Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

On this absorbing recording Keith Jarrett steps away from jazz entirely to interpret the Württemberg Sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, performed on clavichord. Best known for his groundbreaking improvised concerts and his luminous jazz quartets and trios, Jarrett has long maintained a parallel life as a serious interpreter of notated keyboard music, and here he turns to one of the most adventurous composers of the eighteenth century. C.P.E. Bach's writing is famously restless and expressive,…

Where it all began: Keith Jarrett's first ECM solo piano album (1971). Spontaneous compositions of startling melodic and rhythmic invention that foreshadow The Köln Concert. A cornerstone of jazz piano.

Keith Jarrett's most tender solo album, taped at home during recovery from illness as a gift to his wife. Standards and folk songs played with disarming simplicity. Hushed, fragile and deeply moving.

Intimate duo standards from pianist Keith Jarrett and bassist Charlie Haden, from the Jasmine sessions. Unhurried and conversational, two old friends; a poignant and beautiful farewell.

My Song is the beloved high point of the so-called "European" or "Belonging" quartet led by pianist Keith Jarrett, and one of the most cherished albums in the ECM catalogue. Recorded in 1977, it unites Jarrett with three of Scandinavia's finest musicians: saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson and drummer Jon Christensen, a band whose chemistry was extraordinary. Where Jarrett's contemporaneous American quartet leaned toward fire and abstraction, the European group cultivated a more …

French clarinet master Louis Sclavis and pianist Benjamin Moussay in a spare, searching duo. Composition meets free improvisation in delicate, chamber-like dialogues. European improvised music at its most refined.

Swiss pianist Nik Bärtsch and his band Ronin deliver hypnotic 'ritual groove music': interlocking minimal patterns, funk-tinged grooves and Zen-like repetition. Precise, physical and mesmerizing.

The landmark that redefined the ECM trumpet album: Nils Petter Molvaer fuses Nordic trumpet with ambient, dub, electronics and drum'n'bass. A manifesto for future jazz; cinematic and groundbreaking.

The Pat Metheny Group at a joyous peak, with Lyle Mays, Mark Egan and Dan Gottlieb. Bright, anthemic and melodic, led by the soaring '(Cross the) Heartland.' One of ECM's most popular records.

Offramp marks a bold and pivotal step forward for the Pat Metheny Group, the album on which the band significantly expanded its sonic palette while deepening its emotional reach. The great innovation here is Pat Metheny's embrace of the Roland guitar synthesizer, whose vocal, brass-like timbres opened up entirely new textural possibilities and would become a signature element of his sound for years to come. Equally important is the arrival of the Argentine vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Pedr…

Herbie Hancock debuted on Blue Note in 1962 and quickly established himself as both a remarkable pianist and a brilliant composer with three excellent albums—Takin’ Off, My Point Of View, and Inventions & Dimensions—before making what is widely considered to be his first masterpiece: Empyrean Isles. Recorded in 1964, the album seemed to distill the full breadth of Hancock’s artistry into a sweeping 35-minute musical journey. Joining Hancock on the voyage were three of his closest collaborators: …

On Maiden Voyage, Herbie Hancock turns the small jazz group into an ocean vessel, steering a dream team of Freddie Hubbard (trumpet), George Coleman (tenor sax), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums) through a suite of sea‑evoking pieces. Modal harmonies, open forms, and long, swelling melodies create a sense of expanse; Carter and Williams suggest tides and undertows, while Hubbard and Coleman trace arcs that feel both exploratory and inevitable. Hancock’s piano balances delicacy with fo…

The first ever reissue of one of the great hidden artifacts of early prog and fusion: 'Power On!', the second and final full-length by the little-known Frankfurt ensemble From, originally issued by the German arm of CBS in 1972 and now returned to print by Free Flow Archive. Building upon and radically expanding creative ground pioneered by Miles Davis on 'In a Silent Way' and Herbie Hancock on 'Mwandishi', alongside roughly contemporaneous efforts by Soft Machine and The Nice, the sounds of Fro…

On his self‑titled debut, Bauke Meersman steps into focus with an intimate, detail‑oriented statement: a set of pieces shaped as much by touch, space and recording perspective as by melody, quietly framed by DHM Records’ tactile artwork and production care.

