Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

Decades before the advent of 'world music', bassist-composer Ahmed Abdul-Malik introduced Arabic music into jazz, creating a distinct, unique sound that was far beyond its time. Best known in jazz circles for his solid work with Randy Weston and T…

The first and only recorded meeting between two absolute giants of the soprano saxophone - Steve Lacy and Joe McPhee - finally sees the light of day after 36 years! On June 9, 1977, Lacy and McPhee shared a double bill in Basel, Switzerland. Lacy inv…

Triple LP version. Housed in a deluxe triple gatefold sleeve with download card for the entire album. Jazzman Records presents the fourth volume in their Spiritual Jazz compilation series. It's well-known that throughout the 20th century, fed up w…

Inframince / Immensity spotlights two pairs of improvisers at the root of Berlin’s experimental scene. “Inframince” finds Michael Thieke and Olivier Toulemonde submerged in analog exploration: Thieke’s clarinet curls and pulses in slowarcs, sometimes…

Public Private assembles two improvising groups from divergent scenes: Barcelona’s Atolón and London’s Chip Shop Music. The album opens with “Public,” a 44-minute collective improvisation by Atolón: Ruth Barberán (trumpet/objects), Alfredo Costa Mont…

Released 10 March 2013. The album combines the inspired play of Eric Vagnon (saxophone) with a solid rhythm layer driven by the double bassist Eric Brochard and legendary drummer Nicolas Lelièvre. So good...

"Boneshaker are Mars Williams (reeds, toy instruments), Paal Nilssen-Love (drums & percussion) and Kent Kessler (bass), three prolific powerhouse musicians, carrying among them a Grammy nomination and decades of experience with the top ensembles i…

Concert film by Pavel Borodin featuring the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet benefit concert at the Music Unlimited festival in Wels. Guests: Toshinori Kondo, Michiyo Yagi, Yoshihide Otomo and Akira Sakata It was a special wish of the curator of the…

World Premiere!! Available for the 1st time, this legendary live set by the near-mythical Roy Brooks' Sensational Aboriginal Choir. which used to be one of the highlight of the Montreux/Detroit Jazz Festival. unique & special ?! kind of.After the Imp…

180g LP in fine paper silkscreen printed cover. Recorded in London, December 2011 and in Milwaukee, October 2011. A solo album by saxophone virtuoso John Butcher featuring some of his most exceptional extended techniques which he has been developi…

Live in Zurich 1984. Reissue of a double vinyl publish on the same label. Donald Miller, guitar, alto saxophone (on one track). Jim Sauter, tenor, alto, baritone saxophones. Don Dietrich, tenor, alto saxophone, guitar (on one track). 'First off, t…

CD edition. Great work from this heavy heavy trio – a group that features the talents of probably the three greatest living avant saxophonists in the world – Peter Brotzmann on tenor, alto, clarinet, and tarogato, Ken Vandermark on tenor and clari…

180 gram vinyl reissue of German free improvisation pianist and composer Alexander von Schlippenbach's The Living Music, originally released on his own Quasar label in 1969. Recorded by Conny Plank, it features Peter Brötzmann (tenor & baritone saxop…

**Tri-fold digicase with 20-page booklet of liner-notes and photos** Kris Needs repositions the roots of Sonny Blount aka Sun Ra on three discs (60 tracks) spanning his earliest 1933 recordings of big band jazz and be-bop, thru the birth of Sun Ra…

If jazz, as the eminent critic Whitney Balliet once wrote, is the “sound of surprise,” Cuts, an intensely cathartic, fiercely turbulent collaboration between Japanese noise purveyor Masami Akita (aka Merzbow), Hungarian drummer Balazs Pandi…

At last, the reissue of German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann's long out-of-print first record, one of the most auspicious debuts of free music, and a trenchant tribute to the inventor of the saxophone. For Adolphe Sax is a roundhouse punch of European …

Reissue of a very obscure free music document, recorded in Cambridge, MA, sometime in 1970. Notable for it's Saturn-esque paste-on cover artwork (eloquently reconstructed here), and general cosmic vibe, this record harkens back to days when "out" …

Things get dislocated, gather themselves, spread across areas of varying intensities. More intimate or more complex song. closer to the sacred, left untouched by mediation, even slightly incomprehensible, though mostlyambivalent and reality-pierc…

A study of free-form improvisation, rhythm and language using vocalizations, cello and analog electronics. These recordings in two movements can be taken as, on the one hand, pieces for two voices and improvisation chamber orchestra (which is what …

