Jazz record producer and self-styled jazz detective Zev Feldman continues his Muse Records reissue campaign by reintroducing a lost classic from one of the elites among trumpet players. Feldman’s Time Traveler Recordings — a music label launched in 2025 focused on reissuing and remastering albums primarily from the Muse Records catalog — is set to give Woody Shaw’s Love Dance a high-quality vinyl release treatment, with remastering from the original tapes by renowned engineer Matthew Lutthans.
Recorded in late 1975 and released the following year by Muse, Love Dance had eventually dropped out of print, at least as a standalone album. Joel Dorn’s 32 Jazz imprint made it available on CD in 1997 by coupling it with another Muse release Cassandranite (Last Of The Line) and it was also part of the Mosaic box set Woody Shaw: The Complete Muse Sessions isssued in 2013.
Love Dance was the fourth album led by Shaw, whose solo career got off to a delayed start but really got going in the mid-70s when he signed with Muse, and Love Dance was the second one he made for the label. He assembled an nontet for these sessions, with saxophonists Billy Harper (tenor) and René McLean (alto, soprano), trombonist Steve Turre, pianist Joe Bonner, bassist Cecil McBee, drummer Victor Lewis and percussionists Guilherme Franco and Tony Waters.
Bonner is responsible for the title song that properly kicks off the album. “Love Dance” simmers on a Latin groove and the trumpet-sax-sax-trombone front line is large enough to allow for charting some rich interacting harmonies. Shaw, who could blow hotter than any trumpet player not named Freddie Hubbard, keeps it cool and controlled here, and the articulation over his extended solo is on point. Turre, still fairly early in his long career, acquits himself well on his own journey.
“Sunbath” is a little more contemporary and funkier than the other tracks, a slight nod to the times even if it’s all-acoustic anyway. The eminent McBee gets his own spotlight, full of soul and very much in the pocket.
“Zoltan” originally appeared on Larry Young’s 1965 juggernaut album Unity, a tune that along with his better-known “The Moontrane” Shaw wrote when just a teenager and if anything, this later version even better illuminates what a sophisticated piece of post-bop composing this piece truly is. The arrangement casts Lewis as the catalyst for the fireworks that ensue. Though Harper, McLean and Bonner are able to make hay on their turns, it’s the leader Shaw who drops his massive chops on this tune.
Shaw, in turn, selected a Young number “Obsequious,” a song that also appeared on his then-unreleased Cassandranite (aka In The Beginning) and was still a staple in Shaw’s repertoire than he recorded it again for Love Dance. It’s unabashedly driving bop, an idiom that Shaw completely mastered but it’s Harper who gets the spotlight on this occasion.
Harper’s “Soulfully I Love You (Black Spiritual Of Love)” is the ballad of the bunch, an attractive harmony forged by the four horns and a counter melody from Bonner subtly slipped in. It shifts to mid-tempo when Shaw kicks off the rounds of solos and his crafty manipulation of the space between the notes get the ball rolling right.
On January 30, 2026, Love Dance will get its 180g vinyl reissue replete with new liner notes from Bob Blumenthal along with rare photos. Zev Feldman once again pulled out the stops to package an historical recording with new treatment that matches the significance of the music with which it’s packaged.
| Image | Artist | Title | Format | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Woody Shaw | Love Dance | Remastered Vinyl | Purchase Here |
 | Woody Shaw | Last Of The Line | Double CD | Purchase Here |
 | Woody Shaw | Imagination | CD | Purchase Here |
 | Joe Chambers | Double Exposure | Remastered Vinyl | Purchase Here |
- Caroline Davis – ‘Fallows’ (2026) - March 24, 2026
- Finely Tuned Elephant – ‘No Goats’ (2026) - March 23, 2026
- Michael Formanek – ‘New Digs’ (2026) - March 19, 2026