Purple Vinyl! How do you make a documentary film about a man who was also a myth? About a musician who was more than a musician? About someone who asked us to trust our intuition more than our rational minds? This double LP contains the original soundtrack to the accompanying PBS documentary! Includes liner notes from executive producer Bradford Smith about the making of Sun Ra: Do The Impossible, interviews from members of the Arkestra and a BluRay disc of the doc! Firelight assembled an incred…

How do you make a documentary film about a man who was also a myth? About a musician who was more than a musician? About someone who asked us to trust our intuition more than our rational minds? This double CD contains the original soundtrack to the accompanying PBS documentary! Includes liner notes from executive producer Bradford Smith about the making of Sun Ra: Do The Impossible, interviews from members of the Arkestra and a BluRay disc of the doc! Firelight assembled an incredibly talented …

Available for the first time since its original release in 1980, this is compelling, funky, exploratory jazz from Melbourne, Australia. The album opens with the floating Song For Bobby, a downtempo gem with the heartbeat aura of Herbie Hancock’s Butterfly; Orchestral Excerpts (From The Symphony Of Life), In The Basement and City Of Stone are high-grade fusion jams with one eye on Weather Report and Return to Forever, the other on the organic Australian sound of Alan Lee and John Sangster. The al…

Vienna FLAMMeS, or: The noise of these post-jazz improvisers resounds from paradise. According to a widespread cliché, improvisation in jazz is supposed to help promote the free play of the imagination. It was the Viennese flugelhorn player Franz Koglmann who vehemently contradicted the image of the naively self-actualizing jazz musician. As a composer of cerebral “cool” pieces, whose melancholy sprang from a razor-sharp analysis of his own means of expression, Koglmann was the most qualified pe…

We Jazz Magazine, Issue 19 / Summer 2026 "Milestones" for Miles Davis. 128 pages, 170 x 240 mm in size and printed on 140g Edixion paper with laminated 300g Invercote covers. All articles presented in English. Miles Davis by Alex Coles, Phil Freeman, Tony Higgins, Ashley Kahn, Tadayuki Naitoh & Anton Spice, Spiritual Jazz by Pierre Crépon & Francis Gooding, Kadi Vija by Wif Stenger, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten by Tom Toremans, Jonah Parzen-Johnson by Giulio Pecci, Emma Rawicz by Rob Garratt, Courtney…

On Fire in Orbit, Hill Collective sharpen their Brighton‑born spiritual jazz into its most expansive form yet: loose‑limbed, witty and rough‑edged, but guided by a collective instinct that lets every groove breathe and slowly catch fire.

On Let the Sky Open Under Your Feet, Skyjack fuse South African groove, European improv and chamber‑level detail into a live‑wired suite of cosmic jazz, where deep‑rooted rhythms and free flights feel like earth and atmosphere trading places.

Taking a slight deviation from the widely celebrated path through experimental sounds that has largely defined their efforts over the years, the venerable Sub Rosa returns with rare and essential dive into the world of ethnomusicology with ‘Ethiopian Musics 1971’, their third release dedicated to the recordings of Ragnar Johnson and the second devoted to the groundbreaking recordings he made in Ethiopia with Ralph Harrisson during the summer of 1971. Belonging to a larger body of recordings dedi…

CD edition. A title like a manifesto, and music with the conviction to carry it. For a few nights at the close of 1972, the Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen held a trio that would barely survive the season. Abdullah Ibrahim - then still recording as Dollar Brand - sat at the piano; Don Cherry stood with his trumpet; Carlos Ward raised his alto. From the performance of November 14 came The Third World-Underground, a record that surfaced only in Japan, on Trio Records' Nadja imprint in 1974, and t…

„Not So Late / Because it Happens“ on CD and „Because it Happens“ on LP is the material recorded live on August 5th 2025 in London at legendary Cafe OTO. Three masters of improvisation: Mikołaj Trzaska on saxophone, John Edwards on double bass and Mark Sanders on drums. They don't use the term "improvisation," preferring instead to speak of "live composition" and the audience, who are an essential component of the concert ritual. The community created by the performers and the audience's attenti…

