VMP Magazine

From an early age, it was clear that Dorothy Ashby, born Dorothy Jeanne Thompson in Detroit in 1932, would cut a path all her own. As the young daughter of self-taught jazz guitarist Wiley Thompson, she relished sitting in on her father’s combo’s rehearsals in their home, chording along on piano. Instilling in her an understanding of jazz as not only a musical style but a way of life, these jam sessions amounted to an invaluable education. “[My father] taught me more about harmony and melodic construction than I learned in all my years of high school, college, and private study,” Ashby reflected to Sally Placksin for her book American Women in Jazz. “[He] sacrificed more time and money than the family could afford for my musical training and instruments.”

As a student at Cass Technical High School, her repertoire expanded to include violin, upright bass and saxophone — she rubbed shoulders with a teenage Donald Byrd in the marching band — but it was through the school’s pioneering harp program that she became transfixed by the elegant, towering instrument. Hands-on time with one of the school’s five harps was precious; if she was lucky, Ashby could vie for an hour’s worth of playing a day. “It took a little time, but I spent all my time wanting to do it my way,” she recalled. “There were some girls who had harps of their own, but they were very few, and none of the Black girls, of course, had harps. We hadn't even seen a harp before we got there."

In December 2018, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics received Fathers and Sons, a 1969 electric blues album from the legendary Muddy Waters. It’s an album that found Muddy collaborating with a lot of the young, white bluesmen who treated his catalog like a talisman, and it hadn’t been reissued on vinyl in the U.S. in almost 30 years. 

Below, you can read an excerpt from our exclusive Listening Notes Booklet that is included with our edition of Fathers and Sons.

Last year, we reissued two Blue Note classics, Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music, and Johnny Griffin's A Blowing Session. Today, we're releasing the third album in our series with Blue Note; Charlie Rouse's Bossa Nova Bacchanal. Below, you can read an excerpt of the original liner notes.

In February, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive Left My Blues In San Francisco, the overlooked first album from Buddy Guy that charts both the evolution of the blues and his growth as a performer. Read an excerpt from the Listening Notes here. You can sign up over here.

Below, you can learn why we picked the album, and everything that went into making our reissue.

In December, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive Fathers and Sons, the must-own album from one of the most respected, well-known names in blues, Muddy Waters — an album made in collaboration with young bluesmen who owed their careers to his legendary influence. Read an excerpt from the Listening Notes here. You can sign up over here.

Below, you can learn why we picked the album, and everything that went into making our reissue.

In November, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive Knock on Wood, Eddie Floyd’s most successful album featuring the smash-hit song by the same name. Read an excerpt from the Listening Notes here. You can sign up over here.

Below, you can learn why we picked the album, and everything that went into making our reissue.

The Isley Brothers may forever be tied to 1959’s “Shout!”, their rambunctious, gospel-style hit that’s been steeping in pop culture for decades. From National Lampoon’s Animal House to The Wonder Years to an oldies station near you, “Shout!” is still shouting at us. If you don’t have a strong feeling about the song in the 21st century, you’ve got company — the Isleys themselves.

In May, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive an exclusive reissue of Gospel Train, the 1956 studio LP from influential gospel guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Cut directly to lacquer by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound, pressed at QRP in Salinas, Kansas, and featuring Listening Notes from Gayle Wald, author of the definitive biography of Tharpe, this new edition is the defining reissue of Gospel Train.

You can read an excerpt of the Listening Notes booklet included with the album here, and sign up to receive it here.

Below, read why we picked Gospel Train and the details of our reissue.

In September, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive Jujus / Alchemy of the Blues, the third album from poet/scholar/musician Sarah Webster Fabio. We worked closely with Smithsonian Folkways to replicate the packaging from 1976, and had the album remastered by the staff at the label. Read an excerpt from the Listening Notes here. You can sign up over here.

Below, you can learn why we picked the album, and everything that went into our reissue, from the package to the remastering.

