Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

Big Tip! 2024 Stock. Edition of 300. Swedish free jazz trio consisting of piano, double bass and drums. The trio has during the years since their first recording moved from composition-like melodies, riffs and rhythms to 100% improvised music. However, the trio has strong roots in “conventional” jazz which shines through from time to time with tough swing and clear rhythms and melodies. Correction has received fine reviews from all over the world for their releases, the strong point being their …

Edition of 200. Killer. A shadow-strafing suite of spidery rhythms and inquisitive jazz gestures, effortlessly binding avant instrumental dexterity with spacey feeling in a timeless style that could feasibly be dated to any point between the mid ‘70s heyday of jazz-fusion. Especially highly recommended if yr into Miles Davis 'Big Fun'. In 2017 Giovanni di Domenico released an album with a big band (at least for my standards) of 12 musicians, the band was called Abschattungen and the album «The E…

* 180 gram vinyl * Scorned by critics at the time of its release, Miles Davis' 1972 album On The Corner is now seen as a forerunner of Post Punk, Hip Hop, Drum and Bass and Electronic music, thanks to its revolutionary recording techniques. Miles wanted to reconnect with a younger audience, who had forsaken him for Rock and Funk, and the experimental On The Corner was his answer. Leaning more heavily on a drum and bass groundwork, the overdubs consisted of free improvisations held in the studio.…

* 180 gram vinyl * The cover of Thrust reveals a lot of the album. Herbie's sitting comfortably his spaceship controlled by a synth froman alien world, reachingto the clouds and beyond. Well, that's what his stature was in 1974 - one of the seminal renewers of Jazz by incorporating new electric instruments like theARP synthesizer. Thrust is the follow up to Head Hunters using the same band except for drummer HarveyMason, who is replaced by Mike Clark, a Jazz great in his own right. Again, only f…

* 180 gram vinyl* Ramsey Lewis is an American jazz pianist, keyboardist and composer born 1935, Chicago. He has recorded over 80 albums and played with artists like Max Roach, jazz-singer Nancy Wilson and performs with his own trio. The album Sun Goddess is a soul jazz-funk album, recorded in 1974 and was produced by Maurice White, Teo Macero (who had produced albums by Miles Davis) and Ramsey Lewis himself. The opening track "Sun Goddess" was composed, by Earth, Wind & Fire member Maurice White…

* 180 gram vinyl * Herbie Hancock is one of the most prolific jazz pianists of the 20th century. A child prodigy, he played with the greats such as Donald Byrd and Miles Davis. He was one of the first to embrace and master the electric piano, but he always stayed true to the acoustic sound. In fact, he always bounced back and forth between his electronic and acoustic sound, touching upon almost every development in R&B, Funk and Jazz while retaining an original and distinctive voice. Sextant fro…

An unearthed treasure from the '70s Italian avant garde archives! A previously unreleased recording from the legendary Beat72 club in Rome in 1973, featuring a one-off Italian-American all-star ensemble with Roberto Laneri founding member of the experimental vocal group Prima Materia, maverick American composer Alvin Curran co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva. Trombone specialist Giancarlo Schiaffini from the historical Gruppo di improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Cello virtuoso Frances Marie U…

In process of stocking. In late November of 2018, long-time collaborators (and life-long Los Angelenos) Carlos Niño and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson flew to Chicago to participate in the album release performance of Makaya McCraven’s Universal Beings. Just 11 months prior, Carlos and Miguel were part of recording the ‘Los Angeles Side’ of Universal Beings at Jeff Parker’s house in Altadena, California, and this performance in Chicago would be the first time that all of the musicians reunited to re-lea…

In process of stocking. A new project by Chicago-based drummer / producer Makaya McCraven. An addendum to his critically-acclaimed 2018 release Universal Beings, which The New York Times said "affirms the drummer and beatsmith's position as a major figure in creative music," Universal Beings E&F Sides presents fourteen new pieces of organic beat music cut from the original sessions, prepared and produced by Makaya as a soundtrack to the Universal Beings documentary film.Directed by Mark Pallman,…

In process of stocking. Anteloper is a duo of psychedelic sonic compatriots starring a pair of raggedy celestial sound warriors: trumpeter Jaimie Branch and drummer Jason Nazary. These longtime friends and collaborators met as young explorers and consider their electronic duo a continuous experiment into the unknown sonic abyss. Recent results have come back as mind-bendingly abstract head boppers, improvised organisms guided by a unique desire to hear what hasn’t been heard before. This is musi…

