Jazz Dispensary at Ten: Reachin’, Song of Songs and Nature’s World on October 22nd

Jazz Dispensary opened with Cosmic Stash, a box set for Record Store Day, and has built its catalog around late-sixties and seventies jazz grooves. The Top Shelf series takes hand-picked rarities and cuts them from the original analog tapes onto 180-gram vinyl, in tip-on jackets.

For the label’s tenth year we’re giving the early evening to three of its 2026 reissues: Roger Glenn’s Reachin’, Woody Shaw’s Song of Songs and Studio G’s Nature’s World. The night is free and open to the public.

Roger Glenn is the son of Tyree Glenn, the trombonist and vibraphonist who played with Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Vibraphone was Roger’s first instrument, and he plays it alongside flute on Reachin’, which Craft describes as Latin jazz fusion. After Larry Mizell produced Donald Byrd’s Black Byrd for Blue Note in 1973, Fantasy approached him about producing for them, and he suggested Glenn.

Larry Mizell produced Reachin’ with his brother Fonce. Glenn has called the sessions difficult, with Larry away much of the time, and says that is why he stopped recording his own music. Until Jazz Dispensary’s Top Shelf edition came out on July 10th, the record had been off vinyl for about fifty years. Kevin Gray cut it at Cohearent Audio, and Fidelity pressed it.

Woody Shaw recorded Song of Songs at Contemporary’s studio in Los Angeles on September 15th and 18th, 1972, with Lester and John Koenig producing, and Contemporary released it the next year. It was his second album for Contemporary, after Blackstone Legacy, and all four tunes on it are his.

Shaw plays trumpet, with George Cables on piano and electric piano, Henry Franklin on bass and Woodrow Theus II on drums and percussion. Ramon Morris is on tenor and Emanuel Boyd on flute and tenor, and Bennie Maupin sits in on tenor for one track. At AllMusic, Scott Yanow placed the music “between hard bop, modal musings and the avant-garde.” Bernie Grundman cut the Jazz Dispensary Top Shelf reissue from the original tapes, and it came out September 4th.

Studio G was a London music library, started in the late sixties by the ad man John Gale and run for three decades. Its cues turned up on Doctor Who and Vision On, and the library stopped issuing new music in 2009.

Nature’s World is twenty cues by James Harpham and James Asher, about forty-two minutes in all. Jazz Dispensary’s reissue follows Dream a Dream, the label’s 2025 Studio G compilation with liner notes by Bob Stanley. It brings the album back to vinyl after four decades, on a green, yellow and blue “Terratopia” splatter LP out October 16th.

Doors open at 5:30 PM, when our Warm Welcome happy hour starts, and the three records play until 8. Then our resident selector Adam Ellis takes over for the rest of the night.

We’re at 667 Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights, and entry is typically 21+.

Reserve a table, or just come by. The event listing has the details, and the rest of our fall lineup is under upcoming events.