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This recording demonstrates some of the major developments in American social dancing and its music from after the Revolution up to the beginning of electrical recording in the mid-1920s. Dances such as the waltz, polka, tango, quadrille, charleston, cakewalk and turkey-trot are still familiar today, their names holding a permanent place in popular culture. The music they were danced to, however, is often forgotten.
This collection of hits, fads and phenomenons from the history of social dancin…
The generation of American composers who came of age in the 1920s are now generally acknowledged as seminal figures in the creation of a truly indigenous American art music. Quartet Romantic makes available for the first time on CD several important chamber works by four of these figures - Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Wallingford Riegger, and John Becker - as well as an early work by Cowell's most famous pupil, Lou Harrison.
This historic recording features the first-ever release of the two earliest surviving recordings of David Tudor's seminal work, Rainforest. Sandwiched in between are six keyboard works by Gordon Mumma in recordings featuring the composer and his close collaborator, Tudor. Together, these works constitute a fascinating and historically important document of the 1960s avant-garde in America. In early 1968, Merce Cunningham created a new dance whose apparent impetus was Colin Turnbull's The Fore…
Songs of Progress and Protest in the Gilded Age 1865-1893
The Hand That Holds The Bread provides a window onto a particularly turbulent time (1865-1893) in this nation's history-a period of great economic disparity, surging immigration, and rampant government corruption. The accompanying 40-page booklet includes an essay situating the songs in their historical context, complete lyrics and a selected bibliography and discography.
This superb anthology of old ballads and other folk-song types comprises pre-war commercial and field recordings made in the rural Southeast, the part of the United States that most closely met the textbook definition of a "folk culture," in which culture was relatively homogeneous and customs were shared across class and ethnic lines. For this reason, this album focuses on the rural Southeast as a rich source of American folk life, ranging roughly from Virginia and Kentucky south to Alabama and…
From 1977, seven tunes, five of them by Ricky Ford, the then 23-year-old tenor saxophonist and member of the Charles Mingus band and leader of the session. Accompanied by bassist extraordinaire Richard Davis and the great Dannie Richmond, Ford leads the band through mostly hard-swinging, straight-ahead compositions steeped in the jazz tradition but speaking a contemporary language -- a result of the distinctly audible influence of Mingus. Great compositions and strong improvising from the solois…
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 …
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 …
*200 copies limited edition* Past Inside the Present is proud to reissue James Bernard’s landmark 1994 ambient masterwork, Atmospherics, remastered and packaged with a brand new, track-by-track interpretation of the entire album by friend and collaborator, bvdub. While these versions are separated by an ocean of musical and technological change, together they form a cohesive image of adventurous musicianship, melodic and textural richness, and stylistic timelessness.
Ghost is the ninth studio album by New York-based Black Swan, who employs an arsenal of analog recording devices and methods to blur the line between reality and memory. Inspired by musique concrète, ambient, and dark drone traditions, the twenty pieces in this continuous suite capture the experiences of a spirit navigating the physical world it left behind.
The dimensions of each movement come from careful consideration of the overall narrative: some are brief vignettes, while others are given …
2025 stock "Initial recordings for 'Canticles Of Bliss' started in October of 2019 at my home studio located just south of Indianapolis. At the start of 2020 I continued recording songs off and on up until late April where I then took a break and then picked up the guitar again in July. I used an electric guitar for the recordings while utilizing very little effects and a loop station. Quite a lot of the tracks I made ended up not making it on 'Canticles of Bliss'. As such, these eight selected …
*2025 stock* This eclectic group features the legendary multi instrumentalist Daniel Carter as well as the scientist/pianist Matthew Putman, drum wizard and 577 Records co-founder Federico Ughi, together with the brilliant up-and-coming member of the New York downtown scene, Texas-born clarinet player Patrick Holmes plus veteran bassist Hilliard Greene, a mainstay of the avant-garde for the last 20 years.
*In process of stocking* How do you welcome adventure? Longtime comrades, legendary Daniel Carter, Matthew Shipp, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver investigated this in their first album, Welcome Adventure, Vol. 1, resulting in 577 Records’ best-selling release in the 20 years we’ve been operating. Now, the group is trying the question again with their second astonishing volume, taken from the same historical recording session. Daniel Carter (Saxophone, Clarinet) has been collaborating with Will…
Collaborations are unique to their combinations, producing totally original and innovative ideas with the addition of a single factor. In this case, legendary musicians and 577 mainstays join together in this unique arrangement for the first time, allowing for yet another reinvention. Saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter, pianist Leo Genovese, bassist William Parker (also playing Gralla and Shakuhachi on this album), and drummer and vocalist Francisco Mela, unite for another impro…
2024 stock. That’s right, Carter plays piano on this date! It’s the first thing heard as this disc kicks immediately into definite but mature overdrive. It’s a blast to hear William Parker, bassist for Cecil Taylor’s much-lauded Feel Trio, free-walking under Carter’s percussive attacks, certainly indebted to Taylor but even more pointalistic. The case is made on “Zero Softly”, a spare minimalist musing where notes hang in the air like galaxies only to fade beneath Federico Ughi’s carpet of brush…
Truly necessary catalogue accompanying an extensive exhibition dedicated to art works and musical scores and their relationship with Fluxus, an interdisciplinary movement of international artists, poets, composers and designers who experimented with fusing art and music in the 1960s and 1970s. The catalogue, published on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Patrizio Peterlini and Walter Rovere, delves deeply into this aspect of the Fluxus network. Rife with illustrations, the materials of th…
*100 copies limited edition* Belgian musician and filmmaker Jef Mertens has been an active force in the experimental music and film scene for nearly two decades. Known for his documentaries on artists like Sonic Youth and Borbetomagus, as well as his work with the now-defunct Dadaist Tapes label, Mertens continues to push the boundaries of sound exploration. His previous solo works include NO MATHEMATICS, released on KRAAK/Feeding Tube Records.With Orchid Alto, Mertens dedicates himself to the t…
Fluxus was a cultural, visual, and social adventure that began in 1962. Far from wanting to be a nostalgic celebration, 1962 is not offered here as a starting year, but as the first landing on a journey that began a decade before, in 1952, thanks to John Cage at Black Mountain College.During the Sixties, linguistic and formal experiments emerge in a teeming fervor, poised between Europe, the United States and Japan, in an innovative paradigm, extraneous to the aesthetic conventions experienced u…
158 p, ills colour & bw, 17 x 24 cm, pb, English/Italian edition. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the prominent role Italy came to play in the Fluxus movement, which emerged in the late 1950s. It explores the editorial experience of Fluxus, the creation of “editions” – objects, graphics, artists’ books – and the important role this had in the movement’s spread. Inexpensive to produce and easy to distribute, these works were accessible to the wider public and in turn contributed to the F…