Triple LP version. Gatefold sleeve. In Jazzman Records' latest chapter of Spiritual Jazz, the label returns to the source -- the Impulse! label, and the monumental influence of its most prominent artist, John Coltrane. Since the first release in the series back in 2008, Jazzman Records has mapped out the growth of the spiritual sound in jazz. Spiritually energized and politically conscious, the spiritual sound in jazz music is one of the most important currents in the music. The label's series h…

Japan import. Recorded on 29 September and 1 October, 1970 at TSC Japan. Comes in gatefold LP. Reissued for the first time. Reissued for the first time. Rare and rich contents from 1970s Japanese jazz which is now gathering global attention, originally released on Terumasa Hino's private label Love Records and distributed by a Japanese major label. Representing "Ode To Workman" from J Jazz : Deep Modern Jazz From Japan 1969-1984 released on BBE, in his session with local NY musicians, Peace And …

US sax player Stanley J. Zappa and Finnish drummer Simo Laihonen come together on the new album "Muster Point" on We Jazz Records, August 7. The two students of Milford Graves add bassist Ville Rauhala on a couple of tracks to make a bold and adventurous album captured both live and in the studio while Zappa was touring in Finland with the Black Motor musicians. This is a set full of fire and thunder, but also features some more meditative spiritual jazz. RIYL: Milford Graves, ESP-Disk', spiritu…

When Lonnie Liston Smith left the Miles Davis band in 1974 for a solo career, he was, like so many of his fellow alumni, embarking on a musical odyssey. For a committed fusioneer, he had no idea at the time that he was about to enter an abyss that it would take him the better part of two decades to return from. Looking back upon his catalog from the period, this is the only record that stands out -- not only from his own work, but also from every sense of the word: It is fully a jazz album, and …

An average of one album every other year is pretty good going for a free jazz collective, and that's what The Nu Band has achieved. Its fifth, Live In Paris, comes ten years after their first communion in 2000. It's also a departure, not in that it is a concert recording as there are already three of those in the discography, but in that, for the first time, the quartet showcases its considerable talents at instant composition.  Reedman Mark Whitecage's résumé numbers two fine, though overlooked…

Music history is full of miracles and wonders. Ofege is certainly one of them. It's quite easy to imagine this band's story turning into a movie. In 1973, a bunch of teenagers with an abundance of passion for music got their hands on the official school band's instruments and jammed away. Inspired by the psychedelic rock sounds and guitar wizardry of Carlos Santana, Jeff Beck or Led Zeppelin they wrote an album worth of songs and decided to have them recorded. The goal was to press them on vinyl…

Tip-on sleeve. For every celebrated name in jazz, soul and related music, there are probably another 1000 musicians who had all the talent and potential but for whom widespread recognition remained elusive. Roscoe Weathers is one such figure, a jazzman who earned his chops the hard way, a sideman in smoky clubs from Memphis to Seattle, before finally settling in LA. He recorded a significant amount of music through the 1960s, but never found the slightest modicum of commercial acclaim nor the su…

Temporary Super Offer! The Thing started as a recording project in 2000, for the newly formed label Crazy Wisdom, run by Christian Falk, Conny Charles Lindström and me. I wanted to put together a trio, to record some Don Cherry pieces and since I had recently played with Paal in Stockholm and heard Ingebrigt playing live, I knew they were tight. So, things went where they went. I invited the two young Norwegians to Stockholm for a recording date at Atlantic Studios. One day of recording for the …

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…

Trumpeter Don Cherry, an Ornette Coleman soulmate and a world musician decades ago, became one of jazz’s many early losses 10 years back. But saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, who joins him on this fizzing 1966 set, has since ascended to cult status, and he is still around to admire . In the 1960s, he knew no melodic fear at all, in which respect he was aptly partnered with Cherry. This is a quartet set, strongly influenced by the melodic approach of Coleman, but with a fierce abstraction of tone qui…

