Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

180 gram reissue of Miles Davis' expansive 1972 album. ""Here are killer groove riffs that barely hold on as bleating trumpet and soprano sax lines (courtesy of Dave Liebman on track one) interact with John McLaughlin's distortion-box frenzy. Michael Henderson's bass keeps the basic so basic it hypnotizes; keyboards slowly enter the picture, a pair of them handled by Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, as well as Ivory Williams' synthesizer." (All Music)

Libido is a noteworthy moment in contemporary Free Improvisation you should not miss. It’s so fragile, yet uncompromising, so sensitive and confrontative at the same time… It’s simply beautifull" Edition of 200 copies on black vinyl. Comes in a cardboard sleeve with inner envelopes and includes a paper inlay. Blemishes are Thomas Lumley (tenor saxophone) Nicola Hein (guitar), Constantin Herzog (bass) and Niklas Wandt (percussions)

Dog Life explores free improvised music on a high-energetic plateau, descending from the outskirts of free jazz, and further towards a harder, darker and undefined terrain. Their debut album was critically acclaimed in Europe as well as in the US. On their new album Fresh From the Ruins, Doglife continue to push the freejazz-punk limits and sets out new directions with elements of doom and noise.

** 2012 Audiophile Remastered Edition of 500 copies with Original 3page-Multi Fold Out Cover, long out of print, few copies available ** Incredible early work from one of Germany's greatest modernists – one of the key records that showed the world that German jazz was way more than just a rehashing of American modes in the postwar years! This rare 1963 recording features the quintet of trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff – a groundbreaking unit that includes tenorist Heinz Sauer, altoist Gunter…

A stunning new 8 CD box set, comprised of recording from New Jazz Festival Balver Höhle between 1976 & 1977, and issued by the German imprint B.Free, offers a mind altering vision of just that. Toward the middle of 2016, B.Free released a sprawling 11 CD box of recordings from the 1974 and 75 incarnations of the New Jazz Festival Balver Höhle. As remarkable as it was, the following years seriously upped the game. Found within this new box are complete performance recordings of ensembles led by s…

** 2012 Audiophile Remastered Edition of 500 copies with Original 3page-Multi Fold Out Cover, long out of print, few copies available ** An early session from German pianist Wolfgang Dauner – one with a sound that's every bit as great as you'd expect from the title! The "dream talk" component here is one that comes from Dauner's gentle, yet modern approach to the keys – one that's clearly learning lessons from 50s modernists like George Russell or Bill Evans, but which is stretching out here in …

**Triple CD edition** "The latest release in Now-Again's Reserve series is Michael Cosmic's Peace In The World and Phill Musra Group's Creator Spaces, packaged as a triple CD featuring unreleased music by The Phill Musra Group and World's Experience Orchestra. Also includes extensive liner notes featuring rare photos and much more. Free improvisation, first touched on by messengers like John Coltrane, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler, gives us an exuberant maelstrom that rejoices in life while it sh…

Glorious Ravage is a panoramic free jazz song cycle by San Francisco Bay Area bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa, that features a large ensemble of stellar California improvisers performing with films created by Bay Area moving image artists Janis Crystal Lipzin, Kathleen Quillian, Alfonso Alvarez and Konrad Steiner. The program takes as its inspiration the adventures and writings of lady explorers of the 19th century who trekked to the wildest parts of the earth, to escape, to discover, and t…

Double LP version. "My Brother The Wind, Vol. 1 captures Afrofuturist visionary Sun Ra's initial 1969 encounter with the Moog synthesizer. The album has been meticulously remastered from archival session tapes and includes rare and previously unreleased studio material. Recorded in 1969 and self-released by Sun Ra in 1970 on his independent Saturn label, My Brother The Wind is one of several albums that showcase Ra's initial reckonings with the then-recently introduced Moog synthesizer. A…

Reissue on 180-gram opaque white vinyl. Originally released in 1965. The transitional "Bells" was just under 20 minutes, released originally as one side of a clear vinyl LP with the other side empty of music. It was recorded at a May 1, 1965, Town Hall concert of ESP artists, displaying Albert Ayler's new group, which added Albert's brother Donald and Charles Tyler. The denser sound of "Bells" shows Ayler moving towards the bigger sonic statement made on Spirits Rejoice (ESPDISK 1020CD/LP), h…

