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Blase and Yasmina Revisited
The sessions Archie Shepp led for BYG over five days in August 1969 is a body of work that merits revisiting outside the context of the entire Actuel series and the well-trodden trope of the African American avant-garde in radical Paris. The resulting albums were not ad hoc firestorms: rather, they were considered statements mirroring the pan-stylistic of his Impulse! albums. Shepp's BYG are occasionally framed as somewhat anomalous items on his discography, but their subject is the same as that…
Newport, New York, Alabama, 1963, Revisited
John Coltrane played the long game. Longevity in life wasn’t his lot; his fortieth year being his final bow. That circumscribed career, particularly in its final decade, evinced a trajectory of creative ascendancy that was as indelible to improvised music as it was omnipresent in impact. Charlie Parker arguably wears the posthumous mantle of most influential saxophonist, but Coltrane suggests a close contender in terms of ineluctable clout on those who play the instrument.
Practice and the pursu…
The Birth of BeBop - Celebrating Bird at 100 vol 1
The incomparable life and extraordinary, trailblazing career of jazz titan and influential composer Charlie Parker will be honored throughout 2020 with a worldwide celebration commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth (August 29, 1920). Lovingly dubbed Bird 100 after the nickname of the preeminent alto saxophonist who was one of the fathers of bebop and progenitors of modern jazz, the centennial will include a host of major initiatives including exciting new music releases, a tribute tour…
Spirits Rejoice & Bells - Revisited
Together, ‘Spirits Rejoice’ and ‘Bell’s encapsulate a four month period where long-gestating ideas of Ayler’s were birthed, helping to usher in a conception of music unlike virtually anything else extant, paving the way for his own adventures of the next several years and, perhaps more importantly, providing an extremely fertile bed for a generation or two of musicians to come. – Brian Olewnick
Albert Ayler’s recording career was a short one, spanning only the years 1962 – 1970, yet he went thro…
Why Not? Porto Novo!
Reissuing two essential albums from saxophonist Marion Brown--Why Not? (ESP, 1968) and Porto Novo (Polydor, 1969)--the first recorded in NY in a quartet with pianist Stanley Cowell, bassist Sirone and drummer Rashied Ali, the second recorded in The Netherlands in a trio with Han Bennink on drums and Maarten Van Regteren Altena on double bass; essential.
Prophecy
With the essential sidemen to express his unique voice and approach to free jazz, saxophonist Albert Ayler, double bassist Gary Peacock, and drummer Sunny Murray, recorded these sessions in 1964 for the ESP label as "Prophecy", this excellent reissue & remaster also adding the live "Albert Smiles with Sunny" (inRespect) from the same concert; essential.
Capricorn Moon To Juba Lee
Merging and remastering two essential albums from free jazz saxophonist Marion Brown: his 1966 ESP album "Marion Brown Quartet" with trumpeter Alan Shorter, bassist Reggie Johnson and percussionist Rahied Ali; and his 1967 Fontana album "Juba-Lee" in a septet with Reggie Johnson, drummer Beaver Harris, pianist Dave Burrell, trombonist Grachan Moncur III & saxophonist Bennie Maupin.
FFlair III
"Basically, we witness an intimate dialogue between two improvisers. If there had not been a special circumstance leading to this result. Christine Abdelnour and Hans Koch could not hear each other. In fact, "FFlair" is based on two separately recorded solo improvisations, which were superimposed at the end. Mind you, without any subsequent editing." - Rudolf Amstutz
Things In Between
Temporary Super Offer! "This album features the relatively unusual quartet line-up of two pianists and two percussionists. Equally unusual, though less so than it once was: the leader
on this date, pianist Judith Wegmann, is equally at home in improvisation and composed music. She's a composer, and an interpreter of composed music – her recording of Morton Feldman's Triadic Memories and For John Cage appeared recently on this label. But she's also a free improviser who draws on the tradition o…
Unison Polyphony
Temporary Super Offer! Christoph Gallio and Markus Eichenberger, both born in 1957, have known each other since the early eighties and have played together a lot during this time, listening to music, visiting bars and occasionally taking a dip in the Rhine. At some point, their paths got lost until they crossed again in 2018 to regularly sound out their musical languages and create something new. Their performance at the "40 Years of WIM Zurich" festival remained unforgotten for many.