Semantics was a jazz supergroup consisting of Elliott Sharp, Ned Rothenberg and Samm Bennett. Elliott Sharp, born in Ohio in 1951, began playing the piano at the age of six and started to perform concerts two years later. He soon gave up the piano, first in favour of the clarinet and later for the guitar. Sharp became intrigued with all types of experimental music, from contemporary classical to free jazz and sophisticated rock. He studied anthropology at Cornell University, where he played in a…

Crossfade Estate was a special, distinct project. It was made in November 2005. Recorded in 10 hours. Edited, mixed and collaged over 18 months. It was a development of Charles Hayward's long term relationship with The Albany in Deptford, London. They asked him to push their recently installed digital recording suite and see what he could make. The approach was a step further from the series Accidents+Emergencies which Hayward had curated in the late 1990's. It was a pulling together of differen…

Sainkho Namtchylak is a singer originally from Tuva, an autonomous republic in the Russian Federation just north of Mongolia. She is known for her Tuvan throat singing or Khöömei. Her music encompasses avant-jazz, electronica, modern composition and Tuvan influences. Once the Soviet Union had collapsed, she moved to Vienna, making it her base, although she traveled widely, working in any number of shifting groups and recording a number of discs that revolved around free improvisation. Amongst th…

Phil Minton is a jazz/free-improvising vocalist and trumpeter. He is a highly dramatic baritone who tends to specialize in literary texts: he has sung lyrics by William Blake with Mike Westbrook's group, Daniil Kharms and Joseph Brodsky with Simon Nabatov, and extracts from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake with his own ensemble. Minton is perhaps best known, however, for his completely free-form work, which involves "extended techniques" that can be as unsettling as they can be mesmerising. His voca…

Rodrigo Amado was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1964 and took up the saxophone at the age of 17 while convalescing from an accident. Later he studied at the Hot Club Music School and was soon playing with numerous rock, pop and experimental projects. At the shifting boundary between free jazz and improvised music, Amado's position is clear: he plays jazz. He is so clearly a jazz musician that he doesn't require any pre-determined elements of rhythm, harmony, chorus lengths or melody to play jazz.…

It is intended with the utmost respect that this album is entitled Apura!, which in the Filipino language Tagalog translates to “Very Urgent” (the name of an epochal record by the Blue Notes, the pioneering South African jazz sextet of which drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo was the heartbeat). The musicians of Louis and Trevor Watts’s generation cast a tremendous shadow over the legacy of improvised music. It’s not difficult to romanticize the era in which these musicians first made their marks, exer…

If Brandon Seabrook’s previous trio album, Convulsionaries, was quietly pummeled by a modified chamber jazz vibe, Exultations, featuring the ever-versatile drummer Gerald Cleaver and the inimitable Cooper-Moore on diddley-bow, leaves no holds barred. A makeover doesn’t even begin to describe what has happened to Seabrook with the shift in personnel, now a vehicle in full flight; while the faint of heart had better clear out, everyone else should buckle up! For those unfamiliar with Cooper-Moore’…

The sounds of late '70s and '80s east coast avant-garde jazz, soul, and punk rock are well documented, but in Nothing but the Music Thulani Davis gives us something beyond, delivering a collection of synesthetic, transportive documentary poems that breathe anecdotal and impressionistic life into a sonic-social history about which most can only speculate. Davis' verse takes free flight with its muses, scatting and leaping off the page and the shoulders of the musicians, nightclubs, and choreograp…

Deluxe, spot gloss-printed, massive three-hour box set collecting the full work of Herbert Joos (one of the most celebrated musicians in Lithuania’s avant-garde scene) 1968-1973 units, the Modern Jazz Quintet Karlsruhe and Four Men Only

The Sea Is Rough is only a single (released as a 12’’ EP, played in 45 rpm) that features 2 pieces, recorded by the Russian power-pree jazz outfit Brom (Бром) with Japanese legendary trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, known for his collaborations with innovative improvisers around the globe like Peter Brötzmann, Han Bennink, Henry Kaiser, Bill Laswell and Paal Nilssen-Love. This promising meeting of Brom and Kondo was recorded at Orange Studio, Moscow in March 2019.  The first version of the title-piece…

Turkish free jazzers Konstrukt continue their series of exciting collaborations with Otomo Yoshihide, highly repudiated multi-instrumentalist and composer in the experimental world. #4 in the continuing series of Konstrukt collaborations on Karlrecords is a live document of the concert by the Turkish freeform group with the Japanese experimental musician Otomo Yoshihide from the TUSK Festival 2018. Konstrukt, the Istanbul based free jazz/freeform group founded and led by Umut Çağlar and Korhan F…