When Oscar Peterson moved from Montréal to New York in 1949, then-17-year-old Paul Bley took over Peterson's residency at the Alberta Lounge on Peterson's recommendation; in his 20s, Bley played with Charlie Parker. Bley incorporated maverick pianist Lennie Tristano's approach to improvisation and collaborated with Charles Mingus, and in 1958 in Los Angeles famously put together a band with Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins. His move into free improvisation in the gro…

The holy grail for Sun Ra collectors and fans, his original album previously released on Jackpot, with Tip-on Gatefold Jacketand Transparent Blue Colored Vinyl and an album that forever gave them a slogan to live by! The record's different than some of the other Arkestra work from the time – in that it's a bit tighter and more spiritual, more in keeping with the style of the Blue Thumb label, for which it was recorded – and soaring along on a wave of post-Coltrane spiritual jazz enthusiasm…

Karl Records catch Konstrukt and Keiji Haino in collaboration as you’ve never heard them. Veering from a killer spin on Turkish psych disco with wigged sax, wails and electronics harnessed to a disco thump on the 1st track, thru to mathy free jazz, exothermic outbursts, and a thrashing avant-punk piece, then coming to rest on a cooler ‘70s jazz-fusion tip. We’d love to hear someone deploy that 1st cut on an unsuspecting disco crowd!

**3 LP bundle** Pharoah Sanders is Spiritual Jazz, is Devotional Music, is the greatest living link between John Coltrane, Kamasi Washington, and the next generation of this great lineage. His Tenor Sound, his Singing Voice, his compositions, and his recordings have already stood the test of time, in his time, endured, ever-aged so finely, and have now (in my opinion) surpassed critique. Pharoah Sanders is a giant, an innovator, colorful, prayerful, and worthy of all our attention, celebration, …

LP version. Japanese bluesman Kan Mikami is nothing less than an unalloyed force of nature; a skin-shredding blast of frozen wind from the poor, rural north of Japan that he calls home. In the late 1960s, like thousands of other Japanese young people Mikami made his way to Tokyo in search of a life different from that of his parents. Since then he has forcefully carved out a space for himself in the culture as a modernist poet, a raging folk singer, an author, an actor, an engaging TV per…

Incredible vinyl release of a previously unreleased  live recording of a Belgian concert by the Freddie Hubbard Quintet in 1973. It was recorded by Belgian radio & television broadcasting service (BRT) and is now remastered. It is a sweet electric set recorded right in the middle of his classic years for CTI – and with a sound that's maybe even more sublime than his work for that legendary label! The group here is a hip quintet – with Junior Cook on tenor, and George Cables on some especially gr…

Highly Rare is a new mixtape produced & arranged by Makaya McCraven. It’s titled Highly Rare not only for the format of its initial release (a limited-edition run of cassettes packaged in screen-printed, string-sealed, firecracker red envelopes), but foremost for the context of the source material’s capture. The sounds were recorded to four track cassette tape at a DIY show packed into the confines of Chicago dive Danny's Tavern, a place definitely not known for having live bands, let alone…

Corbett Vs. Dempsey present The Lost Eddie Chatterbox Session, a reissue of Eugene Chadbourne's album, first released as a cassette on No Prestige Records in 1988. Dateline: Christmas Day, 1977, San Francisco. On an ailing quarter-track tape deck, in a marathon session, Eugene Chadbourne recorded a series of slide guitar solos playing compositions by the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman, along with a few standards and originals. Although the record…

Corbett Vs. Dempsey present a reissue of Sun Ra Discipline 27-II, originally released on El Saturn Records in 1973. Arguably the last great original-era Saturn LP to be reissued on CD, Discipline 27-II has long deserved to be more familiar to Sun Ra fans and layfolk alike. Recorded during the same sessions in 1972 at Chicago's Streeterville Studios that produced Ra's most popular and best-known record, Space Is The Place (1973), it's got much the same vibe, from the 24-minute four-part suite of …

2017 repress - remastered; Originally released in 2006. Egyptian Jazz represents The Cairo Jazz Band responding to the American jazz scene of the '60s and '70s with influences from Mongo Santamaria to Randy Weston and Sun Ra. These tracks were first presented by The Ministry Of Culture in Cairo as a Prism Music Production and released with an additional disc by the composer Soliman Gamil. This release marks the first time Salah Ragab and The Cairo Jazz Band's definitive works are presented to…

