Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey - Speak No Evil: Europe '06 (Live) (2021)

Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey announced the release of four archival live albums as well as their previously unreleased last studio album with co-founding bassist Reed Mathis, 2008’s Winterwood. Royal Potato Family will digitally issue Winterwood and the first live album, The Spark That Bled, tomorrow, Friday, May 7.

The next two live albums, Nine Improvisations and Speak No Evil will be released digitally on June 4. The fourth and final live album, Lil Tae Rides Again (Live), is due digitally on July 2. A double-LP vinyl edition of Winterwood, whose title comes from Winterwood Recording Studios in Eureka Springs, Arkansas where it was made, will be available on August 6.

Mathis used downtime caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to spend part of 2020 culling through past JFJO recordings. Mathis co-founded JFJO in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1994 and remained in the band until 2008, leaving shortly after recording Winterwood with fellow original member, keyboardist Brian Haas, and one of several JFJO drummers, Josh Raymer. Mathis remixed the recordings from those sessions for the studio album’s long-awaited official release.

“The JFJO experience, for me, sorta felt like 10 years of figuring out what we were meant to do, musically, and then five years of actually getting to play it … to play and write at our full potential,” Mathis said. “Those last four or five years contained so much great teamwork and peak creativity, and so much follow through! We were moving so fast, we ended up with most of that top-shelf stuff going undocumented, and since I left the group at the start of 2009, most of what we had been working on has existed only as raw, unmixed, unedited recordings, silently passing the years away in my storage unit.”

The four live albums were curated by Mathis with different themes presented in each release. Drummer Jason Smart backs Haas and Mathis on The Spark That Bled, recorded in 2005 and showcasing songs and songwriting through three originals paired alongside instrumental covers of songs by The Flaming Lips, Bjork, John Coltrane and others. The same lineup appears on Nine Improvisations, a collection of nine show-starting jams also from 2005 and on Speak No Evil, an album of acoustic live jazz standards and originals recorded mostly in Europe in 2006.

Mathis and Haas are accompanied by Raymer and guitarist Pete Tomshany on Lil Tae Rides Again (Live), which was recorded during the 2008 tour in support of JFJO’s concept album about middle school. Mathis sequenced recordings from multiple performances to create complete versions of each song on Lil Tae Rides Again.

Mathis created a companion mini-documentary to go with today’s announcement.

“I was with Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey from the beginning,” said Mathis. “We saw the world and along the way, we made some incredible art together. All told it was the craziest 15 years of my life. This documentary piece is my version of the story.”