Naya Baaz, Charm, Whirlwind ***1/2

Thumbs up most here for 'Chick's Magnet,' 'Reaching' and 'Peony' as these transcend the generic aspects of Indo-jazz fusion more. Sitar (Josh Feinberg), guitar (Rez Abbasi) - the two leaders of the group - plus cello (Jennifer Vincent) and drums (Satoshi Takeishi) on this 2021 studio coming together match and fuse across continents and the centuries.

The great thing about the use of a sitar in a jazz context - and it worked well on Herbie Hancock track 'The Song Goes On' from The Imagine Project the best most recent example to hand - when you get elasticity and non-western scales mixing with western instruments and modalities from the Indian sub-continent. There is a also a sense when guitar and sitar get really stuck in of a very incisive sense of attack that can achieve a vital propulsion and engagement with the sound as flow is generated and volume maxes up. But you also get extended play and room for extemporisation shaped around core motifs and of course the coming together of traditions that span many disciplines and share much more in common than differentiates them. The driving jazz-rock side of the album and churn of scalar cycles is a good factor on 'Emancipation' where there is some of Abbasi's best soloing. If you are into the Indo side of John McLaughlin or Joe Harriott's work with John Mayer Charm certainly chimes well. L-r: Josh Feinberg, Rez Abbasi, photo: via Whirlwind

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The Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quartet's Intents and Purposes - 2015 review

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In a topsy-turvy world when players of such pedigree often have to plough their furrow again in semi-obscurity as profiles dip or rebirth themselves given the fickleness of even specialist media attention and the sheer forgetfulness of the age you gain the feeling that this solo piano album from Benny Green, a monster, hugely soulful hard bop player who used to be in the Jazz Messengers and was a Blue Note artist of note, is an essential way of saying three things: I have nothing to prove. I am still me. World: where are you? The key sound here - again totally 21st century essential to really know modernistic jazz even when it was made 50 or 60 years ago - is the world of Bobby Timmons, Jackie McLean, Cedar Walton, Horace Silver and Thelonious Monk. Green's power is the most significant thing in his interpreting of the masters, his left hand bellows-like in the way he can practically unfurl an ostinato to sail away on and do remarkable things with. There is such expression when he rhapsodises best of all on Cedar Walton's 'The Maestro' that goes back to the 1970s RCA album Mobius with the grooving Walton back then playing Rhodes (and Steve Gadd no less on drums) and a piece later covered by the great Archie Shepp pianist Horace Parlan. BG, BVG (be very good) to yourselves - Solo away to this today. Benny Green, photo: from the cover art

Naya Baaz, Charm, Whirlwind ***1/2

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Benny Green, Solo, Sunnyside ***1/2