To be both a quiet and a roaring fire is a feat. However, it is this description that perfectly denotes both the artistry of Roberta Flack and her far-too-often overlooked third album, Quiet Fire. On it, her music burns with singeing intensity and gives up a little funk all while conjuring up a halting soul, deep hush, and stillness. Flack would evoke the nearly impossible again and again throughout her career, but that skilled artistry started with this album, which maybe would have gotten the attention it truly deserved if it were released after the delayed popular response to Flack’s debut album, First Take.

VMP is thrilled to feature Teddy Pendergrass’ Life is a Song Worth Singing as our Classics Record of the Month in October 2021. The album is the Quiet Storm R&B icon’s second solo album, and the release that solidified his rightful throne in solo superstardom, which you can read more about in the album’s Listening Notes.

In the mid ’50s, the blues was at a — pardon the pun — crossroads. The music had morphed into various strands (R&B, rock ’n’ roll) and had been incorporated into many more (jazz, pop). While the Chitlin Circuit and Chess Records were still running strong, it seemed unlikely that the generation that spawned Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf, who themselves had followed Robert Johnson, Skip James and Son House, would not be followed by a new wave of young guns ready to preach their blues. But thanks to three men with the last name King — well, two anyway, but more on that later — the blues had a resurgence in the ’60s, due to their reimaginings of what electric blues could be and sound like, forever cementing themselves as the Three Kings of the Blues Guitar.

Out of the Three "Kings" of the Blues, Freddie King is often mentioned behind Albert and B.B., the third wheel like Theodore, Moe or the guy who brought Christ myrrh. And that makes some sense: Freddie died young — at 42, of a combination of stomach ulcers and pancreatitis — and his recording career is the shortest of the Three Kings, mainly lasting the 15 years between 1960 and 1975, the year before his death. And while B.B. and Albert would have career-defining singles — “The Thrill is Gone” and “Born Under a Bad Sign,” respectively — Freddie’s hits were more diffuse; his biggest single, “Hide Away,” was released in the early days of rock ’n’ roll, and while it showcased his nimble fingers and ability to pick out complicated guitar lines, it didn’t really capture the fullness of what made Freddie, well, Freddie. Because Freddie King, perhaps more than his other sovereigns, was about a sound more than any specific song. That sound, a blending of the lightning-in-a-dry-field pyrotechnics of the Texas country blues with the el-train-in-a-blizzard thrust of Chicago blues, would spiral out from Freddie to inspire entire waves of white rock artists from Eric Clapton and Peter Green to Stevie Ray Vaughan and ZZ Top. While he was the last of the Three Kings to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Texas Cannonball, as he was called, certainly belonged there.

It’s late 1961, and Lee Morgan is a man without. He’d lost his place to live; his wife, Kiko, whom he’d married just a year earlier, had left him; and, desperate for drug money, he’d sold his trumpet. There was a silence in his life. But silences always find a way to get filled, and maybe this is a story about that. Maybe this whole album, 1962’s Take Twelve, is a story about filling silences, about figuring out sounds, about figuring out how to begin again.

Our next three Classics Records of the Month — which you’ll receive if you sign up for VMP Classics in October, November and December 2021 — begin with Philly R&B royalty, move on to a blues King and wrap with an undeniable vocal legend.

In 1978 and 1979, Teddy Pendergrass was a mega-star with nothing to prove. He was the hottest male vocalist in R&B. He released Platinum albums, headlined sold-out stadium concerts, and even had his own line of Teddy Jeans for women.

Just one year earlier, though, he was an emerging solo artist with everything to prove. All it took for the change was two solo albums, led by Life Is a Song Worth Singing.

At the age of 14, Lee Morgan’s career seemed to be set in stone after receiving a trumpet for his birthday. His growth was meteoric, and just one year later, while still in high school, he was already performing professionally. Even the upper echelon of jazz musicians noticed Morgan’s talent — many were eager to scout the rising talent. Shortly after graduating high school, Dizzy Gillespie invited Morgan to join his big band. Clifford Brown had been a mentor to the rising musician, and following Brown’s untimely death in a car accident, Morgan was catapulted to the top of the list as the next great trumpeter.

