Jazz
Blue Note has unveiled the 2027 schedule for Tone Poet, the vinyl reissue series selected and produced by Joe Harley: 24 albums, two a month, from 8 January to 3 December. First up are Donald Byrd’s “Free Form” (1961), which the label calls his peak hard bop album, and “Pepper Adams Plays The Compositions Of Charles Mingus” (1963), an “underrated delight”.
Every title is mastered all-analogue from the original master tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, pressed on 180g vinyl at Record Technology Inc. and packaged in tip-on jackets. The list includes albums from other labels now under the Blue Note umbrella: Capitol, Pacific Jazz, United Artists and Motown’s Workshop Jazz.
February brings Lee Morgan’s “Charisma” (1966); March, Bobby Hutcherson’s “Spiral” (1968), with his “Cirrus” (1974) following in November; April, Andrew Hill’s “Ocho Rios”; and June, Wayne Shorter’s “Super Nova” (1969). Art Blakey’s “The Freedom Rider” (1961) arrives in September, and the series closes in December with Elvin Jones’s “The Ultimate” (1968) and Curtis Fuller’s “Bone & Bari” (1957).
“Every year putting together the Tone Poet lineup brings me back to the reason I fell in love with this music: that feeling of hearing something so moving, so surprising, that you just have to share it,” says Harley. The 2027 series, he adds, runs “from the adventurous spirit of Andrew Hill and Wayne Shorter to the sheer joy of Nancy Wilson with Cannonball Adderley”: “Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley” (1961), originally on Capitol, is out in May.
Tone Poet Society subscribers will also receive Grant Green’s “Am I Blue” (1963), limited to 1,000 numbered copies with a lithographic print of a Francis Wolff photograph. The other three quarterly exclusives have yet to be announced.
Text by Aina Torrents