Collage - "Halb Sirp (Bad Sickle)"
Manfred Ludwig-Sextett - "Sextett"
Bernt Rosengren - "Crazy Girl" (with Komeda Trio)
Polish Jazz Quartet - "Promenade Through Empty Streets"
Vagif Mustafa-Zade - "Caucasus"
Quartet "Jazz Focus-65" - "Monday Morning"
Theo Schumman Combo - "Karawane"
Vaclav Zahradnik - "Podzimni Slunce"
The Golstain-Nosov Quintet - "Rosinent In Toledo"
Yu - All Stars 1977 - "Kosmet"
Leningrad Jazz Ensemble - "Aria"
Josef Blaha Trio - "Inter-Mezzo-Forte"
Csaba Deseo Ensemble - "Beyond The Csitri Mountains"
Manfred Ludwig Sextett - "Skandinavia"
Anatoly Vapirov - "Mystery"
Zbigniew Namyslowski - "Piatawka (In 5/4 Time)"
The Andrzej Trzaskowski Quintet - "Synopsis (Expression I)"
Tomsits Quartet - "Dhrupad"
Nicolai Gromin Quartet - "Corrida"
Valery Kolesnikov, Vyacheslav Novikov, Vladimir Molotkov, Alexander Christidis - "Rainbow"
Tone Jansa Quartet - "Goa"
S+HQ - "My Girl (& Other Things)"
Review: The Iron Curtain stood as one of the defining metaphors of 20th-century division: a shroud drawn between East and West, described by Winston Churchill as obscuring all knowledge of life on the other side. But while the world fixated on ideological rifts and military standoffs, a parallel story unfolded in the Soviet Union and its satellite states: the quiet, defiant blossoming of jazz. This second of a two-part Jazzman compilation mini-series lifts that curtain, tracing the emergence of bold, genre-spanning jazz from the early 60s to the 80s. These recordings reflect the arm-in-arm influences of hard bop, modal, cool and Latin jazz, refracted through the lens of European folk traditions and hard-distilled through filters of restriction, secrecy, and sometimes outright prohibition. Pressure makes diamonds, and jazz, ever adaptable, flourished in spite of it all: the secret spirituals of an easily overlooked era.
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