Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

Reedist Peter Brötzmann, a grand old master of European free jazz, has created a body of music that is considered among the most influential and pioneering of the 20th and early 21st centuries, from Machine Gun (1968) to Full Blast (TROST 107CD/LP, 2011) with Michael Wertmüller and Marino Pliakas. Brötzmann's recording presented here, a 72-minute document made in collaboration with the Munich ICI Ensemble, consciously alternates between the intimacy of contemporary chamber music and virtuosic br…

BE! JAZZ is happy to come up with a limited edition (500 copies) of a true “holy” modern/free jazz gems of the late 1960s. The original double LP was issued by Meno Liechtenstein’s CB Records – he was also the organizer of the “International Holy Hill Jazz Meeting” in Heidelberg/Germany. The sound quality on the original album was not really bad – but it certainly was not really good as well. We spent a lot of work on a proper restoration of the live tapes. The result is truly amazing – after al…

Landmark work from the Finnish scene of the 60s – one of those ultra-rare European jazz records that collectors have dug for decades! The set's got a stark, modern sort of feel – but also a nice soulful swing, too – a balance that few of the other Scandinavians hit so well at the time – as they were either hanging between farther-out progressions, or more inside, tightly arranged jazz! Drummer Christian Schwindt's vision here is exceptional – full of rich feeling, deep tone, and careful…

Considered to be one of Australia’s most iconic modern recordings, Eastern Horizons is the result of several jazz workshop sessions recorded in the mid 1960s Sydney. A pioneering exploration of eastern influenced modern jazz that represents one of earliest prototypes of the genre, arguably predating other more widely acknowledged international eastern influenced and indo jazz recordings of the late 60s and early 70s. Following in the footsteps of early 60s Coltrane and the exotic jazz of Yusef L…

Outstanding!!! A huge document of this incredible year in jazz in Germany – a time when free styles were breaking out all over, alongside some of the groovier styles of the MPS scene as well! This beautiful box documents the 12th German Jazz Festival in three different concerts – amazing music that really shows the transformation that was taking place at the time – and which is still revolutionary all these many years later – making for a listening experience that makes us feel like we're hearin…

Recorded live at the cave at Balve, West Germany, July 27/28, 1974 and May 31/June 1, 1975. Box Set with 11 CDs featuring the best of the New Jazz Scene from Europe and the USA in 1974/75. 32-page booklet with concert pictures, posters, flyers and newspaper clippings (in German and English). Includes complete performances and improvisations by  Peter Brötzmann, Jasper van’t Hof, John Surman (with the legendary Trio Surman-Osborne-Skidmore) Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink and many more! RECORDED li…

Sebastian Smolyn, e-trombone. Artur Smolyn, electronics. Oliver Steidle, drums. Peter Brötzmann, reeds.Sebastian Smolyn (trombone) and Artur Smolyn (electronics) are Defibrillator. They have committed themselves to improvised music and do enthralling performances full of energy and love of adventure. They have been educated in classical music in conservatories in Germany, France and Switzerland. They have played in numerous well-known orchestras and ensembles. Their experience is the matrix for …

Swedish drummer Peeter Uuskyla performs all alone on this double-LP. The opening track ”The Dream” features two takes of drumkit mixed with one take of his piano-playing. The triptych ”Nerves I-III” presents Peeter Uuskyla´s everyday rituals as a drumkit-concerto. His primal, natural, basic, archaic music is illustrated by Johannes Brander´s cover art. Peeter Uuskyla has played many years with legendary saxophonist Bengt Frippe Nordströms group in Sweden. He has worked and toured internationall…

Same recordings as the bonus 7″ included with Winged Body but this comes in 50 copies with handmade covers. You better be quick on this one.

Last copies, reduced price. Killer a collection of rehearsals taped in the fall of 1969 at Ra's home studio in Philadelphia. The studio was also his home and the home of most of his Arkestra, here called the Astro- Ihnfinity Arkestra.  The music here is meditative, soul nurturing medicine. Just about every musician from the Arkestra, even the renowned saxophonists John Gilmore and Marshall Allen, doubles on percussion. One might think, with a discography as extensive as the one Sun Ra boasts, t…

Recorded in Stockholm on October 25, 1962, this session is one of Albert Ayler's earliest recordings, featuring a European backing group he assembled during his brief stay there, before returning to the States in 1963 and beginning his legendary run with ESP-Disk and Impulse. Though his genius is not yet fully formed, one can easily hear he's headed that direction, and this rare and long out of print recording is an essential piece of the history from one of America's most uniquely lyrical voice…