In July, VMP celebrated our 50th Classics Record of the Month with Abbey Lincoln’s It's Magic! In honor of this incredible milestone, we invited members and non-members to participate in an essay contest to win the top prize: nearly every Classics record we’ve pressed — 40+ total, valued at $2,000. Contestants were asked to respond to one of six prompts with an essay about one of our 50 Classics records (or their future pick for the Track).

With over 200 amazing entries in just two weeks, picking three winners was no easy task. Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, to every single applicant who took the time to write such heartfelt, detailed pieces about our Classics records. We read and enjoyed each entry, and deliberated for a great deal of time.

Congratulations to our second-place winner Thomas Werner, who wrote about Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s Gospel Train, and our third-place winner Chris Prince, who wrote about Art Blakey’s The Freedom Rider. You can read their entries in our weekly newsletter, The Standard, in the upcoming weeks. (Not a subscriber? You can change that in your VMP email preferences!)

Below, you can read the grand-prize winning essay by Alex Maidy, who shared his exciting personal connection to none other than our 50th Classics artist herself, Abbey Lincoln.

For nearly four decades, Bill Withers’ +’Justments sat hidden in plain sight. It was beloved, and even deemed a masterpiece, by listeners in the know, and for a certain kind of music fan, one of those albums that could confirm you’re amongst your kind — the ones who venture beyond charts; the diggers and the excavators.

But in 1974, when the album was released, the famed singer-songwriter was still at the height of his powers. He was already the Bill Withers who’d made “Ain't No Sunshine,” a prototype of lovelorn lament for its era, and “Grandma’s Hands,” an ode to matriarchal nurture. The Bill Withers who’d made “Lean On Me,” a monument to friendship that’s embedded in our cultural fibers. His songs were paradoxes, deceptively simple in the way they illuminated the interiority of the human experience, how they made the personal universal.

Aretha Franklin’s 1971 stand at the Fillmore West was meant, by her and her longtime producer Jerry Wexler, as a coronation. She’d spent the better part of the previous five years at the top of the charts, turning albums like I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (VMP Essentials No. 84), Aretha Now (VMP Classics No. 33) and Lady Soul into canonical classics, and even conquered Europe, thanks to a brief tour and the album Aretha in Paris. She toured stadiums around the U.S., but Wexler and Franklin were curious how deep her crossover actually was. Would she go over with the crowd used to seeing the Grateful Dead or Janis Joplin or the Allman Brothers Band? It was a moment to test Franklin’s mettle on an away court, the musical version of a football team being so dominant that they decided it’s time to conquer baseball, too.

In 1924, a 51-year-old civil engineer named Heitor da Silva Costa, after winning a contest held by the local Catholic church, traveled from his home in Rio de Janeiro to Europe, to meet with a Polish and French sculptor named Paul Landowski and a French civil engineer counterpart to talk something, well, monumental. Specifically, Christo Redentor, or Christ the Redeemer, a gigantic statue sculpted by Landowski and bankrolled by the Brazilian Catholic Church. After spending years in Europe conferring with experts, and purchasing many tons of concrete in Sweden, Silva Costa was able to return to Rio, where the statue was ultimately completed in 1931, after nine years of sculpting and construction. Christ the Redeemer is considered one of the new Seven Wonders of the World, which more or less means the thing is breathtaking, even in photos.

It’s that time again: Time to hip VMP Classics members about their upcoming Records of the Month. Read below to find out more about our Classics records for April, May and June 2021.

We’re back with another three-Record of the Month announcement. Here’s the scoop on the three Classics Records of the Month for January-March 2021. If you’re a member of VMP Classics, or sign up now, here are the three records you’ll receive with a subscription, in January, February, and March.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the new second chair violinist of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra in 1974. You’re told that you’ve been hired to provide string arrangements for the new soundtrack album for a local performer who’s, despite all odds, risen out of extreme poverty to be known for his music, songwriting, and the literal gold-trimmed Cadillac he drives around town. This performer has previously won an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy for his musical work on a previous film, and some of your orchestra mates even played on his past records. This performer, already a legend for his night owl tendencies, often doesn’t start studio sessions until 2 in the morning. But you’re there, tired, because you have the chance to live on in infamy: your violin can be on the new Isaac Hayes record.