Eichenber…
Draw From The Source
Temporary Super Offer! ”In its sum, Draw From The Source recounts a multidimensional journey whose sources and paths constantly cross. Marco von Orelli and Sheldon Suter reveal a lot about themselves, about their individual idiosyncrasies and about their common feelings in this performance carried by finest lyricism. But behind this journey from the north to the south, from urban stagnation to Mediterranean lightness, there is also a call for us to reflect on the true nature of our existence in …
Hush
Temporary Super Offer! We can only answer that question from an individual perspective, based upon our perception of place, and space, and time, and stimuli. Each of these categories exists within a complex of contexts – for example, there is the stimulus of personal relationships, the stimulus of our health and that of others around us, the stimulus of political events, the stimulus of work, the stimulus of art. A work of art provides an interactive opportunity to ignite our perception with th…
Nephlokokkygia 1992
Temporary Super Offer! To be free. What does that actually mean? Not in a social or even political sense. But as a human being? As a musician? When we speak of free improvised music, freedom is the mother of all things. And that in a literal- al sense. You free yourself from yourself. As human beings, we always act with the sum of what we have collected, stored and reflected in all the years before. An improviser does not have to apply his knowledge and skills intellectually, but instinctively. …
Make That Flight
Temporary Super Offer! 'Even a cursory revisiting of Houle and von Orelli’s previous recordings confirms that the stark forum afforded by a horn duo strips their music to its essentials, their shared ability to make unorthodox forms and materials sing and dance being the most salient. Fresh, distanced, and potentially transformative perspectives abound on this album, and not just about the music of any other artist; but, more importantly, the tug and pull between the continuity represented by tr…
Die Unwucht
Neither musician has to be dominant to prove that he has something to say. Instead of trying to outdo each other, they develop a compelling, very soulful world of their own. In the history of jazz they are two more rhapsodists continuing the tradition, while changing the context of the stories and thus making them plausible. What is amazing is their calm maturity that does completely without the frills of elec- tronics. Dense and compact but at the same time transparent and delicate the music pr…
The Unasked Answer
Temporary Super Offer! In 1908, Charles Ives wrote a work called “The Unanswered Question”. It was for the unusual instrumentation of offstage string ensemble, woodwind quartet and, most significant for our purposes here, solo trumpet. Though it was inspired, we think, by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “The Sphinx”, Ives provided his own explanatory text. The trumpet asks “The Perennial Question of Existence” seven times, to which the woodwinds provide only six increasingly disordered answers, while…
Tetratne
Temporary Super Offer! It is surely significant that both Lovens and Stoffner use all four limbs to control their instrument. Lower limbs used principally to play bass drum and hi-hat in the case of Lovens, volume control and effects pedal for Stoffner. Right and left limbs, right and left brain hemispheres It is not surprising that there is plenty going on in their music. “Whatever happened to the Art of the Individual?!” Han Bennink once asked rhetorically to a crowded backstage. Well here i…
Augmented Space
Temporary Super Offer! Musicians as different as Bill Dixon, Wadada Leo Smith, Axel Dörner, Susana Santos Silva have experimented with the lonely, no-safety-net discipline of solo trumpet playing. It is one of the hardest avocations in music: no harmony instrument, no pedal notes, no supportive pick-up if things go wrong. Schmid seems to follow in that line and yet the solo performances on Augmented Space, for all the extreme discipline of his technique, seems very different to the artists abov…
Prismo
Temporary Super Offer! The Quartet Prismo is the continuation of the collaboration of Sergio Armaroli and Fritz Hauser with an extended circle of musicians. Sergio has proposed his wife Francesca Gemmo, I proposed my esteemed colleague Martina Brodbeck. Around the two recorded versions of Structuring the silence, we recorded combinations of instruments put together by lot. Without time limit, without formal requirements, without rules. Pure improvisation. Together we selected the tracks to be i…
My Favorite Things - Graz 1962
What these performances then, and those in Impression Graz 1962, reveal is a great artist in a period of continued exploration and uncertainties, committed to integrating the exactness of order and the abandon of ecstasy, and reconfirming his improvisational quest as a spiritual discipline. But there were profound changes still to come. - Art Longe
The four tracks on this release have been selected from the 1962 concert tape which Hat Hut Records has licensed from ORF Stelemark, Graz, Austria. I…