Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

The five tracks on neuschnee form an ambitious meta-song suite, with the various lyrics and musical styles combining to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The design is again from Berlin designer Marion Gerth, previously responsible for The Magic ID-till my breath gives out on ErstPop. The front cover juxtaposes a satellite picture of snow with the Mao Zedong poem 'Snow', which the musicians discovered in a book bought while on tour in Beijing. "After a long phase of experimental…

The Modern Sound Quintet were formed in Stockholm by Trinidadian steel drum master Rudy Smith. On Otinku, Smith wails out on his set of 'pans' (as I believe the vernacular goes) in an improbably slick bebop mode, accompanied by a rhythm section capable of keeping it free and swinging one moment, and then within an instant locking down a groove. While pieces like the title track and 'Bye Bye Blackbird' flow effortlessly, 'Mercy, Mercy, Mercy' and 'Memphis Underground' lay down a solid bedrock of …

The rare original LP  released as a hand printed/numbered edition of 1000, designed by Amy Webb."Braxton concentrated heavily on duo performance during this period, and this was one of the happiest of his associations. ...warmly recommended. *** "...these duets are not only stimulating and somewhat challenging, but also surprisingly lyrical and even elegant. The two musicians extract maximum variety from the duo format." --Option Magazine

Recorded live at Alto Adige Jazz Festival in Bolzano, Italy in June of 2007. All compositions by Anthony Braxton: Composition No. 63, Composition No. 92 (part 1-2), Composition No. 164 (part 1-2), Composition No. 59

This is the collaborative masterpiece of the 3-piece unit, sim (Oshima Teruyuki on guitar and composition, Ootani Yoshio on computer, electronics, etc, and Uemura Masahiro on drums) and Otomo Yoshihide (turntables, self-made synthesizer). The noise of Otomo sharply incises the unique sound of sim, where Uemura’s controlled roaring drumming sets an main axis on Oshima’s precise rhythmical composition, Oshima’s the chord cuttings beats minimally and the electronics of Ootani give extreme voltage. …

Sax player Steve Mackay blow with The Stooges on the legendary Fun House session in 1970 (and rejoined them in 2003 when they played their first show in 29 years at the Coachella Festival, and he has performed with them ever since + rec. two more albums)... nearly 25 years later he got involved w/Radon Ensemble, which includes members from such disparate groups such as Temple of Bon Matin & the Arthur Doyle EAE (Paternostro/Wilcox), Nimrod (Lohman), Koonda Holaa (Kamilsky), ect... the 10 tracks …

Clear violet vinyl, photo by Padmanabha. Live improvisations rec. in Buffalo, Rochester & Syracuse on April 8/9/10, 2005. SB - baritone & tenor sax, slide bass clarinet, bells, conch shell, voicemaster, noseflute, home-made 8-hole clarinet; RP - drums, percussions, gopichand, tabla. Oblique and totally improvised free music.

Performed by: Psychatrone (synth), Brian Turner (guitar). Recorded 1996 live to tape. One side is a synth/gt duo with WFMU's boss Brian Turner, while side B is a solo synth. Both tracks recorded in the mid-'90s. Psychedelic waveforms with a freeform sound that grows on you... subtle and mesmerizing.

Last copies...180 gram orange vinyl with gold mixed in, cover by Mike Rudolph. Recorded on 11/04/04 and 3/13/05 by Mike Johnston & Dennis Gonzales. Dennis Gonzalez (trumpet, percussion); Faruq Z. Bey (tenor, alto sax, gong); Mike Carey (tenor sax, bass clarinet); Skeeter C.R. Shelton (tenor, soprano sax); Mike Gilmore (vibes, marimba, saz, tamboura); Mike Johnston (bass, percussion); Nick Ashton (drums, percussion). 3rd vinyl release on Qbico by this great ensemble. Here, as a septet with specia…

Recorded by Jeremy Wilms and Torbitt Schwartz at I.T.S. studio, Brooklyn; November 14, 2007. Andrew Barker (drums, percussion, jaw-harp); Jaime Fennelly (electronics, harmonium); Charles Waters (alto sax, clarinet, bass clarinet). Pressed on yellow & black-striped vinyl.

