Jazz /
Tauhid
Recorded November 15, 1966 at Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs - New Jersey, Tauhid is one of the most iconic album recorded by the tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. On his debut for Impulse ! the leader assembled an extraordinary line-up, defining the boundaries of the so-called spiritual jazz movement. Henry Grimes (bass) Roger Blank (drums), Sonny Sharrock (guitar), Nat Bettis (percussion) and Dave Burrell (piano)Pharoah, (born Farrell Sanders of Little Rock, Arkansas on October 13, 1940…
Fire Hills
Fire Hills is Olie Brice’s third album as a composer bandleader, following the critically acclaimed ‘Immune to Clockwork’ (Multi Kulti, 2014) and ‘Day After Day’ (Babel, 2017). A double album, Brice’s compositions for improvisers are explored by two groups of the most exciting and creative musicians in the UK, all significant bandleaders themselves.
Fire Hills showcases two versions of a new phase in Brice’s music. During 2021 – a year of covid lockdowns and greatly reduced gigging opportuniti…
light as never
The distinctive sound of Linus is born from a delicate balance between folk, jazz, minimalism, chamber music and free improvisation. Starting as a duo, Ruben Machtelinckx and Thomas Jillings have always tried to infuse their compositions, which tend towards poetry and simplicity, with the ungraspable spirit of true open-minded improvisation. In the search of new stories to tell, it therefore did not come as a surprise that they chose to expand their palette by including both an eclectic mix of i…
Als Ik Niets Meer Van De Kano Zie
*Limited Edition of 100 hand-numbered copies.* Improvisation is a universal non-verbal language. For many of us it is a practice, not a music genre, one that knows no boundaries. Personally I’m really interested in the locality of an improvisational recording. I find it much more intriguing to listen to someone who improvises and lives outside of the big hubs for free jazz and free improv of the western world. It might seem trivial to many of you, but the fact that the titles and bandcamp notes …
Pacemaker
* Limited Edition of 300 copies with hand-made artwork. Hand-numbered edition. * Lithuania saxophonist - here on contrabass and prepared clarinet, tenor and soprano saxophones - is a musician with many faces, ranging from the powerful free jazz of "Kablys" over the melodic and sensitive excursion with pianist Petras Geniusas, to the angular free improv with Barry Guy on "Lava". On Pacemaker he demonstrates yet another side of his art, now in the company of Christian Windfeld on prepared drum kit…
Red Clay
The first Freddie Hubbard album released on Creed Taylor CTI label marked a shift away from Hubbard's recording with Blue Note Records. It was the album that established Taylor's vision for the music that was to appear on his labels in the coming decade. "Red Clay" is Freddie Hubbard's seventeenth overall album.
Searching in Grenoble : The 1978 Solo Piano Concert
Searching In Grenoble: The 1978 Solo Piano Concert is a previously unissued recording of jazz icon Mal Waldron's mesmerizing performance at the "Five Days of Jazz" series in Grenoble, France on March 23, 1978. Waldron was Billie Holiday’s final accompanist, played on classic sessions with John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Jackie McLean among others, and recorded dozens of solo albums as a leader before his passing in 2002. Originally produced by the legendary André Francís and transferred from t…
Carpathes
"Percussionist Paul Lovens turns in some exemplary work on Carpathes, joined by Michel Pilz (bcl) and Peter Kowald (b). Actually it is mostly Pilz' date as he appears throughout the record either in solo, trio or duo with Kowald. But it is Lovens who most impresses me here as he hammers, rings, jingles the percussion, managing to both give rhythmic freedom and abstraction while implying a more traditional rhythm and he sustains himself very well. Actually the rhythm is constantly outstanding in …
Ritual
Belgium, not the first place you’d think of when it comes to Latin or Afro funk. Yet one of the greatest records to blend both styles came from the small northern European country, masterminded by Nico Gomez and his Afro Percussion Inc.