This 1958 debut recording by the Ornette Coleman Quintet, which featured Coleman on his trademark white plastic alto, Don Cherry on trumpet, Billy Higgins on drums, Walter Norris on piano, and Don Payne on bass, shook up the jazz world -- particularly those musicians and critics who had entered the hard bop era with such verve and were busy using the blues as a way of creating vast solo spaces inside tight and short melody lines. Something Else!!!! is anathema to that entire idea, and must have …

2016 repress. Originally released in 1960, Free Jazzwas recorded in one uninterrupted take: Coleman, Scott LaFaro, Don Cherry, & Billy Higgins are on the left stereo channel; Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell are on the right. "We were expressing our minds and emotions as much as could be captured by electronics." Gatefold exact repro reissue, manufactured by Rhino.

Limited to 150 handmade covers, promotional 7". For almost twenty years, Peter Brötzmann and Swedish drummer Peeter Uuskyla have been playing regularly together as a duo and in a trio with Danish bassist Peter Friis Nielsen. Brötzmann’s collaborations with drummers are many, but the duo with Uuskyla represents an alternative to those with, say, Hamid Drake or Steve Noble. Uuskyla’s style is jagged, full of twists and turns. Brötzmann adapts by harking back to his sound of the 70s and 80s. Straig…

Peter Brötzmann and Swedish drummer Peeter Uuskyla, a veteran of saxophonist Bengt Nordström’s groups, first recorded together in 1999 with bassist Peter Friis Nielsen, and have since met numerous times in trio and duo settings. Previous to A Crack to Beauty was a 2LP set: Red Cloud on Silver, on the young Swedish label Omlott, which has also released Uuskyla’s solo music as well as reissuing part of their previous duo disc, Born Broke, as a single LP titled Dead and Useless. Uuskyla is a…

Swedish sax player Anna Högberg's all-female sextet Attack's debut album is one of the most expected releases this year. Attack premiered in the 2013 edition of the Stockholm Jazz Festival and since then its performances gained praises all over, including a heartfelt endorsement from Högberg role-model, sax-titan Mats Gustafsson, who promises that Högberg’s Attack will “melt your brain as we know it”. Attack features Högberg (who plays also on Gustafsson’s Fire! Orchestra, guested in The T…

This album is about a way to simply make raw, basic, natural and joyful music. This album is also about and with the Swedish saxophone visionary Bengt Nordström, ”Frippe” who first of all talked to me about making and playing natural music. The legend of Bengt Nordström (1936-2000) tells how he picked up the clarinet and the saxophone after being deeply touched by the music of Tony Scott and Sonny Rollins. Then meeting Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler changed his musical vision; so much tha…

NY saxophonist and pocket trumpeter Joe McPhee meets Turkish free-improv group KonstruKt, who have collaborated with Evan Parker, Marshall Allen and Peter Brotzmann, for these incredible sessions mixing jazz, traditional instrumentation, and electronics.“Thirty years ago while on a plane waiting for takeoff, the pilot came on the intercom extolling the technical marvels of his new jetliner and reciting a poem about the wonders of fight. I can’t recall the title of the poem or its author but thes…

Frode Gjerstad, alto saxophone, Bb clarinet. Jon Rune Strøm, double bass. Paal Nilssen-Love, drums & percussion. Recorded live in concert at Casa del Popolo, Montreal, Canada on the 27th of November 2015 by Mathieu Bélanger. Mixed and mastered by Frode Gjerstad. Photos by Petra Cvelbar. Cover design by Lasse Marhaug. Produced by Frode Gjerstad Trio.'Frode Gjerstad and Paal Nilssen-Love collaboration goes back to 1992 when Paal joined Frode's Circulasione Totale Orchestra as their second drummer.…

Gatefold double LP version. Includes CD. Fire! Orchestra follow their acclaimed 2014 album Enter (RCD 2158CD/RLP 3158LP) with Ritual, slimming the ensemble down from 28 of northern Europe's finest jazz and improvisational musicians to a mere 21. Since the release of Enter, this energetic and dynamic mass ensemble has gone from intimate jazz settings to the main hall at the Molde International Jazz Festival and a major stage at the prestigious Roskilde Festival. As brilliant as Enter is, wit…