And then, there he is. He strolls in, dripping in excellence. It’s at this point you realize: There is no sheet music for what Hayes expects you to play. Going back to his earliest days in the Stax studio, he and the Stax songwriters and musicians never write anything down. They call it “Head Arrangements,” and they all work like Otis Redding used to: walking up to horn players in the studio and humming lines into their ears for them to play. You play what Hayes wants you to play, and the album comes together.

Somehow, Isaac Hayes scores an entire film, and makes a soundtrack for that film, with nothing more than the music batting around his head.

If the blues defined popular music of the 20th century, Coleman Hawkins — born four years into said century, and largely fueled by that 12-bar form — was nearly as undeniable a constant through its first half, if a less heralded one.

It’s nearly impossible to write about Gábor Szabó, and his guitar playing, without slipping into something like trying to describe what a ghost looks like to someone who’s unfamiliar with ghosts. You end up using words like “sorcery” and “bewitching” and “haunting” that make his albums sound like a tape of Halloween sounds. This is a guy whose albums had titles like Spellbinder and More Sorcery and Magical Connection; I’m not sure if he personally named his albums, but they acknowledged the spectral quality of what he was getting into. It’s hard, increasingly since his death in 1982 at age 45, to separate the mortal man from the ethereal spirit of his music.

In August, members of VMP Classics will receive Money Talks, a lost LP from the Bar-Kays, assembled and released after the band had left Stax Records and became superstars, and after Stax Records had been purchased and relaunched by Fantasy. It allowed the Bar-Kays to be on the R&B charts for two labels at the same time, and it stands alongside the band’s other albums of the era as a towering funk record. It’s been remastered from its original master tapes AAA, and comes on 180-gram vinyl with brand new liner notes. Below, you can hear from our Classics A&R why he picked this record this month.

In September, members of VMP Classics will receive a AAA vinyl reissue of Freedom Suite by Sonny Rollins. Remastered from the original analog master tapes, our edition comes on 180g vinyl and with new liner notes. Read below for more on why we picked this album.

In December, 2016, JazzTimes traced the history of protest in jazz. It touched on classics like Louis Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” right up to Max Roach’s fiery We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite and Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues. But they left out the first album-length statement of the Civil Rights era, leading longtime subscriber Sonny Rollins to write in and defend his magnificent yet oddly overshadowed 1958 album, Freedom Suite. The editors of JazzTimes weren’t the only ones to mistakenly pass it by.

For the purposes of these liner notes, I’m going to assume that you are familiar with the broad contours of the Stax Records story, thanks to our eight previous Stax Classics selections (I’m including The Immortal Otis Redding here) and likely our The Story Of Stax Records Anthology box set from earlier this year. But as a refresher: Stax Records started life as a small regional soul label, got distributed by Atlantic for a few glory years, realized their contract with Atlantic left them not owning their masters, left Atlantic, and struggled for years to regain their foothold, ultimately culminating in some of the most iconic R&B of the ’60s and ’70s. They had shining towers of success, followed by devastating lows that included the label being forced to close up shop in 1975, when a variety of banking concerns cut them off. By the end, Stax Records couldn’t get into stores or off pressing plant floors, and the label was purchased out of bankruptcy in the late-’70s. Stax was mostly a reissue concern until 2005, when Concord Records bought it, and signed some of the label’s original artists and new artists like Nathaniel Rateliff. Its legacy as the most important soul label ever is undebatable, and assured for history, despite it lasting for roughly 15 glory years.

But there’s a forgotten period in Stax history that brings us here today: the roughly 18 months in 1977 and 1978, when one of the label’s ace songwriters ran a newly relaunched Stax, pulled old songs out of the vault and made new albums, signed new acts and had charting singles. This period was short, and it hardly ranks in any Stax history: Robert Gordon’s veritable Stax bible Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion devotes only two sentences to this period in its 350+ pages, and Rob Bowman’s earlier Soulsville, U.S.A. devotes a single paragraph. But the music released in this period is some of the best funk and R&B released in the late-’70s, as worthy of rediscovery as much as earlier LPs by label stalwarts. Especially the album that this booklet accompanies: The Bar-Kays’ mammoth Money Talks.

