchestra is jazz, if "My Spanish Heart" and Return to Forever’s acoustic recordings are jazz, if Glenn Branca is jazz, then so is a lot of Art Zoyd, Urban Sax, Zao, & Univers Zero.

See, e.g., the Wikipedia entry for "chamber jazz."

But really, the word "jazz" is just an attempt to describe a genre of music without setting boundary conditions...When a person says that they like jazz, are they referring to Dixieland or Sun Ra or TooManyZooz or Carla Bley or Miles’s "Doo-Bop"? I think that those whose minds are sufficiently open to new sounds to embrace more adventurous jazz sub-genres would find much within the RiO movement as exciting and fresh as we did -- and still do.

But this is just a nit. The bottom line is that there’s a whole world of world-class "jazzy" music, well-known in other countries, that is barely known here.

And don’t forget that I was also recommending more "mainstream" period East European & Soviet jazz. Pleasae don’t let that get lost in the shuffle. Guys like Stancko & Komeda have tremendous catalogs that are (OK, just my opinion, but still) belong on a shelf with the best Miles, Coltrane, & Ellington recordings.

I’m just hoping that some of the people reading this thread are inspired to dig a little into these great recordings and incredible artists, many of which are now right there on Tidal & YouTube.  A great place to start learning about what's out there is Archie Patterson's Eurock Web site -- a project that he started by recording & selling "educational" RiO cassetes in the 1970s -- and, of course, the Cuneiform record label.

Thanks for the listening suggestions. I’ll try to track ’em down.

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