Jazz
Trazar Records · 25 September 2026
“Summer Solstice” closes the album turned into funk. The piece is his own, published in 1975 on the album of the same name, and there it ran on a swing of broken metre; here the band comes in all together and top to bottom, and of the seven pieces it is the one that departs furthest from the original recording. “Turn the Music Up” came out on 25 September on Trazar Records, Azar Lawrence’s own label, recorded at the Earthstar Creation Center in Venice and mastered by Bernie Grundman.
Lawrence was twenty-one when he recorded “Bridge into the New Age” (1974) and twenty-two by “Summer Solstice” (1975), and five of the seven tracks here come from those two albums: from the second come “Highway” and “Novo Ano”, both by the Brazilian guitarist and composer Amaury Tristao, and also “Lost Tribes of Lemuria”, plus the title track that closes the record; the ballad “Fatisha” is from the first. The other two are “Atlantis”, which McCoy Tyner recorded in 1974 with Lawrence in the band, and “The Creator Has a Master Plan”, the Pharoah Sanders and Leon Thomas anthem. “We’ve sieved through artists and musicians over the years, and have brought it to this point of refinement”, Lawrence says of the group he has now.
That group is The Azar Lawrence Experience: Brian Swartz on trumpet, Taka Mori on guitar, Robert Turner on piano and keyboards, Gerald Brown on bass, Yayo Morales on drums and Lynne Fiddmont on vocals, with Quinn Carson’s trombone and three more percussionists as guests. Lawrence’s tenor sounds the way it always has, cutting and full-bodied, and on “Lost Tribes of Lemuria” his unison lines with Swartz are the best passage of the fifty minutes. Fiddmont sings wordlessly underneath and there the piece works.
Seven permanent musicians and four guests take up all the available space, and on that same “Lost Tribes” the keyboards, the guitar and the horns tread on one another; the seventies spiritual jazz this record sets out to remember held together largely through what it left empty, and there is none of that here. Two decisions are worse. “Highway” ends with a scat vocal that adds nothing to it, and “Atlantis” — the most demanding of the seven, and the one Turner plays closely emulating Tyner’s percussive piano — is resolved with a mixing-desk fade. On a record presented as a matter of modal depth, an ending made of turning the volume down is a retreat.
Lawrence is 73 and turns 74 on 3 November. “Turn the Music Up” is his thirteenth album as a leader; with TALE he plays Half Moon Bay on 8 November and Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York from 17 to 21 February 2027.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents