Henry Franklin, Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad - Jazz Is Dead 14 (2022 Jazz Is Dead Vinyl LP)

Henry Franklin, Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad - Jazz Is Dead 14 | Vinyl LP - 2022 Jazz Is Dead (JID014)

• The fourteenth instalment in the Jazz Is Dead series and widely considered its strongest, pairing LA double bassist Henry “The Skipper” Franklin with producers Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad on eight tracks of modal jazz, Latin-tinged grooves and spiritual funk.
• Franklin’s career goes back to the late 1960s, starting with Hugh Masekela’s number one hit “Grazing in the Grass” and running through two cult albums on Black Jazz Records, sessions with Woody Shaw, Freddie Hubbard, Sonny Rollins and Count Basie, and a gold record with Stevie Wonder. 
• Winner of the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album (Instrumental). Pressed at Pallas, Germany.

Henry Franklin is not a household name even by jazz standards, but his CV reads like a map of the music from the late sixties onward. He grew up in Los Angeles, took bass lessons from George Morrow and Al McKibbon, and got his break when Hugh Masekela heard him play and hired him on the spot. That gig produced “Grazing in the Grass”, which hit number one in 1968. From there Franklin became the house bassist on Gene Russell’s Black Jazz Records label and released two albums of his own: The Skipper in 1972 and The Skipper at Home in 1974, both of which have become collector pieces. He played with Archie Shepp in New York, toured with Willie Bobo, sat in with Bobby Bradford and John Carter on the West Coast free jazz scene, and recorded with Freddie Hubbard, Sonny Rollins, Woody Shaw, Julian Priester, Hampton Hawes and Count Basie. He earned a gold record playing on Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. By the time Younge and Muhammad brought him into the Jazz Is Dead studio, Franklin was eighty-one and still gigging regularly around LA.

The result is one of the best records in the series. Franklin’s upright bass is at the centre of every track, not buried in the mix the way a bassist often is on a producer-led session. “Karibu” opens with a warm, mid-tempo groove. “The Griot” stretches out over four and a half minutes. “African Sun” is the longest piece at five and a half minutes and draws on the Afro-Latin rhythms Franklin first absorbed playing with Masekela. “A Song for Sigrid” closes the album with something gentler. Younge and Muhammad build the arrangements around Franklin rather than over him, and Jonathan Pinson adds drums. The album won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album (Instrumental) in 2023. Pressed at Pallas in Germany.