International Jazz Ladies' Day: Humphrey At Last

Bobbi Humphrey - Chicago, Damn

I shouldn't be doing this, but sometimes I just have to challenge myself to create a viable post out of nowhere, on no notice, from no preparation at all.

I was just sitting here at 6 AM getting ready to wrap it up and slumber, when I noticed reading my phone that today is International Jazz Day.

Jazz being unfortunately too much a man's game, and this page being the same, drives me to strike a blow against both of those constraints because why not? Too much of life and the world are about witholding for perceived advantage to the self. I'm here to share music.

So there I was, sitting here wondering what on Earth could I post out of whole cloth that I already have here, that would be worthwhile and not just a perfunctory placeholder?

Then I realized that merely a few days ago, one of my all-time super duper favorite musicians of any genre -- whom I've never covered in 12+ years of doing this -- turned 76 years young.

There was but a singular field for endeavor, as my old high school English teacher Mr. Maze used to say.

So I created the text file for this post, fixed the artwork I had made over 10 years ago (!), and here we are, ready to celebrate both International Jazz Day -- which is based out of Chicago this year, hence the song sample above! -- and the birthday of flute legend Bobbi Humphrey, who was born 5 days and 76 years prior to now.

If you are somehow unfamiliar with Bobbi Humphrey -- herself one of the pillars of the subgenre we sometimes call Soul Jazz -- she was discovered by the late Lee Morgan upon arriving from her native Texas in the early Seventies, and right before he so tragically passed in 1972 he had her in his working band and was producing her first recordings as a leader.

There's even footage of her with him, on the indescribably insane PBS show coincidentally called Soul!, in early 1972 just before he left this world.

She could have faded away into obscurity, but instead she followed up her debut as a leader -- which Morgan had assisted in creating in 1971 -- with album after album of highly funkatized, ridiculously well-constructed Fusion, many of them produced by the just-as-legendary Larry & Fonce Mizell for the Blue Note label that had begun, by that time, to rely on the ever-more-popular Jazz-Funk stuff to stay afloat.

Anyway, there are less than no ROIOs of her -- talk about insane! an artist who's brought joy to audiences for 55 years and no live broadcasts at all! -- but I've had this mixtape of her best 1970s cuts in my phone for over a decade, and it hasn't gotten any less awesome.

Bobbi Humphrey

Ladies' Day

Bobbi Humphrey In the '70s

1971-1979

CD1

01 Ain't No Sunshine

02 Blacks and Blues

03 Chicago, Damn

04 Don't Knock My Funk

05 El Mundo De Maravillas (A World of Beauty)

06 Fajehzo

07 Fun House

08 Harlem River Drive

09 Home-Made Jam

10 Jasper Country Man

11 Jealousy

12 Ladies' Day

13 Lonely Town, Lonely Street

14 Love When I'm In Your Arms (7'' version)

CD2

01 Lover to Lover

02 Mestizo Eyes

03 New York Times

04 Nubian Lady

05 San Francisco Lights

06 Set Us Free

07 Smiling Faces Sometimes

08 Spanish Harlem

09 Sunset Burgundy

10 Sweeter Than Sugar

11 The Trip

12 Uno Esta

13 Virtue

14 You Make Me Feel So Good

Total time: 2:36:32

compendium of the 1970s output of flute legend Bobbi Humphrey

selected, assembled and remastered for unity by EN sometime in the mid-2010s
987 MB FLAC/direct link

I'll be back, come what May, in just a couple of days to launch the Yacht from the Rock as we start another month. But when I noticed what day it was, I couldn't help but try to turn the super sausagefest that Jazz can sometimes resemble into a Ladies' Day celebration, and give Int'l Jazz Day some female flight flavor with the flute of the forever fantastic Bobbi Humphrey! Which I hope you can forgive.--J.

Orquesta Bien

Willie Colón - Oh Que Será

We're closing out April with a true pillar of Salsa music, who passed at the end of February but who was born on this day in 1950.

Born, like my own parents, in the South Bronx in NYC. Almost as soon as he could hold a brass instrument, he gravitated immediately toward the trumpet and then trombone.

He was signed to the seminal Fania label by age 15, and by the time Willie Colón had made it to 17, he'd made his first record as a leader.

It didn't take long for him to evolve into a kind of kingpin of Salsa music, composing many of its most iconic songs and collaborating with literally the entire firmament of the genre's stars in a career in which he sold over 30 million records worldwide.

If his music had a consistent theme shared across his whole output, it would have to do with how deeply he identified with his ancestral Puerto Rico, with a lot of his music exploring the often complex realities of living life as a Puerto Rican in New York City.

Which if you think about it, is almost like being American twice -- PR and NYC being unique geographic and cultural locations unto themselves, but both technically still in the US -- while still fully retaining your Latin heritage and outlook.

He also had great hats, did I mention the classy, always signature-stylish headwear? The suave, invincible outlaw Gangster image that became so popular in the 1970s is said to have had something to do with his 1960s album covers. I dunno about that, but I do know that if I had hats a trillionth this fly, I'd be on a boat in the Bahamas somewhere, being fed grapes by incredibly attractive, musically literate college boys wearing next to nada.

