“Of all the trumpeters to come to prominence in the 60’s. Charles Tolliver was perhaps the most sensitive to the necessity of swinging.”
– Ira Gitler / The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the 70s
A new recording will be released on Mack Avenue Records this summer.
Charles Tolliver Music Inc, featuring Camille Thurman (tenor/vocals) and Darrell Green (drums), as well as the Strata-East All Stars, are now available for bookings through 2025/2026.
Celebrate the genius of Charles Tolliver with Strata-East: The Legacy Begins, a groundbreaking digital anthology launching February 21. This collection honors the revolutionary spirit of Strata-East, the iconic jazz label Tolliver co-founded. Featuring Charles Tolliver’s trailblazing work alongside legends like Stanley Cowell and Pharoah Sanders, the anthology showcases cult classics that defined avant-garde and post-bop jazz.
John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass is jazz on a monumental, almost geological scale. Recorded in 1961, it takes the intensity of Coltrane’s small-group music and places it inside a huge, dark orchestral landscape of brass, reeds, French horns, and low instruments.
A towering figure in the 1960s and 70s post-Coltrane movement now known as “spiritual jazz,” trumpeter and composer Charles Tolliver honours the legacy of John Coltrane, performing the jazz legend’s landmark 1961 large ensemble album Africa/Brass with his power-packed quintet and local brass orchestra.
With his visionary approach to the concept of the jazz orchestra, Tolliver is the perfect artist to pay tribute to Africa/Brass. Coltrane’s debut for Impulse! Records, the album consists of three expanded compositions like “Greensleeves” and a pair of originals by the leader, “Africa” and “Blues Minor”
This is the performance of a masterpiece just like any classical composition if it’s Beethoven, Mozart, Bach or any other …..this is a concert in itself and the international musicians need to coordinate and rehearse with the local big band for at least a day and a half.
Self-taught trumpet wizard and virtuoso composer and arranger, Grammy-nominated Charles Tolliver has kept the faith with the African-American rhythms, large sounds, and group dynamics of ‘Trane’s’ iconic AFRICA/BRASS.
Earlier in his career Tolliver had the pleasure of being presented with his group ‘Music Inc’ alongside the John Coltrane Quartet for a historic live concert at the fabled Village Gate presented by Imiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) recorded & issued by Impulse Records entitled ‘The New Thing’.
In 1998 at the urging of the great bassist Reggie Workman, who is now the only surviving artist on the original Africa Brass recording, Tolliver created the definitive transcriptions of Trane’s monumental work, as all the original orchestra arrangements (including Eric Dolphy’s & McCoy Tyner) had long ago been lost.
In the new millennia Tolliver revisits AFRICA/BRASS with a new spectacular show staging the lesser-known titles with the brass orchestra program to the full glory of AFRICA.
After his acclaimed Impulse Records 2011 concert marking its 50th anniversary of this historic recording, Charles Tolliver is bringing this exciting NEW program worldwide to once more celebrate John Coltrane’s Complete AFRICA/BRASS.
ABOUT CHARLES
During the 60s Charles Tolliver worked extensively with several leading bop musicians of the time including Jackie McLean, with whom he was debuted on the 1964 Blue Note recording “IT’S TIME”, and the bands of Art Blakey, and Sonny Rollins. For a short stint he also performed in the Gerald Wilson orchestra, in whose band he met Roy Ayers.
He recorded with both Wilson and Ayers as leaders and he was a member of the Max Roach Quintet, recording the 1968 Atlantic Records session Members Don’t Get Weary. At the end of the 60s he was a founder member of the cooperative quartet, Music, Inc. Another member of this band was Stanley Cowell with whom Tolliver formed the cult label Strata-East.
In 2007, Charles released the big band album With Love, which was nominated for a Grammy award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble. He followed this up two years later with another big band release, Emperor March: Live at the Blue Note.
2015 saw a wonderful celebration of Strata-East. Charles was joined by the Strata-East All Stars (Stanley Cowell, Alvin Queen, Billy Harper, Cecil McBee and special guest Jean Carne) for three European concerts, culminating in a performance at the Barbican hosted by BBC 6 Music’s Gilles Peterson.
In 2018 the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival honoured Charles’s 50th Anniversary of his seminal first leader recording “Charles Tolliver Allstars – PAPER MAN” Polydor/Arista/Strata-East with a performance by Charles, his original recording mate Gary Bartz and Jason Moran, Buster Williams, and Jack DeJohnette occupying the chairs of the original recording rhythm section Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Joe Chambers.
2020 saw the release of ‘CONNECT’ (Gearbox Records), a very welcome return to form that was Charles’ first recording as a leader in over a decade. The album received glowing reviews, with All About Jazz saying ‘…the album finds Tolliver still at the top of his game in a recording career which began in the mid 1960s…He fronts a US quintet which brings with it the grit and groove of a mid-1960s Blue Note hard-bop band while sounding totally 2020…Tolliver is jazz royalty’.
In 2019 Charles was honored with the “LIVING JAZZ LEGACY AWARD” by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and in 2022 by Jazz Foundation of America with the “Lifetime Achievement Award.