Zeitkratzer keeps on being good for a surprise and finally goes jazz! Looking at the line-up of the "modern composition supergroup" (The Wire) it seems astonishing that it took so long: Saxophonists Frank Gratkowski and Hayden Chisholm both won independently the German radio SWR Jazz award, the French horn virtuoso Hild Sofie Tafjord grew up with jazz, as her father and uncle are members of Norwegian jazz group Brazz Brothers, Hilary Jeffery toured with numerous jazz musicians, as did drummer Ma…

“a brisk but free-flowing dialogue with phrases and ideas being batted back and forth between them ... in effect, they are soloing simultaneously with each being aware of the other's playing and responsive to it. Even when Parker gets locked into one of his protracted, circular-breathing solos, Smyth is still there with him, responding with an impressively gargantuan solo of his own. The two obviously understand and complement each other well.” — John Eyles, All About Jazz “Parker and Smyth use …

"'Proprioception' initially focuses on his acoustic improvisations, studio recordings with a startlingly vivid and intimate sound, so near that one feels like an occupant of the clarinet itself. When he adds amplification to the clarinet he presses it into the sonic territory of an electric guitar." — The New York City Jazz Record "Not only London's, but probably the UK's finest exponent of free, extended technique improv on clarinet is also a gripping solo performer, as he proves here." — Jazzw…

**CD Edition** “Peter Brötzmann has made no secret of the fact he doesn’t especially dig playing with pianists, citing a few notable exceptions including Fred Van Hove, Pat Thomas and Masahiko Satoh. Recorded in Dublin in 2015, this adventurous set extends the honour to Irish pianist Paul G Smyth. As Brötzmann locks into a characteristically savage mutter, Smyth responds with hyperkinetic leaps up the keyboard but, when the tenor briefly drops out, he’s able to employ a more deft touch, generati…

"Operating at an extremely high level, Smyth and Corsano share a special connection. One can almost see their thoughts syncing together and their bodies merging into one four-armed monster. Several moments are reminiscent of the best work from Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley, while still managing to sound like Smyth and Corsano." — Burning Ambulance “With the energy and focus on display, it is tempting to compare the meeting to two heavyweights coming toe-to-toe, prepared to slug it out… but that wo…

4-disc boxset with 20-page booklet documenting Mopomoso's triumphant UK tour in 2013. disc 1 – Evan Parker / John Russell / John Edwards – Chasing The Peripanjandra disc 2 – Pat Thomas – Naqsh disc 3 – Alison Blunt / Benedict Taylor / David Leahy – Knottings disc 4 – Kay Grant / Alex Ward – Seven Cities "On this evidence, 'Making Rooms' already seems certain to feature prominently in many an end-of-year list of best releases. Yes, a future classic." — All About Jazz "'Making Rooms' has a connect…

Peter Evans on trumpet and compositions, John Hébert on bass and Kassa Overall on drums. Recorded live at the Zebulon Cafe in March of 2012. Debut album by this rare trumpet - bass- drums trio. A review from Gapplegate Music Review: "Peter Evans was and is a trumpet player who never ceases to surprise me. When I first heard the solo album he did for Evan Parker a number of years ago I thought, "huh?" And it's been that way ever since, whether it's with MOPDTK, with others or on his own. He is a …

The long awaited second release from the Peter Evans Quintet. Four new compositions commissioned by the Jerome Foundation's Emerging Artist Grant and recorded at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. The album is named after a novel by Frank Herbert concerning a mission into space to create an artificial consciousness, a mission designed to use planned failure as a springboard to new levels of creativity. Destination: Void is an epic, cinematic synthesis of eccentr…

The eponymous debut recording from the quartet Rocket Science, recorded live at the Vortex in London. Rocket Science brings together four virtuosic instrumentalists: Evan Parker (tenor and soprano saxophones), Craig Taborn (piano), Sam Pluta (live electronics) and Peter Evans (trumpet and piccolo trumpet). Together they perform an hour of highly detailed, dynamic and surprisingly beautiful improvised electro-acoustic chamber music. Each member of the group is widely recognized as having pushed t…