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The Field Within A Line
With his riveting performance in the inaugural Sequesterfest online festival in April 2020, Ken Vandermark inspired the Black Cross Solo Sessions. Already in the early days of lockdown, making good on the promise – or threat – of protracted off-road time, Vandermark had dedicated himself to the creation of a new book of works for solo reed instruments, which he debuted that day. The result of this watershed moment for the Chicago-based improvisor and composer was a body of works that reassert …
Dedications
One of the towering creative musicians of our time, a master drummer and multiple percussionist, Hamid Drake has anchored inumerable bands. As a hard working player, constantly touring the globe, he's collaborated with most of the major figures in improvised music and contemporary jazz, from David Murray and Peter Brötzmann to Pharoah Sanders and Don Cherry. Along the way, Drake has never had an opportunity to stop and make a solo record. Indeed, he's only performed solo on a few occasions. John…
Milwaukee Tapes Vol. 2
In the winter of 1980, Chicago tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson (1929-2010) brought his quartet to Milwaukee, where they were recorded live in concert. These tapes were first plumbed for The Milwaukee Tapes Vol. 1 on the Unheard Music Series in 2000.
Largest Afternoon
One day in the studio, something ridiculously great happened. It was deep Chicago winter, cold as shit. Four musicians assembled for a round-robin set of improvisations -- duets, trios, a few quartets. Approached casually, the late morning bloomed into Largest Afternoon, 15 crackling encounters between guitarist Arto Lindsay, saxophonists Joe McPhee, and Ken Vandermark, and drummer Phil Sudderberg. No expectations -- open minds and creative intent. Lindsay, a brilliant singer and songwriter and …
Route 84 Quarantine Blues
Joe McPhee’s response to the challenge of making a new CD of solo music during Covid was to go at it head on, to address the present in its starkest aspects, to reach for comfort in the music of great composers, and to speak directly to the virus in no uncertain terms. The result is unlike any other of McPhee’s many records, a variety show of improvisations, favorite compositions, field recording, multi-tracking, incantation and recitation. After searching for the right studio-like setting wit…
Babi
Corbett Vs. Dempsey presents a reissue of Milford Graves's Bäbi, originally issued in 1977 on Graves's own IPS label. This is the first reissue of one of the most legendary albums in the history of free music. Recorded live in concert in 1976, when Graves' trio with saxophonists Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover was at the height of its powers, Bäbi is a testament to the absolutely unique approach the drummer had established for himself. He had reconfigured the drum kit, removing the second heads on …
The Complete Yale Concert, 1966
For a performance at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in spring of 1966, percussionist Milford Graves invited pianist Don Pullen to play duets. The two musicians had worked together in a band fronted by saxophonist and clarinetist Giusseppi Logan, with whom they had recorded two LPs in 1965 for ESP-Disk'. Graves was already a daunting presence in free music. One step at a time, he was busy transforming the role of drumming in jazz, introducing a new way of dealing with unmetered time a…
Songs In Heat
*In process of stocking.* While Dredd Foole would stamp his legend as a foundational figure in the New Weird America free folk underground of the 1990s and 2000s, that is just the second half of the story. Forty years ago, in February 1982, Dredd entered the studio with Mission of Burma, stepping off a remarkable decade of post-punk activity that drew comparisons to The Stooges, Tim Buckley, and various outsider musicians. They would never tour and lacked ambition, so their powers were largely w…
Black Is The Color: Live in Poughkeepsie and New Windsor 1969-70
Never-before-issued music from three very different settings in upstate New York, all recorded in the period running up to Poughkeepsie multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee's Nation Time (CVSD 054CD). From a year before that landmark LP, in the same hall at Vassar College, McPhee led a band with soulful vibraphonist Ernie Bostic and voluble rhythm section of Tyrone Crabb and Bruce Thompson, both of Nation Time fame, performing a John Coltrane-oriented set that included versions of Mongo Santamaria's…
Musings Of A Bahamian Son
Joe McPhee is one of the great multi-instrumentalists of contemporary improvised music. His instrumental battery has included saxophones, clarinets, valve trombone, pocket trumpet, sound-on-sound tape recorder, and space organ, but another arrow in his quiver is text. McPhee has been writing poems since the 1970s. He occasionally introduces one into performance, as an introduction or afterword to music, and in recent years he's been known to do full-on readings, text only, featuring his inimitab…
Angular Apron
It's unreleased Oxley & Stabbins & Sirone & Thomas & Schoof!