Artwork by Muruga. Recorded in 2007 at Sage CT. Studio, Michigan. Muruga (drums, bells, shaker, Nada drum, conga, jimbay, synth); Perry Robinson (clarinet, wood whistles). This magical duo is the result of more then 30 years of playing together/friendship. Two side-long tracks, Muruga on side A is on drums/synth, while on side B on various perc. instruments. The bubble waves bring you closer to the light, while the bubble beat makes you wanna dance... the preacher meets the magician.

Notwithstanding a fruitful career, the great, late bass player Malachi Favors was quite a discreet musician even though no one has forgotten his role as the central mainstay of the Art Ensemble of Chicago until his death in January 2004. Apart from this, he only made one splendid solo album but no group recording as a leader was heard until this Maghostut Trio. Consequently, the present beautiful, original, intense and cohesive record is also a rare musical moment to enjoy. A few months before h…

Sharp-edged work from Right Hemisphere -- nothing too cerebral, and instead some great improvisations from a quartet that includes Matthew Shipp on piano, Rob Brown on alto sax, Joe Morris on bass, and Whit Dickey on drums! Shipp's brooding piano really sets the tone for the record -- even when played sparingly, as it is on some tracks -- and the tunes are a mix of tentative sound explorations, and a few fiercer moments -- but even these latter ones still have a sensitive, almost poetic feel at …

Roscoe Mitchell is of course one of the figureheads of free jazz, a long time member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and nowadays productive in smaller settings, duets and trios. On this double CD he is accompanied by Harrison Bankhead (bass, cello) and Vincent Davis (drums) , to bring 24 compositions varying between 2 and 14 minutes. The trio improvizes along structural patterns, and the interplay and technical skills of the three musicians, and then especially Mitchell himself, are excellent. …

The music improvised by Drake, Abrams, Alexander, Morris, Parker and Parker is getting close. The music improvised by the second incarnation of Bindu is also a trance music: so is its rhythm of growth, the crossroad. The music can only grow, propagate waves, navigate through forms. Dance upon the laying body of cinder-covered structures. Everything is good to it, nothing dictates its behavior.

The most exciting of the label's inaugural issues is a new title from Art Ensemble of Chicago founder Roscoe Mitchell. In itself that is always a notable event, but this new group (with Mitchell's longtime rhythm section Jaribu Shahid and Tani Tabal on bass and drums along with new Art Ensemble trumpeter Corey Wilkes and the excellent young pianist Craig Taborn) stands among his greatest bands. They have all the role and bluster of Mitchell's Note Factory, but stripped down to an economic quinte…

Rob Brown has a sound of his own, one that you instantly identify, and it’s a wonder why his unique way of playing alto saxophone still hasn’t found the recognition it deserves. With “Radiant Pools”, not only does he confirm what a great musician he is, but he also shows how he can give life and soul to an orchestra… and what orchestra! Quite noteworthy is the way Rob Brown’s alto sax (hear his high notes) and flute, and Steve Swell’s trombone complement and enrich each other; respond to one ano…

Guitarist Scott Fields points out in the liner notes to his latest record We Were The Philks: “It is my habit to set myself some rules for each project I compose. Otherwise the world is just too big for me. For my contributions to The Phliks book I made myself a rule that every tune would include traditional notation, graphical notation, and improvisation. In the Phliks pieces I would blur the distinction between notated and improvised material.” When one listens to the 70-minute work, a distinc…

Drummer Hamid Drake has been a major voice in the generation of Chicagoans following the explosion of Mitchell and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He’s most known for a long association with saxophonist Fred Anderson and here makes his recording debut as a bandleader. He called together for the session a quartet of New York and Chicago saxophonists (Daniel Carter, Ernest Dawkins, Sabir Mateen and Greg Ward) and added the great young flutist Nicole Mitchell. The track…

