When the Acid Jazz scene was reaching its final stages, in the mid ’90s, the so-called “Dance Oriented Jazz” went through hard times, when it got exhausted by the thousands of productions that flooded the market in those years and by the contemporary switch of interest towards soundtracks (through the Lounge movement) or towards electronic music, decidedly influenced by “dub”. Schema Records has always been faithful to certain jazz productions that populated the scene in th ’50s, ’60s and ’70s and in particular to labels and artists that were relevant influences. Our label keeps exploring not only the jazz of Afro-American origin (Dizzy Gillespie, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Miles Davis ...) but also the South American Jazz, sucha as the Latin Jazz, and the Brazilian Jazz (Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria, Tenorio Jr. Bossa Tres, Sambalanço Trio, Tamba Trio …) and more recently European Jazz (Francy Boland, Tubby Hayes, Dusko Gojkovic, Gianni Basso …). The huge success of St Germain’s “RoseRouge” in the year 2000, a 4/4 swing ride rhythm made even more brilliant by a vocal sample of Marlena Shaw, and the almost contemporary release of “New Standards” by Nicola Conte and Gianluca Petrella marked the rise of a new way of making dance music: to the ’50s and ’60s jazz attitude, techniques and sounds from the new millennium are added, to create a cool and powerful blend. The idea originates just from this connection: to propose a “New Standard” that can be freely understood by new generations. I thought that “Freedom Jazz Dance”, title given by Eddie Harris to one of his compositions, could fully describe this project, that’s the proposition of something going over the obstacles imposed by the rigid market laws: the sense of artistic “Freedom”, founded on the base, “Jazz”, and the natural impulse of movement, “Dance&.......
more