“An African instrument is not the piano; an African village is not the Both/And; an African Waltz is not in ¾,” wrote Michael S. Harper in his 1971 poem “Time For Tyner: Folksong.” It appears to depict some one-off performance in a drafty bar, while laying out some of the contradictions — between making art and fighting for justice, in searching for heritage when yours has been brutally robbed — that pianist McCoy Tyner was just starting to explore with the 1969 album that inspired the poem’s title.

In June, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive King, Does The King’s Things, Albert King’s Elvis covers album recorded for Stax. On vinyl for the first time since 1980, it’s been remastered from its original master tapes AAA, and comes on 180-gram vinyl with brand new liner notes. Below, you can hear from our Classics A&R why he picked this record this month.

“Everybody in Memphis thought that Sam was a peckerwood, just like they were,” Robert Gordon, author of Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, told me in 2019. “If he could do it, why couldn’t they?”

The Sam in question was Sam Phillips, who with his Sun Records seemingly willed a million Memphis record labels into existence with the discovery of the most famous Memphian to ever live: Elvis Aaron Presley. One of the labels started in the wake of Sun Records and Presley was Stax Records, started by a bank teller named Jim Stewart, who loved country music and figured he had enough of an ear to turn his garage into a studio and look for a star. He’d eventually find that in Rufus and Carla Thomas, move his whole operation to a defunct theater on McLemore Avenue — a little over two miles from the Sun Studio storefront where Elvis got signed — in Memphis proper, and launch, with his sister Estelle Axton and the many talented local kids, one of the most important soul labels of all time.

In May, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive the first vinyl reissue of Erroll Garner’s Magician in almost 50 years. This new edition of the album features liner notes from Ted Gioia, and is remastered via an innovative digital conversion called Plangent from the original master reels. You can read more about the remastering here (http://magazine.vinylmeplease.com/magazine/erroll-garner-vmp-plangent-process) and read below for more info on the album.

As you know, Vinyl Me, Please is reissuing Erroll Garner’s Magician as our Classics Record of the Month for May, 2020. The album was remastered from its original master tapes — which are fragile — using an innovative digital transfer technology called the Plangent Process. The digitization process also gets closer to how Garner’s piano sounded in the room than any previous masters. We talked with Senior Producer of the Octave Remastered Series Peter Lockhart, who’s been working on reissues of all of Erroll Garner’s self-released albums, about the work that went into preparing Magician for this release.

Few albums are more aptly named than Magician. Over the course of five decades, Erroll Garner stood out as an unparalleled keyboard prestidigitator whose whole life was built on doing things that seemed impossible to mere mortals.

“Otis Redding was a natural prince. When you were with him, he communicated love and a tremendous faith in human possibility, a promise that great and happy events were coming.” — Jerry Wexler, Atlantic Records executive, at Otis Redding’s funeral in December, 1967.

In April, member of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive Otis Redding’s The Immortal Otis Redding, a posthumous album from the soul singer, who died right after finishing the songs on the album. This new edition features new liner notes, and was remastered from the original analog tapes AAA, and comes on 180-gram vinyl. Read below for more on the album.

In the early months of 1982, Patrice Rushen was readying Straight From the Heart, her seventh studio album in eight years, and the fourth she had recorded for Elektra Records. Up until then, the label had taken a hands-off approach: “They so rarely came by the studio or asked any questions,” Rushen recalled. “It wasn't until Straight From the Heart that I had received any kind of hesitation on their part.” According to Rushen’s frequent collaborator, arranger Charles Mims Jr., the promotions staff found the album “kind of light.” Even the lead single, “Forget Me Nots,” didn’t resonate for them. The news was, “Not exactly what we wanted to hear, but at least we know where they stood,” Rushen said. It meant that if the album had any hope of success, she and her team would need to handle things.

They pooled their resources and hired an independent promoter to work “Forget Me Nots.” The gambit paid off almost immediately: “Within three weeks, we had about 54 stations playing the record,” Mims remembered. For a song and album that underwhelmed Elektra at the start, the label must have liked how it ended: both “Forget Me Nots” and Straight From the Heart became the biggest hits in Rushen’s storied career.