**A real find. In the best way this is a record that is immediate and enduring.  Limited to just 300 copies for the world, we urge you to grab one while you can** The new solo LP by Giovanni Di Domenico, Insalata Statica comprises a single album-length composition, initially a suite of six distinct parts that have been weaved together to form a kaleidoscopic whole. Composed and performed almost in its entirety by Di Domenico himself, the music takes listeners from passages of melancholic introsp…

Going's third effort is a joint release by Silent Water and meakusma. Recorded in the span of one year in monthly recording sessions, it sees them venture off into an at times melismatic and contrasting contemplation on forward musical propulsion, 70s crossover jazz and minimalistic and at times downright futuristic electronic music. Over the course of two spun out yet concentrated pieces, light and dark are built into a mesmerizing musical reverie that is equally as contemplative as it is expli…

**CD edition** Konstrukt has made contact with both Alexander Hawkins and Alan Wilkinson during their presence at Konfrontationen Festival in Nickelsdorf in 2013 where the band performed for the second time in Austria after Saalfelden Jazz Festival with Marshall Allen in 2011. All three parts were excited and have agreed to get together sometime in the future.The result was a night of music with high energy and a wide musical perspective. From drum&bass to ethnic funk vibes, from straight free j…

Invaluable CD reissue for Spontaneous Music Ensemble’s groundbreaking and inspirational Karyōbin (1968) - a pivotal moment in the history of free-jazz/improvised music featuring the combined talents of Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Dave Holland, John Stevens and others, now presented by Martin Davidson’s lagendary Emanem label on its golden jubilee, remixed and remastered from the original tapes with new liner notes.The histories of free-jazz, with subsequent narratives of improvisation which grew…

George Khan could be called a forgotten pioneer of the London free music scenes, except that anyone who has heard or seen or met him could surely never forget him. A superb saxophonist and flautist, as well as one of the nicest and most laid-back people - he is capable of outputting an apparently endless stream of what is generally called Fire Music. Meeting up with Terry Day in the mid-1960s, Khan became a member of the People Band, and since then has mostly combined his musical and theatr…

Three early recordings by the long lasting duo of Milo Fine (clarinet, percussion and piano) and Steve Gnitka (electric guitar). The first two sessions, HAH! from 1976 and The Constant Extension of Inescapable Tradition from 1977, were issued on two hat Hut LPs (with two tracks missing). The third, When I was five years old, I predicted your whole life from 1978, was scheduled to appear on Horo, but that label went bust before it happened, so this material is now making a very belated first …

Imagined while crossing the great american plains, 'Badlands' is the first solo album by saxophonist Cathy Heyden. Each side of the record reveals a different facet of the (the devil's) instrument and of the (accomplished) instrumentist. 'Coyotes' pulls out of studio recording the tour de force of a radical evocation of the wild and nocturnal immensity of the desert ; while 'Soda Lake' meticulously explores unexpected patterns and matters. Co-released with 213 Records

Combining some of the most innovative players from each of three cities (Beirut – Cairo – Istanbul), Karkhana met in Beirut for the first time in February 2014 with the very ambitious aim to bring together elements from the three major experimental music scenes of the area. The band’s music strives to create a unique musical blend combining free jazz and psychedelic with various shades of ethnic and traditional music, traces of shaabi, tarab… Building on the multi-instrumental capacities …

**We're over the moon to present this truly legendary 1973 mind-expanding Eastern-influenced/ecstatic/free jazz LP, reissued for the first time ever** Die Schachtel present the first vinyl reissue N.A.D.M.A.'s (Natural Arkestra Da Maya Alta) Uno Zingaro Di Atlante Con Un Fiore A New York, originally released in 1973. Comprised of Davide Mosconi, Franco Pardi, Gustavo Bonora, Inez Klok, Marco Cristofolini, Marino Vismara, Mino Ceretti, Otto Davis Corrado, and Talia Toni Marcus, within the histor…