Flutists' albums, in jazz, do not clutter up record stores. Michel Edelin is one of the (very) few jazz musicians, French on top of that, to have chosen the flute, in all its forms, as his exclusive instrument. For ages, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Eric Dophy, Jeremy Steig, James Newton, Dave Valentin and the likes have held a central position in his personal pantheon, he who was able to digest their teachings in order to feed his own syntax: a sound of a beautiful elegance, an angular phrasing where a…

Un Piano is the meeting of a pianist with a piano. It gives to Matthew Shipp the opportunity not only to synthesize 20 years of music exploration, but also to go far beyond.

This is an overlooked gem drawn from the 1971 Balloon Theater (Cairo) show, with the title track recorded at the home of the esteemed Mr. Hartmut Geerken. The Balloon Theater material is, in contrast to many of the more raucous live albums of this period, deep, dark, and intimate-sounding...even meditative. Discipline 11 and Discipline 15 both feature slow, haunting ensemble horns and reeds playing those wild intervals that saxophonist John Gilmore always cited as a reason he made the Arkestra h…

In 1971, in Denmark, at the end of a tour, Sun Ra suddenly decided to take his whole band to Egypt. They had no concerts and no contacts there, but Ra sold some recording rights to Black Lion to pay for the tickets and they flew out. They were stopped at customs and their instruments were temporarily impounded, but they were let through as tourists. Then they booked into a hotel facing the pyramid at Giza. Word got to Hartmut Geerken, then working at the Goethe institute, and he quickly threw a …

Originally issued as El Saturn 101679, recorded on 10/16/79, never reissued before in any form (before Artyard's prior LP edition in 2005). "On Jupiter uses more than the usual amount of post recording processing and mixing, nudging up to the jazz-rock/disco music of its time, but not getting too close. These are still eccentric, expanded, lurching musical beasts. And it's nice to hear the oboe and bassoon -- so often lost on the live concert mixes -- so prominent here. The playing is great, as …

Originally released on Saturn Records in 1979, both Sleeping Beauty and On Jupiter are studio recordings by the large Ra ensemble (including electric guitar and electric bass) and, for the most part, feature the first recordings of the titles included on them (though most were played live a few months earlier). These two releases belong together, since they were recorded and released in close proximity and are both long, groove-based, pieces that range from proto-disco to relaxed groove-driven p…

Never mind the piano, the pianist is Fine! Milo Fine describes the particular piano as 'more remains than intact', yet he still manages to get the right music out of 'that wonderful beast'. The earlier date is unaccompanied piano improvised mainly at the keyboard. On the other longer concert, recorded towards the likely demise of the 'beast', Fine spends most of his time working on the innards resulting in a very wide range of sound. He also uses some electronics, and is joined by alto saxophoni…

Since 1978 saxophonist Larry Ochs' activities have been primarily centered on the Rova Saxophone Quartet, but increasingly, survival in the jazz world demands the pursuit of parallel projects. Consequently Ochs participates in groups as diverse as the all-improv Maybe Monday and his uncategorizable Sax and Drumming Core, as well as the trio found on Spiller Alley. Ochs has stated that all his written music has been concerned with the integration of composition and improvisation using non-traditi…

Awesome release, beautifully packaged: 1 CD + two DVDs with two documentaries by the anthropologist Laurence Petit-Jouvet tracing the 2000 US tour by German bassist Peter Kowald. The film finds Kowald performing with many of free improvisation's most important contemporary figures, such as the Bronx-born bassist William Parker. In early 2002, not long after this film was made, Kowald achieved a lifelong dream by securing an apartment in Harlem, which he regarded as the capital of black American …

"Collected Works" is the first compilation of music belonging to the solo works of Valerio Cosi.  It gathers the best recordings from the years between 2005 and 2008.   Many of these recordings were originally released in limited (sometimes ultra limited) quantities through cdr labels and now come renewed and re-mastered in sound.  Valerio started making solo experimental music back in the late 90's which was mostly recorded in his home.  His first released recording called "Immortal Attitudes" …

Recorded live at Pezner, Villeurbanne (France), December 4, 1998. Mastered by Trutone, NYC. Jim Sauter & Don Dietrich : saxophones, Donald Miller : electric guitar.