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. In the '30s he was the most rigorous bandleader in Birmingham, heading the Sonny Blount Orchestra and filling every waking moment with music or philosophical discussions; by the '40s he had moved to Chicago and performed with luminaries such as Wynonie Harris, Fletcher Henderson, and Coleman Hawkins. By the '50s he had changed his name to Sun Ra…

Nick Mazzarella is a singular voice in a late generation of free jazz formalists. The 31-year-old devotee of the alto saxophone spends days in a shop repairing woodwinds and nights playing gigs at diverse venues across the Chicago jazz and improvised music scene. In less than a decade, working with the likes of Rob Mazurek, Dana Hall, Ken Vandermark and The Eternals, he has quickly established himself as a vital contributor to the city’s creative music lineage. Far from just a sideman, Mazzarell…

Lead single from Jeff Parker's forthcoming full-length International Anthem release The New Breed. Released digitally and on limited 7" phonograph flexi disc with gold foil titles and glossy photo print of Ernie Parker and friends. Jeff Parker is an American jazz and rock guitarist based in Los Angeles. Parker is best known as an experimental musician, working with avant-garde electronic, rock, and improvisational groups. Parker currently plays guitar in the post-rock group Tortoise and also was…

1977 was a transitional time for jazz enigma and self-proclaimed member of an “angel race“, Sun Ra. During the Summer of 1976, he had stormed Montreux and toured West Africa with one of the greatest of his full-sized Arkestras before embarking on occasional solo concerts for the first time, emphasising his prowess at the piano. Although he had always played the blues within Arkestra sets, he now summoned up the rolling tradition of blues piano, recalling Otis Spann, Avery Parrish, stride and ric…

Two new releases by Jonas Kocher’s Flexion label, and those releases can be had for the exchange of money, other CDs, books, bottle of wine, postcards etc. The first of these is not by Kocher himself but by two friends, the duo of one Hans Koch on bass clarinet and Gaudenz Badrutt on electronics – whatever that may consist of these days (laptop, stomp boxes, synths, electrical connections) cooking up some radical improvised music. Not radical in the sense of things being very loud or very soft, …

This performance from May 2014 was the opening concert at Jazzwerkstatt 51, given by Charles Gayle (tenor saxophone, piano), William Parker (double bass) and Hamid Drake (drums) in the Stüler Church, Peitz, Germany. The concert was dedicated “In Memoriam Peter Kowald”, the German bassist who died in 2002 and lived in New York for almost the last two decades of his life. Gayle and Parker were among his earliest musical associates in the city, as seen in the film Rising Tones Cross (full of now fa…

One of the highlights of the EFG London Jazz Festival programme at The Vortex was a late night performance by Double Trouble, a quartet led by the Berlin based saxophonist and composer Peter Ehwald. Ehwald is probably best known to UK jazz audiences as a member of the Anglo-German group Paragon featuring Ehwald’s compatriot Matthias Nowak on double bass plus the British contingent of pianist Arthur Lea and drummer Jon Scott. Both of Paragon’s albums “Quarterlife Crisis” (2010) and “Cerca” (2014)…

2015 release ** "The members of Nikolaus Neuser's "5tet" are new Berlin residents, some of them from the post-reunification era. The bandleader is a trumpet player in Silke Eberhard's two Eric Dolphy Project bands, and Eberhard, in turn, is the featured soloist in Neuser's ensemble, which also includes trombonist Gerhard Gschlößl, Mike Majkowski on double bass, and Bernd Oezsevim on drums. In her witty liner notes, Eberhard references the free jazz of the GDR; and the "Pink Elephant" respectfull…

Peter Brotzmann, Tenor Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Tarogato. Fred Hopkins, Double Bass. Rashied Ali, Drums. Recorded by Holger Scheuermann, Jost Gebers, October 30th and 31st, in Berlin, 1991. First released on FMP as FMP CD 53.'In perhaps the most understated performance of his entire career, German saxophone giant Peter Brötzmann played in a trio with American free jazz legends Fred Hopkins and Rashied Ali back in 1991 at the now mythical Total Music Meeting. () Brötzmann appears to have been i…

*2022 stock* A rare bit of 'early' free jazz from Italy – featuring a group led by soprano/tenor sax player Eraldo Volontè, and featuring trumpet, trombone, drums, and a piano-less double-bass rhythm team that gives the record a really unique sound! At some level, the feeling of the material is like ESP avant jamming – except for the fact that the freedom of the players is also firmly tethered to an ability to swing, as one of the bassists always seems to be working the rhythm, even when the oth…