Originally released on CD by Beirut based Al Maslakh Recordings in 2015. Mark Corroto about Ariha Brass Quartet in All About Jazz upon its initial release: "The practitioners here, three trumpeters Axel Dörner, Franz Hautzinger, Mazen Kerbaj, and Carl Ludwig Hübsch on tuba, practice a unique approach to their instruments. All four musicians set aside a traditional approach to playing, substituting breath for notes, abandoning a mouthpiece, and applying amplification to microscopic sounds. Th…

We’re proud to introduce the new Superfly reissue of splendid deep independent jazz LP! Great from start to finish, this is the kind of record you want to play again and again! You won't find the name Bobby Jackson in the jazz books. Yet here is a remarkable man who did more than anyone to promote live jazz in his hometown of Minneapolis, risking everything to open a venue for jazz lovers and putting on such luminaries as Freddie Hubbard, Roland Kirk and Elvin Jones. In so doing, he rode the…

We’re proud to introduce the new Superfly reissue of the rarest LP at cult Strata East label! Reissued for the first time, John Gordon’s ‘Erotica Suite’ is one of the holy grail for deep and spiritual jazz fans, check the superb ‘Neleh’! A great later label effort under the leadership of trombonist John Gordon, with work by James Spaulding on alto and flute, John Miller on piano and keyboards, Waymond Reed on trumpet, Lyle Atkinson on bass, and Frank Derrick on drums and bells;As usual, beautif…

"To understand the significance of the word 'featuring' on Featuring Pharoah Sanders And Black Harold, consider how infrequently Sun Ra used it and the exact way it had been used."The October Revolution in Jazz, organized by Bill Dixon in the West Village in 1964, presented a vivid cross section of approaches to the new music, including a sextet led by Ra. For the October Revolution's continuation, titled Four Days in December, held at nearby Judson Hall on the last days of 1964, the Arkestra pe…

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 in the world. Thinking Out Loud is their third album. Personnel: Mars Williams - reeds; Paal Nilssen-Love - drums; Kent Kessler - bass.

Unreleased material by Paul Rutherford, one of the greatest trombone improvisers in jazz – heard here on four very long tracks pulled from the vaults of Emanem Records! As label founder Martin Davidson says in the notes, the music of Rutherford was one of the reasons he created the company – and hearing him here, there's no doubt that even lesser-known work by the trombonist is still every bit as great as the rest of his legacy – and only serves to cement his reputation for one of the most creat…

An incredible package – one that brings together two very important albums from reedman Steve Lacy – plus unreleased material from the same time too! First up is the record Disposability – presented here with the first-ever correction to the cymbal sound – a key session in the development of Steve Lacy – and a great one too! The album was one of Lacy's first European recordings – caught in the studio in Rome in 1965, with a very free-styled trio that includes Alberto Romano on drums and Kent Car…

This essential title is also available under the moniker of Sun Song (1956). Regardless of its name, this long player contains some of Sun Ra's most complex but most accessible efforts. Ra had been an active performer since the late 1940s, recording with his various combos or "Arkestra(s)," as he dubbed them. Since this was the first widely distributed platter that the artist cut, it is often erroneously referred to as his debut. The tracks were documented by then-unknown Tom Wilson. If the name…

Angels And Demons At Play was compiled from two different sessions, recorded four years apart (1956 and 1960), that reflect Sun Ra's evolution from hard Chicago bop towards exotic styles that transcended easy categorization. The album was released in 1965 with a distinctive sleeve design by Sun Ra, featuring an identical illustration on both sides, and no sleeve notes. Besides the leader, there's overlapping personnel at the two sessions, yet the two LP sides were somewhat incongruous, demonstra…

Herman Poole Blount, better known to the world as Sun Ra, lived more musical lives in his 79 years on this planet (and others) than seems possible. This collection compile singles of rare hard to find early Sun Ra productions and performances from Juanita Rogers, Yochanan, Little Mack, and Sun Ra and his Myth-Science Arkestra, from 1955-1961. A must have for all true Sun Ra collectors, this is an impressive retrospective on the early days of this legendary music guru.

A studio album between three UK master improvisers - John Butcher on sax, John Edwards on double bass, and Mark Sanders on drums - the trio pushing the envelope in technique and dialog in nearly telepathic playing that transports the listener into their environment, as the music builds and releases in effortless ways that are stunning and exulant; highly recommended.