Music from United States

One for the ages here.  Unearthed from the ESS archives and officially released for the first time ever, a previously unknown half-hour from cosmic mythologist and sound scientist Sun Ra's 1971 U.C. Berkeley course "The Black Man in the Cosmos." Ra's soft-spoken intensity is underscored by the sound of chalk on the board as he ambles effortlessly through his potent and prescient ideas. The class session closes with two musical tracks, a piano version of "Love In Outer Space" and a blistering Moo…

Originally released on Roulette Records in 1960, this is a unique and yet often overlooked document in the form of a split album featuring early, little known works by John Coltrane and Lee Morgan. Coltrane, already in full modal flight, is featured with an unusual quartet that includes McCoy Tyner on piano, Steven Davis on bass and the great Billy Higgins on drums. Lee Morgan's straight ahead hard bop set sees the young trumpet genius leading a hard swinging group that includes a fabulous Wayne…

"...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…

*400 copies limited edition* The seeds of composer Rafael Anton Irisarri’s latest LP were first planted during his 2016 tour in Italy, months before that Autumn’s unexpected presidential election. The linguistic glitch of an innocuous diner in Milan named “il Mito Americano” – meant as “The American Dream” but translated literally to English as “The American Myth” – sparked a series of ideas, both conceptual and musical. Amid the chaos of 2020, while exploring the stark world of brutalist archit…

Propulsion is the debut album by a stellar quartet of journeymen Chicago improvisers assembled by saxophonist and Aerophonic Records founder Dave Rempis. Vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz is known for his extensive work with the late Peter Brötzmann, Hamid Drake, Mike Reed, and his own trio Sun Rooms. Bassist Joshua Abrams is the leader of Natural Information Society, perhaps the best-known group internationally to emerge from Chicago over the last decade. He also maintains longstanding relationship…

Biggest Tip!  180 gram Vinyl Edition. Gatefold Cover. Recorded in New York City and Los Angeles, California, and was released in 1973 by Impulse! Records. Wisdom Through Music, with its smaller line-up - Sanders is joined by flutist James Branch, pianist Joe Bonner, bassist Cecil McBee, drummer Norman Connors, and percussionists Badal Roy, James Mtume, and Lawrence Killian. - consists of five tracks. Most notable is "High Life," on which Sanders emulates the West African style of music with roil…

Limited Edition 180 Gram Gatefold LP Reissue. From the early 1960s to the late '80s, A&M was one of the most eclectic and powerful independent record labels in the world. The roster of artists who recorded there includes The Carpenters, Captain Beefheart, The Police, Joe Cocker, Suzanne Vega, Procol Harum and Janet Jackson, among others. Founded as an independent company by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss in 1962, soon the label garnered interest and success, and was acquired by PolyGram in 1989. Thr…

*100 copies limited edition* Limited to 100 Numbered LPs housed in thick silk screened cardstock. The new chapter in the Decimus 'Morning And Evening Ragas' saga which has already reached volume 4. Pat Murano playing at his absolute peak. Intense and loud, this is totally rad. Open, free and beautiful.

LP version.If cellist/composer Janel Leppin’s wonderful and widely celebrated 2022 solo debut album Ensemble Volcanic Ash was a creative eruption, her follow up To March Is to Love is a glowing magma flow that greatly expands her singular band’s sonic terrain. The project thrums with immediacy as Leppin and her all-star sextet honor their musical ancestors and reflect on disquieting times.  Bandcamp Daily declared “There’s no end to the melodic intensity of Ensemble Volcanic Ash. Even at its lus…

Building on the back of their recent, stellar reissue of Eddie Gale's “Ghetto Music”, Elemental Music continues their long-standing initiative to make important works from the history of jazz available to a new generation of listeners with the much needed and long overdue, first ever vinyl reissue of Pharoah Sanders’ towering 1973 classic “Village of the Pharoahs”. Easily some of Sanders’ most radical music ever laid to tape, unfolding as a bristling hybrid of modal, spiritual jazz and driving f…

Big Tip!  180 gram Vinyl Edition. Gatefold Cover. One of the last records made by avant sax legend Albert Ayler – a really mind-expanding album that's unlike anything else he ever did! By the time of the record, Ayler had made a full round trip between the New York and European jazz scenes – leaving important influences wherever he went, and trying desperately to pick up new ones the further he moved on. Here, he's working in a style that's a bit like that of Archie Shepp at the time – still ste…

*75 copies limited edition* Henry Fraser bores into the sound of the double bass to explore the endless patterns of its otherwise hidden contours. The instrument acquires its own dynamic landscape, its own body, and its own mode of perception – opening a space of acute, granular perceptivity in which presumed boundaries are blurred: between center and periphery, sonic and tactile, instrumentalist and instrument, performer and listener."When the poet, Charles Olson wrote, “the HEAD, by way of the…

Originally released by Extreme in 1991, Tamper holds a significant place in Jim O'Rourke's discography, as it represents one of his early ventures into the realm of electro-acoustic music

Strut proudly presents a special edition, deluxe repress of Sun Ra’s classic ‘Lanquidity’, for the 25th anniversary of the label. Housed in a tip-on sleeve with  OBI strip, this new special editions features an A2 poster including a rare Veryl Oakland photograph of Sun Ra in his home, as well as liner notes by Tom Buchler (Philly Jazz), Michael Ray and Danny Ray Thompson (Sun Ra Arkestra) and Bob Blank. “Enter the sober, tranquil chambers of the next moment. Soft angles of lights into space, cho…

2026 repress on vinyl; Deluxe 3LP box version with an 8-page, large-format lyric booklet and printed inner sleeves. For various reasons Have One On Me, Joanna Newsom's new triple-album defies the notion of fast-turnaround appraisals. Apart from sheer abundance of music here, it's also very dense and scrupulously laboured over, not only by Newsom herself but a select band of fellow musicians and arrangers - not to mention ace mixing engineers Jim O'Rourke, and Noah Georgeson (best known for his w…

The chronicle continues, deepening the legend… Out Under Streets serves as a milestone in the profuse and vastly intangible catalog of Bug Bus Piano – a decade into the cult project’s existence, this album stands as its first LP. But Bug Bus Piano, the originator of Hard Ambient, is perhaps better understood as an outlook or world unto itself. At any given moment it is a spirited performance of hyper-ambivalence, a refuge and processing center for personal history, populist strife and achievemen…

Cleared, the duo of Steven Hess and Michael Vallera has re-emerged with Hexa, their sixth release and third for the Touch label. Steven Hess recorded sessions in the group's practice space, handing them over to Vallera, who in turn added his home recordings, mixing and manipulating them. The final product provides only the barest of hints to any instrumental points of origin, such is the extent of their intermixture.

First official anthology of Lou Reed’s work for Pickwick Records 1964-1965

This Da Vinci Classics album stems from a friendship and a cooperation. Its protagonists are two musicians, Walter Prati and Alvin Curran, each contributing his own experience, musical principles, creativity and openness to artistic encounters. Walter Prati’s musical background is as unusual as it is fascinating. He describes it as a “mix of non-academic provenances and academic experiences”. His first approaches to music performance date back to his early teens, when he began playing the bass i…

“Radiance” is the first album of solo piano improvisations from Keith Jarrett in a decade. The last such was “La Scala”, recorded 1995, released 1997. (In between, in 1999, Jarrett issued the home recording “The Melody At Night With You”, a solo album of standards and folk songs). Four years ago, Jarrett told interviewers it was unlikely he would return to solo piano performance. Having been sidelined for several seasons by illness, he had attempted two solo concerts in Japan in the autumn of 19…