Did I also fail to mention that, in another one of those criminal omissions that make people like me tear their hard drives out, there aren't any ROIOs or unissued concert tapes of Willie Colón that circulate?

Stuff like this sends me onto my super duper YouTube Premium account faster than a teenage boy searching Porn Hub for the first time. Desperately trying to find something I can make into something, so there'll at least be one ROIO around of an artist as undeniably formative as someone of this lofty, almost royal stature.

And hey, bully for me... I found one suitable for processing, so to say.

This show sounded great and went strong and lossless all the way to 16 kHz in the spectral analysis tool I tend to spend almost as much time looking at as YouTube itself.

When I paid close attention, however, it was impossible not to notice that the presence of the bass in the music gradually disappeared over the course of it, until by the fourth tune it was essentially quieter than the World Series aspirations of your average Met fan after another disastrous doubleheader.

When I split it apart to isolate the bass, you could see that dude had come on very loud and boisterous with the slappy poppy thing bass players are sometimes keen to exhibit for women in Row 4 Seat C, that the young ladies might imagine what fingers that impactful might do after a few cocktails back in the hotel room after the gig. It was visually obvious from the waveform that the soundman was duly offended by such behavior, and kept turning him down and down until he was almost not there anymore!

But the music was so good and worth it, it meant I had to go through it tune by tune and make the bass presence somewhat consistent over the 83 minutes of exquisite Salsa Nirvana it comprises. What happened with the girl in the fourth row I'm afraid I can't say.

I clicked so many times adjusting it that the battery had to be changed in my wireless mouse, but at least I got Mr. Slappy Poppy out from under his punishment after 16 years in the sound guy's doghouse. Here, Hear! Let's see what you think...

La Orquesta de Willie Colón

Centro de Convenciones Scencia de La Molina

Lima, Perú

9.10.2010

01 Asia

02 Oh Que Será

03 Medley Contrabando

04 Idilio

05 Mi Sueño

06 Sin Poderte Hablar

07 Gitana

08 El Gran Varon

Total time: 1:23:35

disc break goes after Track 04

Willie Colón - trombone, vocals & percussion

Néstor Agudelo - trombone

Cupertino Bermúdez - tenor & soprano saxophones

Ennio Gaty - piano

Juan Carlos García - bass

Lucho Arroyo - synthesizer

Chino Rey - timbales & percussion

Javier Ortega - congas & percussion

Jairo Rosales - bongós & percussion

Willie Garcés & Janio Coronado - coros & percussion

256/48k audio extracted from an HD YouTube premium video

spectral analysis is lossless to 16 kHz FM cutoff

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, denoised, demuxed, remuxed for better balance & remastered by EN, April 2026
538 MB FLAC/direct link

I realize it's kinda cheap for a FLAC dogmatic like me to do these this way, but if they go lossless to the standard FM 15 kHz, or even the preFM 20 like some of them do, what makes them different from a radio rebroadcast you'd get off of the WDR in Germany or on France Musique? I gotta do something since Bill's Bardo of Boosted Boots went off the air, am I right? Plus this one sounds fantastic, especially since the bass is now more discernable than the Oort cloud is in the distant night sky from Earth.

I'm getting into May already, so if at the end of next month you hear them on the Infotainment News channels warning you of some sort of ridiculous DDOS attack or whatever, it ain't gonna be "the terrorists" at all. It's not even gonna be the traditional False Flag, brought to you by your friends at Dassom Industries... no, that's just drama for your momma without so much as a merciful comma. If the internet goes down, rest assured it's just gonna be little ol' Joshy, breaking the servers into tiny silicon fragments with posts all about the 100th birthday of Miles Davis.

But that's then, this is now. And now we honor Salsa superman Willie Colón, who'd have been 76 today had he not split the soundstage 7 weeks previous. When you absorb this show, you'll begin to understand that only his body has gone, but his music -- eternally burning with life and fire -- is never gonna have any problem moving yours.--J.

4.28.1950 - 2.21.2026

Cookout Below: Harry Miller 85

Harry Miller Quintet - Orange Groove

We'll rejoinder yesterday's 1941 with another, because we're dropping more bombs than WWII in here.

There's almost no pictures of him online -- and exactly zero ones in color -- but today would have been the 85th birthday of South African bassist Harry Miller, who supplied the percolating bottom to so many favorite LPs of mine.

He was essentially the house bass player for the ridiculously awesome record label Ogun, for which you've heard me sing mad praises as recently as Louis Moholo's birthday a few weeks ago.

His much-celebrated, moodsetting cameo -- featuring a bowed double bass -- opens the 1971 King Crimson LP Islands, which is where most people who don't know who he was would have heard him.

One of the stalwarts of 1970s British Jazz, he's on recordings by almost all of its pivotal figures like Mike Westbrook -- who just passed a couple of weeks ago, in fact -- and John Surman, among many.