Ritual was originally released in 1971 on the Dutch label Omega International (Gomez was born in Holland before moving to Belgium in the late 40s) and is being reissued by Mr Bongo in 2013, bringing its blazing funk grooves to both new ears and those already tune…
Marc Ribot Plays Solo Guitar Works of Frantz Casseus
*2020 stock.* Long before Marc Ribot made a name for himself as a pioneering force in NYC's downtown music scene, and as guitarist for luminaries like Tom Waits, Wilson Pickett and The Lounge Lizards, he began his guitar studies as a teenager with close family friend, the Father of Haitian classical guitar, Frantz Casséus. In 1946, Frantz came to NYC from his native Port-au-Prince, Haiti with the ambition to compose a distinctly Haitian classical guitar music, to fuse the European classical trad…
Song Of Soweto
Never released outside South Africa, and out of print since 1974, Outernational Sounds presents two long-lost Johannesburg sessions from the Mallory-Hall Band -- an all-star review of West Coast jazz stars who toured apartheid South Africa in the mid-1970s. During a storied career stretching across six decades, Sanifu Al Hall, Jnr. has recorded with the greats of the music including Freddie Hubbard, Doug Carn, and Johnny Hammond, and leads his own Cosmos Dwellerz Arkestra. But until recent years…
Bloom
Like the flower from which he takes his name, which is very rare and only grows once a year in one region of the world, the music of Rose Noir cultivates a form of dark and fascinating elegance. Traces of its genesis can be found in the sampling practice of the golden age of hip hop dear to the musician, but it also manages to retranscribe the total aesthetics of the culture of the 60s and 70s, when the stars aligned to give birth to a music bathed in cinematographic influences in the wake of Ma…
Duet
“Composition 429” is the first piece using a new writing method that Braxton calls “Lorraine.” The composer’s notes to the piece describe Lorraine as “a music system that governs the ‘sonic winds’ of breath.” Saxophonist and longtime collaborator James Fei contributes an essay detailing the Lorraine system, which uses a combination of traditional notation and color-coded symbols of the composer’s design to indicate “specific sound types or performance techniques,” drawing from Braxton’s long his…
Fire Music To Mama Too Tight, Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! 'Jost may have had Fire Music and Mama Too Tight in mind when he suggested that by 1965 Archie Shepp spoke “basically two musical languages whose grammar and syntax had hardly anything in common.” This reflected the commentaries’s insistence that a chasm existed between free jazz and mainstream jazz practices, and, implicitly, between the New Wave in Jazz and the New Breed led by James Brown. What was revolutionary about Shepp’s music is that it rejected the underlying bin…
Sluimer
**Limited to 240 hand-numbered copies** "Fantoom is a quartet that feature Dirk Serries, his wife, autodidact double bass player Martina Verhoeven (who is also a gifted photographer), drummer René Aquarius, and sax player Otto Kokke, both from the Dutch group Dead Neanderthals, with whom Serries played in their Endless Voids project on the 2014 edition of the Incubate festival in Tilburg, Netherlands. The quartet debut album, is a free-improvisation affair that was recorded in studio in Decembe…
Extra Presence
Extra Presence is a 90 minute, 17-track collection showcasing Los Angeles modern music scene pioneer Carlos Niño’s unique, highly developed, self-described “Spiritual, Improvisational, Space Collage” sound, and featuring an incredible cast of collaborators (including Jamael Dean, Nate Mercereau, Shabazz Palaces, Deantoni Parks, Sam Gendel, Laraaji, Jamire Williams, Iasos, and more). It's an expanded edition of a 10-track suite called 'Actual Presence' that Niño self-released exclusively via his …
Katyusha
This isn’t your grandfather’s free jazz. Hell, it probably isn’t free jazz at all, but you have to call it something. “Katyusha” is ballistic fire music that starts where the most berserk, intense free music begins and then sustains that, then pushes it further. Blood vessel bursting intensity, stamina, speed, and momentum is here in blinding quantities, all the while retaining lightning fast interaction. No dull roar, the densities and dynamics do vary, but there is never a dull moment or coast…
Akisakila / Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees)
*Limited edition of 400 copies.* Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees) is a collaboration between XT (the duo of Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright) and pianist Pat Thomas. Across the two LP sides (80 minutes), and four gatefold panels (13,331 words) together they reflect on, and take inspiration from, the late pianist, composer, poet Cecil Taylor. On 12 August 2018, as part of a Cafe OTO tribute to the recently deceased Taylor, the trio perform live a 'version' of The Cecil Taylor Un…
Sequential Stream
Big Tip! *Limited edition of 500 copies.* Properly transcendent deep-dream jazz fantasy from prolific trumpet virtuoso Arve Henriksen (Supersilent) and Norwegian pianist Kjetil Husebø, together shaping an album that’s much, much more than the not so inconsiderable sum of its parts. Like a fever-dream comedown, it takes us from insanely rich sounding 4th world topographies to fizzing, electric ambience and fluttering prepared piano, perfectly soundtracking the humid un-reality we’re living throug…
The Futuristic Sounds Of Sun Ra
This special 60th Anniversary reissue of groundbreaking jazz artist Sun Ra’s iconic 1962 album The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra features all-analog re-mastering by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, pressed on 180-gram vinyl at RTI. The package includes Tom Wilson’s original liner notes, plus insightful new essays by jazz historian Ben Young, as well as by Irwin Chusid, who is also a journalist, radio personality, and author. Engineered by Paul Cady, the sessions featured nine players, including Ra…