Craft Recordings Adds 4 New Original Jazz Classics Series Reissues in 2024

Is anyone doing it better right now than Craft Recordings? We are hard pressed to find another label that is reissuing this many quality titles for rock, blues, and jazz fans. 

Craft Recordings has just expanded their already long list of reissues in the Original Jazz Classics series with four new titles: The Red Garland Trio’s Groovy, Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane’s Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane, The John Wright Trio’s South Side Soul, and The New Miles Davis Quintet’s Miles. 

Available for pre-order today, these reissues, which roll out from April to July 2024, feature lacquers cut from the original tapes (AAA) by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio (Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane and Groovy titles cut by Matthew Lutthans at Cohearent Audio), 180-gram vinyl pressed at RTI and tip-on jackets, replicating the original artwork.

All titles will also be released digitally in 192kHz/24-bit hi-res audio. 

Original Jazz Classics was created in 1982 (under Fantasy Records) and relaunched last year, with jazz fans and critics alike praising the series’ devotion to vividly preserving and restoring seminal jazz albums, paying mind to everything from cover art to liner notes to the audio recordings themselves.

Since its inception, the series has reissued 850+ hard-to-find jazz albums, among them acclaimed titles from Prestige, Galaxy, Milestone, Riverside, Debut, Contemporary, Jazzland, and Pablo.

Craft Recordings will continue to grow its Original Jazz Classics series this year, with audiophile vinyl and digital reissues of even more out-of-print titles.

So what’s new for the next few months in this particular series?

The Red Garland Trio – Groovy (Available April 26, 2024)

Pianist Red Garland, the former boxer out of Texas who many would argue is still underrated (see his work, too, with Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins), is joined here by drummer Art Taylor and bassist Paul Chamber. This is the trio’s third album together, released in 1957. Bouncy and dexterous Groovy, sits firmly in the bebop and hard-bop genre.

“Over this uniquely compelling rhythm, Garland has constructed a blend of locked chord and single-note solo line style that retains all the essential warmth of melody and remains inventive,” DownBeat wrote. The album is also satisfyingly three-dimensional. Tracks such as the twinkling “Will You Still Be Mine?” telegraph pure joy, while you’d be hard-pressed to not get a little teary listening to “Gone Again,” a wistful, timeless ballad. 

Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane – Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane (Available May 31, 2024)

Though they recorded this album in 1958 (with a release date five years later), guitarist Kenny Burrell and saxophonist John Coltrane went back as far as 1951, when they both played in Dizzy Gillespie’s band. By 1958 this recorded collaboration with Burrell — who’d go on to be anointed a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts — would end up being Coltrane’s last before he went on a spiritual music journey that would culminate in A Love Supreme.

The John Wright Trio – South Side Soul (Available June 28, 2024)

John Wright, a Chicago native — if you couldn’t already tell by his LP’s title — was a self-taught pianist as a child who later enlisted in the army, played across Europe, and proceeded to become a regular on the jazz scene.

By 1960, he released this album, the celebrated South Side Soul which the Chicago Reader gushed is, “an album that swaggers hard.” A figure who’s lesser known despite his outsized talent, Wright was given the Walter Dyett Lifetime Achievement Award by the Jazz Institute of Chicago, in 2009.

Bolstered by Wendell Roberts on bass and Walter McCants on drums, the debut features a slinky-cool title track, which cemented “South Side Soul” as Wright’s nickname. Meanwhile, a pair of harmonic escapes, “Sin Corner” and “Amen Corner,” nod ever so slyly to Wrights’ roots playing in a Baptist church.

The New Miles Davis Quintet – Miles (Available July 26, 2024)

The 1956 debut from Miles Davis’ Quintet came together after a record executive encouraged him to form a band. The talent Davis assembled ended up becoming a dream team: tenor-saxophonist John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, famed bassist Paul Chambers, and Davis’ favorite drummer, Philly Joe Jones. The results are remarkable.

Click here to pre-order these new titles, or click here to shop the complete OJC collection.

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