He also led his own groups and made his own records, before moving to The Netherlands at the end of the 1970s. He unfortunately died very young, at 42 in a car accident there in 1983.

To celebrate his milestone b'day-in-absentia, let's toast Bottoms Up! for this titan of the low end with two killer BBC sessions from the mid Seventies. These circulate fairly commonly, but I removed the unctuous announcer and brightened them up a little bit.

 Harry Miller

BBC sessions

1976-77

01 Family Affair

02 Where Now Then?

Harry Miller's Isipingo

BBC Studios, London UK; likely January 1976

Harry Miller - bass

Marc Charig - trumpet & cornet

Keith Tippett - piano

Malcolm Griffiths - trombone

Mike Osborne - alto saxophone

Louis Moholo - drums

03 Orange Grove

04 A Traumatic Experience

Harry Miller Quintet

BBC Studios, London UK 12.18.1977

Harry Miller - bass

Bernie Holland - guitar

Trevor Watts - alto & soprano saxophones

Alan Wakeman - tenor & soprano saxophones

Louis Moholo - drums

Total time: 46:30

master off-air FM reel captures of two original BBC broadcasts

remastered by EN, April 2026
316 MB FLAC/direct link

I've got one more lethal blast of birthday blissness slated for Tuesday before we haste away to the Maypole, but I wanted to tribute Harry Miller -- born this day in 1941 -- and there aren't that many more ROIOs of him than there are suitable photographs!-J.

4.25.1941 - 12.16.1983

Sky Friday: John Williams 85

Sky - Sahara

I've been hard at play here, splitting apart stereo files like ripe coconuts and imbibing of the sweet, separated juice within, but I'm taking time out from what I'm doing to smash up two musical superbeings who just happened to have been born on consecutive days during WWII.

The first is John Williams. You know, John Williams.

No, no. Not that John Williams. He was born in February and is gonna be 95 next year, a milestone he will likely celebrate by scoring his 4,801,884th major motion picture.

We'll get to the movie music John Williams another time. This John Williams is from Australia and plays Classical guitar. Well, he started off doing only that, but then other things happened.

Mainly what happened is he was interested in more than just the Rodrigo repertoire, and after establishing himself as a leading Classical player in the early 1970s, he started dipping toes into other areas and different contexts for his music to inhabit.

He branched off to play with Pete Townshend of The Who and write music that ended up in successful films with lyrics added. But perhaps his flagship project was as the main architect of Sky, a kind of Classical Rock instrumental supergroup that was active and fairly huge for a decade, beginning in 1974.

It was as a member of this extraordinary band -- which also featured Francis Monkman from Curved Air and 801, as well as orchestral drummer Tristan Fry and Walk On the Wild Side bass legend Herbie Flowers -- that this other John Williams came to most prominence.

Nowadays, he's a Royal Academy scholar and venerated guitar teacher, famous for his ensemble-based approach to instruction.

Back at the end of 1979, he was helping pilot Sky through a 5-night, sold-out run at London's Dominion Theatre.

These were recorded, and a composite of the residency aired on the BBC. Thankfully someone had their FM signal dialed in and their tape recorder in position, so we can hear what happened when these five mammoth musicians took the stage and headed for the sky as one unit.

Sky

Dominion Theatre 

London, UK

10.16-20.1979

01 Westway

02 Danza

03 Cannonball

04 Dance of the Little Fairies 

05 El Cielo

06 Sahara

07 Hotta

08 Carillon

09 Toccata

10 Vivaldi

11 Where Opposites Meet

12 Tuba Smarties

Total time: 1:16:28

John Williams - guitars

Kevin Peek - guitars

Tristram Fry - drums, trumpet & percussion

Herbie Flowers - bass & tuba

Francis Monkman - keyboards & drumbox 

Tracks 01-10: Dominion Theatre, London UK 10.16-20.1979/from an off-air FM cassette master of the original BBC broadcast

Track 11: Wembley Arena, London UK 11.22.1979 "Year of the Child" concert/from an off-air FM master cassette of the original BBC broadcast

Track 12: Dominion Theatre, London UK October 1979/from the 2018 remastered CD of "Sky 2" on Esoteric Records

assembled, edited & remastered for unity by EN, April 2026
544 MB FLAC/direct link

I took the liberty of adding another FM jam from a little later in the tour, from when Sky played the end-of-decade "Year of the Child" benefit at Wembley, plus the encore song they used to do, where they broke out brass instruments and did a little march tune. The latter appears on their second studio record for some odd reason as the lone live track, but I included it as it was from that same series of London Dominion Theatre concerts.

I'll be right back with part two of this double birthday bliss blessing in 24, as we groove deeply to April 1941, a month that will live in whatever the opposite of infamy is.

Don't sleep on the other John Williams though. He's 85 today and although he's never scored a Marvel movie, his immaculate musical pedigree and lengthy career legacy -- as you'll see from these stunning live tracks captured 45 years ago -- are still Sky high! --J.