Pet irritation: labels describing an album release as new when really the album is a recent reissue.
The newness is only in the fact that it happens to be a new reissue. Or, as some might put it just as disingenuously even if less ambiguously, a new re-release.
It happens quite often. If the reissue is of an album that was say released in 2007 because long ago-ness in jazz is valued and even 1967 is not as long ago as it sounds 2007 is deemed quite recent somehow and it is easy for a label to think let’s dress the record up again as new particularly if it didn’t get much attention at the time through no fault of its own to drum up a few more sales.
Reissuing is a tricky business for any record label large or small. If there is demand yes repress by all means and keep the album available perhaps coming up with some new marketing copy. I prefer better clarity like still in catalogue, or now with new artwork. But if the item is less than 20 years old and it is just another wheel around the block with no reference to the first release then fuhgeddaboudit. Record buyers deserve better.
Photo: Wikimedia
Late to this particular party it was only Rituals that first registered on my radar, Italian guitarist/DJ/producer Nicola Conte’s sassy 2008 album that featured a then on-the-rise José James the same year The Dreamer came out. James is here among a bunch of singers performing in his case ‘Goddess of the Sea’ Conte’s own song but he can’t rest on his laurels when Marvin Parks is around particularly on ‘If I Should Lose You’ done as a fast samba with a fine solo from Italian alto-sax great Rosario Giuliani. But it’s former BritSchool student Bridgette Amofah, currently making waves in the States with drum’n’bass-dubstep hitmakers Rudimental, who steals the show with her laidback sound on the sun-drenched title track and a cover of Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ the picks. Conte’s combo here has 60s retro Blue Note-type horns from Magnus Lindgren and Francesco Lento among the horn section (the drummer on seven of the tracks is Five Corners Quintet’s very own Buhainia Teppo “Teddy Rok” Mäkynen). Starry guests include Greg Osby on Ahmad Jamal’s ‘Ahmad’s Blues’ a song that US/Haitian singer Melanie Charles (known for her backing vocals with Laura Izibor and her septet The Journey) almost makes her own. She’s definitely “so urban her suburban friends don’t know her bag of blues” to borrow from the song. So, tasteful sophisticated clubby soul-jazz for sure, perhaps a little too fluffy in places but with a wealth of singers courtesy of the talented Mr Conte on these sessions recorded in the studio in the Italian city of Bari from 2006-11, the vocals and overdubs added just in the winter. SG