Lloyd McNeill Tori LP

Limited edition black vinyl. 1,000 copies worldwide. Comes with limited-time digital download code. Soul Jazz Records is reissuing this very rare, deep-spiritual-jazz-meets-Brazilian-and-Latin album, first released as a private-press album in 1978 on flautist Lloyd McNeill's own Baobab Record label in Washington, D.C. The album has been out of print for 43 years and is lovingly remastered by Soul Jazz Records.

Recorded in 1978, Tori is a stunning album that blends Brazilian and Latin flavors with deep spiritual jazz. The album features an unbelievably strong line-up, which includes legendary Brazilian figures like Dom Um Romão, Naná Vasconcelos and Dom Salvador, alongside jazz heavyweights such as Buster Williams, Howard Johnson, John La Barbera and more. These A-team musicians were all regulars in McNeill's long-running and highly-successful resident live group in New York, all set up to blend deep jazz, Brazilian and Latin music together.

Lloyd McNeill is an African-American flautist, painter, poet, and photographer, born in Washington, D.C, in 1935. His multi-disciplinary creative life led to encounters and friendships with Nina Simone, Picasso, Eric Dolphy, Nana Vasconceles and other legendary cultural figures. Lloyd McNeill's hypnotic Washington Suite was originally commissioned as a piece of music for the Capital Ballet Company in Washington, D.C.

McNeill grew up through the era of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and his life and work is a reflection of those ideals. In the mid-1960s he moved to France where he became friends with Picasso, working with a number of émigré-jazz musicians whilst living in Paris. In the late 1960s he taught jazz and painting workshops at the New Thing Art and Architecture Center in Washington. In the 1970s he traveled throughout Brazil and West Africa studying music, and taught music anthropology in the U.S.