Kari Rønnekleiv, violin. Ole-Henrik Moe, viola. In 2011 Rønnekleiv/Moe released the album “A summer’s night at the crooked forest” on SOFA. The London based music magazine WIRE wrote that the album is a technical tour de force. And a musical one, …

Edition of 300 (coproduced with phase records & mafia). 'it was in dhalgren that i had read about a father getting fired, and who trying not to depress his family about it, wakes up every day, shaves, dresses himself up, has breakfast and leaves …

A Saturn release from the 1960's featuring a wide-range of pieces from studio recordings, rehearsals, and live concerts that are all heart-felt and made in the traditional Sun Ra style, starting with eight delirious minutes of kora and piano frame -…

As a duo Tim Catlin and David Brown aka Candlesnuffer come together as 'Helium Clench' and boast long histories in the Melbourne and international avant-garde music world. Both have independently developed a fascination with microtonal sound, in …

Guitarist and founding member of Maajun in 1969 (That released one album under the Vogue label), Cyril Lefebvre recorded three beautiful albums during the Seventies. Cocaïne Blues, the second one, is one of the finest achievements of the Golden Age o…

Long Story Short, the festival organized as the 25th edition of the Unlimited Festival in Wels, Austria (November 2011) designed a festival around Peter Brotzmann's musical practice -- not a retrospective, but a representation of the contemporary mus…

Latest (and final) volume of the long dormant J.I. Collection - PSF's groundbreaking collection of rare Japanese free jazz recordings from the early 1970s! Kaoru Abe was easily the brightest shooting star of the late sixties and early seventies J…

The HBE family are in full effect on this 6-track mini-album. Forming like a brass-plated Voltron, they spin from swaggering Hip-Hop funk on 'Starfighter' to sparky, feel-good breakbeat funk on 'Touch The Sky' and more sultry, jazzed up styles for…

Originally schooled in the foundations of hard bop, cornetist Rob Mazurek, quickly surpassed the form's conventional limitations; his multihued electro-acoustic work over the past two decades has subsequently drawn inspiration from numerous genres be…

Triumphal new CD, the first new recordings in an age, from one of the greatest bands on the goddamn planet, the trio of saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and guitarist Donald Miller aka Borbetomagus: this is a roof-raising performance, reco…

Northern Spy is proud to present two of John Butcher’s most recent experiments in moving sound waves through space. On Bell Trove Spools we hear Butcher in two distinct situations: Richmond Hall, a Houston art gallery housing a permanent Dan Flavin c…

Koboku Senju, meaning something like a Selection of Dead Trees', is the quintet of Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Martin Taxt, Eivind Lønning, and Espen Reinertsen. Akiyama and Nakamura, on guitar and no input mixing board respectively, have lon…

Hard-grooving Ethiopiques killers from the "Ethiopian Elvis". This eponymous collection gathers some of his finest moments from 45's recorded between 1967 and 1974, nine total, mixing R&B, soul, rock'n'roll with that magically mystical blend of mo…

With any sizeable Brötzmann group, the temptation is always there to compare it to his classic Machine Gun unit. This new tentet doesn’t match up to the unbridled ferocity of that earlier grouping, but then what has? Perhaps the greatest sea change s…

Stripped-down' probably isn't the right term for a release like this, but Brotzmann's reeds and Uuskyla's drums are the only two constituents of this double disc set, setting themselves up for comparison with fellow free improv pillars Ken Vanderm…

Would it be that when everything finishes that everything starts? Rather than a postlude or a coda, the five minutes a cappella by Joe McPhee on the tenor saxophone placed here in thirteenth position, sound like a song of love and hope coloured utopi…

Despite the compositions’ respective demands, Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble fully and vividly represented Roscoe Mitchell’s varied means of creating chemistry between written and improvised materials. At every turn in the program, they pla…

If the three compositions proposed by Denis Fournier have already been recorded, they merit to be here as resurgences, like scenarios encouraging the freedom of transformation without which free interpretation is nothing. “I often say that I don’t ma…

Lawrence Butch Morris developed the concept of “conduction” to account for a mode of Instant Composition based on the creative freedom of the players stimulated by the gestures of a central conductor. AP/DP, with this cd, invent the practice of music…

Unboxed editiion. 4 x CD: for some time now, alan silva has commented that the market value of his records should more closely resemble the price of a lithograph or an artist's print than the price an ordinary record. we remind him that his albums…

A stunning series of duo improvisations from two of the world's finest string players, whose shared dynamism and intensity of purpose produces fluid, powerful music that ranges from dense viscosity to swift effervescence.With all-strings improvisatio…