Paul Chambers plays the mambo (sort of)

Paul Chambers in 1958
 by Dennis Stock

Boxed multi-disk sets are wonderful, but they can be a challenge to assimilate. Case in point, the sensational Miles Davis - Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, released in 1996. It comprises six CDs full of music that gave us four albums, so you do the math: it contains a lot of music with a lot of repetition.

However, some attentive listening with the appropriate equipment—enough sound on all frequencies, particularly the bass—can unveil treasures such as Paul Chambers's bass line on take 5 of "New Rhumba".

A biography of Oscar Alemán (in Spanish)

Sergio Pujol
Oscar Alemán: La guitarra embrujada
Planeta; Buenos Aires, 2015
Paperback; 312 pp.

The life of Oscar Alemán (1909-1980) is one of those narratives which tend to end up ditched on the kerbs of history. But how do you fit in the jazz canon a black Argentinian guitar player, who got to be hugely popular in pre-WWII France without ever setting foot in the US?

A couple of books about jazz in Spanish

Being one of the most spoken languages in the world, both in terms of people and geography, Spanish has a bibliography about jazz that would need libraries equipped with an ICU. And if we don't take translations into account, one shelf would do. A small one.

That is why it is so newsworthy that we have several new original works about jazz in Spanish, which may interest English-language readers. First of all, history professor and journalist Sergio A. Pujol has just published Oscar Alemán—La guitarra embrujada (Oscar Alemán—The Haunted Guitar, Planeta, Buenos Aires, Argentina), his biography of the great Oscar (stress on the last syllable, /osKAR/) Alemán, which promises to be a great read. Besides the author's proven abilities (he's the author of a history of jazz in Argentina, among other books), his subject, the guitar virtuoso Oscar Alemán (1909-1980) is vital to appreciate how early and far jazz travelled throughout the world (Alemán's heyday was as Josephine Baker's featured star in Paris, France), mainly as music for dancing, when record labels carried the title and the name of the dance that went with the music (like "stomp" or "fox trot").

You can go here for a wide-ranging sample of Alemán's music.

Argentinian paper Página 12 carries an excerpt of the book here.

The publisher's page for this book can be found here.

Some time ago I wrote this about other far and wide travels of jazz in the past.