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. In the 30s he was the most rigorous bandleader in Birmingham, heading the Sonny Blount Orchestra and filling every waking moment with music or philosophical discussions, by the 40s he had moved to Chicago and performed with luminaries such as Wynonie Harris, Fletcher Henderson, and Coleman Hawkins. By the 50s he had changed his name to Sun Ra …

Masahiko Satoh’s fourth album is a duet with German pianist and composer Wolfgang Dauner. Dauner is one of very early European avant-garde jazz pianists, and he recorded the first free jazz album in Germany back in 1964. Dauner played with Eberhard Weber and Jean-Luc Ponty, and in the late 60s, he experimented with choral music. Being a passionate innovator and experimenter, in 1970 he discovered electronic devices and started using them in his music. He experimented with ring-modulated Hohner c…

"Stan's Hat Flapping In The Wind features work from one of the jazz avant-garde's most heralded figures, presented in one of the most traditional of forms. 19 new songs composed by William Parker, and performed by singer Lisa Sokolov & pianist Cooper-Moore. Parker is -- among his many great talents -- a master of evocative song-craft, as readily evidenced on Corn Meal Dance (AUM043, 2007), and the very recently released Great Spirit (AUM098, 2015), by his Raining On The Moon ensemble. The compos…

A great counterpart to some of Archie Shepp's studio albums for Impulse – a live date recorded in San Francisco, with a slightly freer, sharper edge! The sound is almost free at times, but always with that strong sense of focus that Archie brought to his brilliant work of the time – and the group's a well-honed ensemble who really understand each others motivations and inspirations – Roswell Rudd on trombone, Donald Garrett and Lewis Worrell on bass, and Beaver Harris on drums – all almost worki…

*2022 stock* 1999 Release. A lost Italian gem from the 60s! Bassist Giorgio Azzolini was one of Italy's best players during the postwar years, and this handsome reissue brings to light one of his rarer sessions from the 60s. The record's a lyrical septet session, with Azzolini's warm round basslines right up front, and beautiful solo work by a young Gato Barbieri on tenor, Franco Ambrosetti on trumpet, and Renato Sellani on piano. The session has the warmth and sensitivity of some of Horace Silv…

Climate- atmosphere is what we say.  Soul with beautiful expression, is what they say in the modern jazz scene in the US.  It’s a necessary component for good jazz, as well as for swing.   But to achieve an organic atmosphere which is therefore vital and alive, a relationship of intentions and views, and a congeniality of thoughts are needed.  When Tommasi was in Rome for a few days and had Santucci and Scoppa listen to the latest pieces he had composed,  the three musicians ideas, aspirations, …

*2022 stock* 2008 Release. This record is the fruit of five months of hard work in the recording studio, rehearsals and even sacrifices as told by Enrico Intra and I am obviously satisfied with it. But I sure don't want to consider it a goal. I feel like I'm going toward the right direction and I hope my next work is further confirmation of the effort, seriousness and true passion I've put into my music. Those who know Enrico Intra remember his face like a baby always living in cloud-cuckoo-land…

"Tee" in Tee and Company is the nickname of Three Blind Mice's founder and producer Takeshi Fujii, who formed the all-star group of eight top Japanese jazz musicians in 1977 for a series of concerts and seven days of studio recording that produced three separate albums.This supergroup included who's who of the Japanese jazz scene: Kenji Mori and Takao Uematsu on saxophones, Masaru Imada on piano, Masayuki Takayanagi on guitar, Hideto Kanai on bass, Nobuyoshi Ino on electric bass, Hiroshi Murakam…

2026 Repress. Guitarist Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi (1932-1991) was a towering leader in the Japanese jazz world. His first influence was Lennie Tristano, but through the 1960s and 1970s he explored and pushed the boundaries in free form jazz, leading a group called New Direction, among others. Ever a fighting spirit, in 1982, shortly after recovering from a life-threatening medical condition and surgery, Takayanagi decided to take on a challenging task for any guitarist: To record an entire solo…

Pianist Imada Masaru was 42 years old when he recorded this album in 1975. His adventurous spirit led him to use the electric piano for the first time in a recording, and thanks to his musicianship, he made it sound like he'd been playing the instrument for years. The program opens with the title track, a sophisticated urban funk. Guitarist Kazumi Watanabe plays a big role here. It is followed by a more intricate, fusion-like "Straight Flash."The all-original-composition program switches gear on…