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"No music making can be entirely non-idiomatic. Removing the metaphor, the claim is that it is characterless, without personality. But despite his best intentions, perhaps, one can hear a range of influences in Bailey’s own work – even if jazz isn't one of them. And the present album shows that "non-idiomatic" is the wrong description for much free improvisation. The common description "abstract" is also misleading. All music is abstract in form, humane in utterance." – Andy Hamilton
"A long life can contain a certain amount of waste. Live long enough and posterity doesn’t notice the occasional unproductive gap. A short life adds value to every moment and every creative act. This new issue of Albert Ayler’s brief association with Don Cherry includes further material from their time in Copenhagen, a period when the saxophonist daily reinvented the themes that were coursing through his mind, breath and fingers. These are not a collector’s fetishes. These are fresh document…
"Kontakte makes contacts between acoustic instrumental sounds and electronic music, its multidimensionality and its invitation to time travel, all promised a future in which humanity might transcend the limitations of material reality. In Spiegelung and Geschichte der Gewalt the electronic sounds emerge as transformations of this reality." – Christopher Fox
"In its entirety, the concert is lively and penetrating evidence of Braxton’s remarkable facility, powers of invention, and commitment to his principles at this point in time, with special emphasis on saxophone techniques energizing variables of tone color, texture, and timbre to affect separate phrases, extended lines, and sectional contrasts." – Art Lange
Producer’s note: "I experienced over many years Anthony Braxton different performances. His solo performance 1984 in Bern belongs into the …
“We are in the business of transformation, applying our knowledge of improvising together for twenty-five years, interwoven with our resonance with these melodies and forms. We have found our collective way with honouring what these pieces express to us, through our personal language, comments Gerry Hemingway.” He agrees that there's a concept of authenticity”. “The feeling of swing is our own, but shaped by the pieces we are playing”. Authenticity is acquired through assimilating traditions, an…
First visit archive offers previously unreleased recordings of historic and musical importance. "When, in this music, he succeeds in fusing the emotional (translated into its lyrical and dramatic qualities) pas- sage of ritual with the complex architecture of his ensemble’s infrastructural procedures, we have a bridge into Cecil Taylor’s creative spirit, and far beyond." - Art Lange
"I was present at the recordings, sitting in the recording truck in front of Fat Tuesday’s in NYC. The recording w…
Though they may not have recorded together until 1953, when Rollins was 23 years old, Sonny was introduced to Monk while a senior in high school, already part of a cadre of young neighborhood jazz neophytes. Monk became a mentor to them, offering home-based instruction on the new possibilities restructuring bop harmonies and rhythms, or as Rollins later put it, “the geometry of musical time and space.” - Art Lange
Joe Henderson Our Thing To In ’N Out Revisited notes: The Blue Note label in the early and mid 1960s was a haven for musicians engaged in the process of expanding the jazz vocabulary with unconventional harmonic strategies and new compositional infrastructures that elicited equally exploratory improvisational responses. And it was an ongoing process, benefiting from the sporadic, albeit calculated, interaction of different perspectives and methods of creative inspiration. Established or working g…
"It was once said of Paul Bley that he was the only pianist who could make a concert grand sound like an
upright. While that is not literally true, or only partly so, it makes a point that strikes home on these often
strange, offbeat, otherworldly tracks. It is a quality preserved by Michael Brändli’s typically sensitive sonic
Paul Bley-upright piano
Steve Swallow-double bass
Pete LaRoca-drums
restoration, which increases the probability of rapture. Enjoy." – Chris May
"Tadd Dameron remains better known and more widely admired among fellow musicians than with the record-buying public, and yet most will know at least some of his sophisticated compositions: “Lady Bird”, “On A Misty Night”, “If You Could See Me Now”. A thoughtful manner and an early death conspired to keep his reputation somewhat subdued. Here is an opportunity to hear two of Dameron's best recordings in modern sound. An intelligent rather than dramatic player himself, he nonetheless deserves…
"...How Time Passes... and Essence were issued at a time when jazz history was being made practically on a monthly basis. There are a few reasons why they became submerged in the tsunami of groundbreaking albums released in the first years of the 1960s. For starters, Candid and Pacific Jazz simply did not have the market clout of Atlantic, Impulse, and other labels. Furthermore, Don Ellis’ music differed significantly from that of the avatars of free jazz, occupying a space between contemporar…
"The material on From Out Front To Booker Little And Friend Revisited is Little’s collective chef d’oeuvre. It is exploratory but also strewn with retentions from tradition. The dense yet sonorous dissonance, the graceful tempo and metre shifts, the extended forms that give equal weight to composed and improvised sections, together these „alter the present“ and „direct the past“." – Chris May
Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation is an album by the jazz saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman. It was released through Atlantic Records in September 1961: the fourth of Coleman's six albums for the label. Its title named the then-nascent free jazz movement.
About Ornette! Brian Olewnick commented that Coleman is found "plumbing his quartet music to ever greater heights of richness and creativity," concluding that the album was "a superb release and a must for all fans of Coleman and cr…
"The two reissues presented herein include the last sessions that Donald would record with his brother, bookending a turning point in Ayler’s music. The Village Theater sessions, from late 1966 and early 1967 (the latter without Donald) mark, arguably, a high point in his work to that date, where the musical ecstasy he sought was as close to realization as he ever achieved – and new avenues may have been opening up – whereas ‘Love Cry’, from the summer of 1967, indicates at least partially a piv…
"Marion Brown was already defying categorisation in 1966 when he recorded Three For Shepp, whose six tracks open Three For Shepp To Gespächsfetzen Revisited. Brown’s opening “New Blues” and Archie Shepp’s closing “Delicado,” though compelling,are relatively orthodox expressions of mid 1960s NewThing. The four tracks they bookend, however, are distinctive even today. Brown’s exquisite “Fortunato,” though it sounds like nothing Pharoah Sanders ever wrote, inhabits similarly pretty terrain as Sand…
"Heard together, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and Pre Bird suggest the enormity of
Charles Mingus’ artistic vision. No one album encompasses it in its entirety, and perhaps not even
two or three. However, these recordings, made six months apart in 1960, vividly summarized his
work to date, as he headed towards to jazz’s pantheon." – Bill Shoemaker
“He was nomadic. The strongest and most lasting thing you can say about Alan is that he was
an original, as original as you can get. He didn’t want any academic guidelines to equip him to
reinvent the wheel. If he saw something like that, he’d go the other way.” – Wayne Shorter
Temporary Super Offer! "This Revisited disc chronicles the trio in transition. Formed in autumn 1959, the group recorded its debut album in December. Following a coast-to-coast tour, it opened at Birdland in March 1960, when the first five tracks here were recorded on two separate dates. Already cooking, by the time of the April and May recordings the trio was touching on the interactive magic heard on ezz-thetics’ At The Village." – Chis May
Temporary Super Offer! “Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order. I felt I learned from him in every way – through the senses, theoretically, technically. I would talk to Monk about musical problems and he would sit at the piano and show me the answers just by playing them.“ – John Coltrane