When I think about Aretha Franklin, I think about ecstasy: the feeling of completely abandoning the self, a state of expanded consciousness achieved through heightened concentration and profound emotion. For thousands of years, religion, drugs, and music (or some combination of the three) have proven reliable fuel for ecstatic experiences, as documented in writing ranging from terrible to sublime. In an example from the latter category, Milan Kundera uses the act of making music to explain this mystical state: “The boy banging on the keyboard feels … a sorrow, or a delight, and the emotion rises to such a pitch of intensity that it becomes unbearable: the boy flees into the state of blindness and deafness where everything is forgotten, even oneself. Through ecstasy, emotion reaches its climax, and thereby at the same time its negation.”

By the mid-1970s, disco was ubiquitous. It was on TV dance shows like Soul Train and the sweat-soaked dancefloors of Studio 54. The music seemed to touch everyone from Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, to Earth, Wind & Fire, and Diana Ross; even the most celebrated purveyors of funk and soul experimented with disco’s four-on-the-floor beat, undulating basslines, and rhythmic guitar chords. The groove caught the pianist and bandleader Herbie Hancock as well. By the late ’70s, on Sunlight opener “I Thought It Was You,” and throughout 1979’s aptly titled Feets Don’t Fail Me Now, the jazz titan had all but given up his known genre, and walked head-on into disco and other forms of electronic dance music. For those who’d been following Herbie — from the early ’60s as a pianist in the Miles Davis Quintet, to the early ’70s as leader of The Headhunters band — the move wasn’t surprising. Some 20 records into his solo career, Herbie was still exploring, still blending genres in hopes of creating new ones. Ever the innovator, he wouldn’t stay in one place for long.

This month, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive an exclusive 180-gram edition of Aretha Franklin's breakout LP, Aretha Now. This new edition was remastered AAA by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound, and pressed at QRP on 180g black vinyl. Head here to read our new liner notes, and read below for why we picked this album.

This month, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive an exclusive 180-gram edition of Herbie Hancock’s 1980 album Mr. Hands. Celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2020, the album has never been reissued on vinyl until this edition, which was remastered AAA, and pressed at QRP. Head here to read our new liner notes, and read below for why we picked this album.

This month, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive an exclusive 180-gram edition of Patrice Rushen's Straight From the Heart, her pop smash album that would go on to infamy when its biggest songs were sampled by rap producers. This new edition was remastered AAA by Peter Beckmann at Technology Works, and pressed at QRP on 180g black vinyl. Head here to read our new liner notes, and read below for why we picked this album.

“The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.” — B.B. King

In December, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive Lucille, a 1968 album by B.B. King. The album has been remastered from the original tapes and pressed at QRP on 180g vinyl, with a tip-on jacket. You can read an excerpt from our liner notes here, check out a best-of playlist here, and read below for why we picked this record. Sign up here.

Dave Brubeck didn’t stay still during the heyday of his classic quartet in the 1950s and 1960s. Year after year, the group piled up recording sessions, releasing as many as five albums a year, touring the world whenever they weren't in the studio. In all the bustle, 1964's Jazz Impressions Of Japan wasn’t so much lost in the shuffle but swept up in the deluge; it was one strong album among many. Time revealed it not only to be something special and prescient, but also a punctuation mark to Brubeck's purple period with alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, drummer Joe Morello, and bassist Eugene Wright.

In October, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive Celia & Johnny, the debut collaboration album between Celia Cruz and Johnny Pacheco, and part of our partnership with Fania records. The album has been remastered from the original tapes and pressed at QRP on 180g vinyl, with a tip-on jacket. You can read an excerpt from our liner notes here, and read below for why we picked this record. Sign up here.

In November, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive Jazz Impressions of Japan, a 1964 album from the Dave Brubeck Quartet. The album has been remastered from the original tapes and pressed at QRP on 180g vinyl, with a tip-on jacket. You can read an excerpt from our liner notes here, read a primer on the band here, check out a best of playlist here, and read below for why we picked this record. Sign up here.

“La rumba me está llamando: Bongó, dile que ya voy…” (“The rumba is calling me: Bongó, tell her I’m on my way…”)