As jazz is increasingly seen as America's classical music, jazz record labels have become expert at mining their catalogs for retrospectives—most are now assembling one every decade. Impulse! Records issued its first label-wide compilation, The Definitive Jazz Scene Volume 1 in 1964 and now comes this well-chosen 25-track sampler (in the famous orange and black design theme) to celebrate the label's 60 years of existence, directed by such visionaries as Creed Taylor, Bob Thiele and Ed Michel. While aficionados will already own many of the albums these tracks come from, surveys like this are particularly useful for newbies and also as impressive shuffle play party records. The styles here range across the entire Impulse spectrum, from the almost R&B of Stanley Turrentine's "Good Lookin' Out" and Earl Hines' especially piquant arrangement of Duke Ellington's "Black and Tan Fantasy" to Archie Shepp's alternately angry and desolate "Malcolm Malcolm—Semper Malcolm" and Quincy Jones snappy, upbeat big band bop, "Hard Sock Dance."
Impulse was always horn driven—hence the nickname, "the house that Trane built"—and we hear from some of lesser-known lights in the label's horn universe like Dewey Redman, Marion Brown, Albert Ayler and Yusef Lateef. There are also wonderful surprises buried within like an edit of Pharoah Sanders' surprisingly cheerful and lyrical, "The Creator has a Master Plan" (from the album Karma) where singer Leon Thomas speaks of universal happiness before taking his vibrato into a quiet yodel.
While it's tempting to say that just throwing darts at Impulse titles would make for a great collection, there's a powerful unifying theme to this tribute. The song titles tell the story: Oliver Nelson's brilliant "The Rights of All," The Ahmad Jamal Trio's smooth "The Awakening" and Charlie Haden's short, instrumental version of the civil rights anthem, "We Shall Overcome." All beautifully recorded (most by Rudy Van Gelder), this is music bent on change, an idea that poet and critic A. B. Spellman—who lived through NYC's early bop era—picks up in the liner notes. "…this is all music that has something to say. It expresses a deep commitment to the fundamental change of the human condition… We need this scope of sound again: We need the horns to scream of stout resistance, and we need the bands to sing to us of the righteous beauty of our souls." Perhaps no track expresses that "scope" better than John Coltrane's frenetic, squeal 'n' skronk "Reverend King," (from Cosmic Music, his album with wife Alice, released after his death), it's pent-up energy frustrated, ricocheting, crying for a way out. An insightful collection built to celebrate 60 years as an indispensable part of the story of jazz, this timeless music has fresh relevance. © Robert Baird/Qobuz