Though I can’t speak eloquently about jazz, I do love listening to it. Nobody in my immediate world is a jazz fan so I spend a lot of time just searching “jazz” on YouTube and Spotify. The easiest way to describe my sweet spot is that I like piano jazz that you’d hear at a country club or a dark, basement-level bar in a major city.
John Wright is not a familiar name to me, nor have I ever heard any of his music. I’ve learned that Soul Side Soul was the John Wright Trio’s debut album and was released on the Prestige label in 1960. Whenever I hear something like this, I contemplate cashing in my existing vinyl collection which consists mainly of rock albums, and starting a jazz collection. But, when searching for South Side Soul on Amazon, Discogs and eBay, I found that it goes for about $150 so streaming on YouTube will have to do.
Here is a fantastic feature on John Wright that appeared in the Chicago Reader in 2014. Three years later, John Wright would pass away at the age of 83.