11th Street Fire Suite
11th Street Fire Suite is a post-BAG (Black Artists Group) classic. An emotionally ranging set of blues-drenched duets by alto saxophonist Luther Thomas and flutist Luther C. Petty, it's one of the great documents of the St. Louis creative music diaspora, a wild ride through turbulent and beautiful terrain on a slab of vinyl that's as rare as hen's teeth in its original form. Relocated from their midwestern hometown to New York City, Thomas and Petty entered the studio in 1978 with a fellow musi…
Nineteen Sixty-Six
Until now, the earliest recordings anyone has heard by Joe McPhee come from the period around his 1968 debut album, Underground Railroad. McPhee had just started playing tenor saxophone at that point. A couple of years earlier, the bassist featured on all of McPhee's early recordings, Tyrone Crabb, led a band of his own, the Jazzmen, in which McPhee was featured on his first instrument: trumpet. Indeed, McPhee was a trumpet legacy – his father was a trumpeter. In the mid-'60s, Joe was a serious …
Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996
Light in the Attic Records proudly presents Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996—the first comprehensive collection of Ukrainian music recorded prior to, and immediately following, the USSR’s collapse. From subtly dissenting Soviet-era singles to DIY recordings from Kyiv’s vibrant underground scene, the compilation chronicles the development of Ukraine’s rich musical landscape through rare folk, rock, jazz, and electronic recordings.
“This record is a labor of love and a long…
Sun Worship
2025 stock Chicago power-jazz trio Tiger Hatchery proudly comes out of the ESP-Disk' free jazz tradition, as saxophonist Mike Forbes's playing makes clear, but there's an added noise-rock edge, especially in Ben Billington's aggressive drumming, that keeps the sound modern. Bassist Andrew Scott Young does much more than lay down the bottom, emerging as a fully equal member of their glorious cacophony. This is one of the most powerful albums in the storied 50-year history of ESP-Disk', and that'…
Breathing In The Walls
2025 stock Chicago power-jazz trio Tiger Hatchery proudly comes out of the ESP-Disk' free jazz tradition, as Forbes's playing makes clear, but there's an added noise-rock edge, especially in Billington's aggressive drumming, that keeps the sound modern. Young does much more than lay down the bottom, emerging as an equal member of their glorious cacophony. Their 2013 ESP release, Sun Worship, earned huzzahs from press and free-jazz aficionados.
Identical Sunsets
2025 stock After a chance meeting in a taxi line at Lisbon Airport, a surreal intertwining of tours emanated. In between the lasers, confetti and face-painted fans at Plymouth Pavillions and Wolverhampton Civic Hall, Chris Corsano left the Björk mega-tour to get down to business alongside the imaginative Paul Dunmall for some vital improvisation at Slak Bar in Cheltenham, England.
This wonderfully recorded live set begins with Dunmall swirling away on the border pipes (he may be the preeminent …
Other Worlds
Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube Records in collaboration with Deep Water Acres and in tribute to Sunrise Ocean Bender Records bring to you: Elkhorn -- Other Worlds. Drew Gardner and Jesse Sheppard, the two-guitar duo of Elkhorn, share a musical brotherhood that spans several decades. From their nascent high school socialist-realist post-punk band Mayfirst, to teenage scavenger trips to the Princeton Record Exchange and City Gardens, the two came of age goofing along to the Dead Kennedys, the Butthole…
The Hated Music
2025 stock "Hard to believe it has been 18 years since this set was first issued, but that’s what the calendar says. Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano had been playing together for a while before this. I seem to recall rehearsals outdoors in Hartford beneath stretches of raised highway under construction. But that may have been Chris and Pete Nolan, back when Pete played guitar. Who can remember exactly? It’s been a long time. But I do remember we put this set together because it seemed essential …
Extensions Out, Plus: Four Poetry Books 1957-1972 (4x Books)
Corbett vs. Dempsey announce the release of four books of poetry by Sun Ra. Two of these were pamphlets that accompanied early Sun Ra albums issued in the late 1950s; the other two were published more than a decade later by Infinity Inc./Saturn Research. CvsD's reprints are fastidiously designed facsimiles of the original publications, marking the first time they have been available in their Ra-ordained form since they were published. An architect of Afrofuturism and one of the great musical thi…