The staff gauged the rate at which the postwoman is depositing new releases in the Rifftides mailbox and decided that we should pick up the pace of telling you about some of them. This will be the most recent of many doomed attempts to let you know about a flood of jazz albums that seems only to gain in size and speed. If we are to keep up, brevity is a must, even for the most important arrivals.
Let’s begin by continuing our occasional series calling attention to the bands of the US military services. The Airmen Of Note are the big jazz band of the United States Air Force. Their latest release is a three-CD set with guest artists Cyrille Amée, the French singer whose popularity keeps rising; veteran pianist Kenny Barron; and New Orleans saxophonist Branford Marsalis. Each of them stars on one of the discs. In his set, Marsalis runs a gamut that includes a Japanese folk song, compositions by Irving Berlin, John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter, the 1947 hit “I’ll Close My Eyes” and, from 1913, Raymond Hubbell’s “Panama,” which went on to become one of the first standards in the jazz repertoire. For this classic, Marsalis chose the soprano sax.
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Come back soon for reviews of–or alerts to–further recent releases