The work of Jean-Luc Guionnet deals at times with organs, church organs, pipe organs. Only one piece here with organ sounds. All three are granted a text to explain what they are about, but they aren't too easy to understand. Likewise I don't know what Guionnet does to his organ sounds. Are they played in real time? Are they layered? Are they processed? I simply don't know. In 'Espace Bas' it seems this is not the case, and its played 'as is', with lots of air sounding through occasionally playe…

Their first duo album “Dual Pleasure” was hailed as a masterpiece, and among others nominated for Norway`s Alarm Award. The sequel, Dual Pleasure 2 was recorded in the studio over two days in Oslo, while CD 2 was recorded live 2 days after the studio session at Kampen Jazz in Oslo. The result is “Dual Pleasure 2” , a complex and grroving piece of independent underground jazz. A clash between the highly influential and innovative Chicago and Scandinavian jazz scenes that started in 2000 when the …

First live document and fourth album overall from a band that mixes free jazz ecstasy with garage rock intensity. Even with no electricity, they make a hell of a noise and the album is an explosion of energy. Recorded at the Bla in Oslo.

Smalltown Supersound's "Superjazz" offshoot delivers this much-discussed darkcore jazz fusion album led by sometime sonic youth collaborator Mats Gustafsson, here rummaging through improvs and cover versions like a garage band picking up trumpets, double bass and drums for their heavily skewed but massively charming workouts. Sticking a hairy a tongue out at the polished slickness of the Bad Plus, The Thing offer up cover versions of tracks by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The White Stripes and Peter Bro…

The Thing pretty much tore my living room to shreds on the release of their last album 'Garage' with its rock 'n roll take on free jazz. Their rendition of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's 'Art Star' especially defined their sound perfectly with a distinctly punk rock ethic applied to what to most sounds like truly out-there jazz. It's hardly surprising that the band is made up of Norwegians then, the country that has birthed some of the most continuously exciting free jazz to date and continues to with lab…

Masada 10th Anniversary Edition Vol. 4. Performed by: Mark Feldman (violin), Sylvie Courvoisier (piano). Virtuosic fireworks and heartfelt lyricism from two of the most amazing musicians in new music. Performing a dozen compositions from the vast Masada repertory, including the world premiere of a piece never before performed, Masada Recital is another new interpretation of the now classic book of compositions expanding on the Jewish tradition.

One of the great archaeological finds of recent years: Three lost tracks from the Nipples sessions. Dateline: Germany, 1969. The legendary lineup: Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker (saxophones), Derek Bailey (guitar), Fred Van Hove (piano), Buschi Niebergall (bass), Han Bennink (drums). Over the course of two long studio sessions, Peter Brötzmann assembled one of the masterpieces of free jazz from Europe, Nipples, which was reissued by the Unheard Music Series in 2000. Brötzmann has always mention…

180-gram vinyl limited edition LP. This LP was recorded live Dec. 2 1989 at the Elbo Room in Chicago. Numbered limited edition of 1000 copies. Guitar/sax duets.

Brewery Tap is the duo of free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker & Norwegian bassist Ingebrigt Haker Flaten. The recordings on this disc was recorded live at Oslo Jazzfestival the 13th of August 2007 at the Belleville venue.

Tenor saxophonist (and occasional trumpeter) Joe McPhee has been a firebrand presence on the American and European avant-garde jazz scenes since the 1970's, while Paal Nilssen-Love is a free jazz drummer from Norway, about half McPhee's age. Yet each is perfectly in tune with the other on Tomorrow Came Today, a high-energy session of freely improvised jazz. Tomorrow Came Today is less about theme-solos-theme, and more about spontaneity, unfettered freedom, and collective interplay. It's likely t…