Just lately, I’ve found myself delving further and further into jazz music of all forms. I haven’t fully worked out yet how I came to persue this genre so avidly, but it’s become a major musical passion for me over the last five years. Caitlin Moran wrote recently in The Times about how your music taste atrophies in your thirties; in my case, as I race toward the conclusion of my thirties, the burning quest to still find new things to get excited about hasn’t diminished at all, but whereas at the start of this last decade of my life I was listening primarily to Mute, now I find myself more and more playing and buying jazz records.

One of the reasons it’s become so important for me is because I rarely ever write about it. Instead it’s become music I can just listen to without feeling compelled to document it in some way. Opportunities to review jazz records only come up at Electronic Sound if they stray into adventurous synth territory, and Clash never covers jazz – so I jumped at the chance to cover this book and album when it appeared on the monthly reviews list for the latter. 

This album covers the under-surveyed Boston avant-garde jazz scene of the Seventies and early Eighties via an authoritative book written by one of the scene’s central figures, accompanied by a CD featuring some of the artists whose careers the book highlights. For anyone who thinks that developments in jazz were confined to New York and Chicago, it’s an illuminating proposition.

My review can be found here.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence for Clash