Next Saturday, April 12, is certainly one of the most packed Record Store Days in recent memory. Since the list was announced, we drilled down on titles from Craft Recordings, Legacy Recordings, Rhino Records, Universal Music Group, Real Gone Music, Omnivore Recordings, BMG, Cooking Vinyl and Demon Music Group, as well as some notable titles that were getting later general releases on CD. Well, if you thought that was it, you're wrong! We pored and pored over the list and are here to share
Back in February, we reported on Blue Note Records' Tone Poet Reissue Series, a new initiative by label president Don Was and audiophile jazz expert Joe Harley that presents detailed vinyl reissues of Blue Note classics and overlooked titles from the label's 80-year history. Each title is an all-analog affair, mastered from the original master tapes by Kevin Gray and pressed onto 180-gram vinyl at RTI, then housed in deluxe gatefold packaging. The first titles - Wayne Shorter's Etcetera and
Cherry Red's él label is in a jazz mood with three recent releases from two late legends of the guitar, Django Reinhardt and Grant Green, and one fondly-remembered group, The Temperance Seven! Though Django Reinhardt (1910-1953) lived to just 43 years of age, the Belgian-born French guitarist of Romani descent invented a wholly new vocabulary for jazz guitar, sometimes referred to as "gypsy jazz." Able to use just two fingers on his left hand, he created a singular style of swing thanks to