**CD Version* “Peace is not the word to play” rapped Large Professor on Main Source’s 1991 debut album. His plea to stop abusing the word “peace” simply for rhetoric flair sounds just as valid in today’s genocidal world as it did in the streets of New York over 30 years ago. For Oiro Pena to name this album Béke, meaning peace in Hungarian – or white people in French Caribbean creole – it seems like they finally have something to say. With this group/concept/project called Oiro Pena, circling as…

There is a particular kind of record that only happens when a visiting player drops into a local scene and everyone raises their game. Love Walked In is one of those. For a short run of dates in 2024 the New York pianist Michael Kanan joined the Leeds trio of Alex Fisher, Simon Henry and Elliot Roffe, and the group carried that chemistry into a small hillside studio above Keighley, in West Yorkshire, to commit it to tape. The result is a single, unrepeatable meeting of veteran New York swing and…

Over the past decade Helsinki has quietly become one of Europe's busiest cities for young jazz players, and few labels have done more to document that activity than Jazzaggression. Uusi Jazzi Klubi - the loose collective that bills itself as the city's underground jazz club - return with their second album, recorded across two days in the spring of 2024 at the label's own Pelto Studio. Nothing here was written in advance. Drummer Aleksi Tanhuala gathered the players, set the tape rolling, and le…

Brazilian guitar music has a way of folding the whole century into a single instrument, and few players carried more of it in their hands than Luiz Bonfá. Most listeners know him through the songs he wrote for Orfeu Negro, the ones that helped carry bossa nova out of Rio and across the world. Introspection, cut for RCA in 1972, is the quieter counterweight to that fame: eight original pieces for solo guitar, recorded at a moment when Bonfá had stopped chasing the hit and turned inward.

*100 copies limited edition* "When AJ Lee stepped back into the ring in September 2025 - after a ten-year break - she introduced herself to a new generation of fans with the words: 'If you haven't heard of me, I am your favorite wrestler’s favorite wrestler.' That is exactly what came to my mind as a lead for this blurb when Pokusa asked me to write it. Because that’s what they are: your favorite indie darlings' favorite indie darlings (even though no one uses that term anymore, let alone identi…

Recorded at Studio Grez, Brussels, on March 10th, 2025, by Augusto Pirodda and Giotis DamianidisMixed by Augusto PiroddaMastered by Titos Kariotakis at Royal Alzheimer HallArtwork by Peter Jacquemyn Design by Jeroen Wille

Tip! *100 copies limited edition* "A Decent Run is the result of a journey that began in 2000 and was recorded in 2024, seven years after the death of Tom Raworth, whose poems I used as the basis for ten tracks—ten songs—to which I added two pieces by Steve Lacy. It is a journey through many different kinds of music, lyrics, images, and sounds, yet one shaped by a single principle: the idea of music and improvisation as a collective, choral process, in which space and prominence are given to ind…

In 1963 and 1965 Oscar Peterson performed at the Kulttuuritalo in Helsinki. He was the leader of what was then considered one of the most closely-knit bands in the history of jazz, made up of Oscar himself and two other fabulous jazzmen, Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums. For the 1965 concert, trumpeter Clark Terry was invited to join the legendary trio.The Helsinki concerts were both part of whirlwind European tours that included performances all over the continent, from France and Germ…

Norio Maeda ignites this trio date with raw, thrilling momentum — one of his most electrifying records. Stripped-down and urgent, the music bursts with kinetic energy: tight, swinging interplay that sparks like vintage 60s bossa bands yet barrels in its own direction. Maeda’s piano cuts through with bold, adventurous lines; Tatsuro Takimoto’s bass is muscular and melodic; Takeshi Inomata’s drumming is sharp, driving, relentless. Standout tracks include "Alpha Ray," "Fifth Column," "Slobber," "St…

Killer jazz-funk from Japan here! Since turning professional in 1960, guitarist Kiyoshi Sugimoto had been active in many sessions and recordings. From the latter half of the 1960s, he joined groups with Hideo Shiraki, Akira Ishikawa, and Terumasa Hino, gaining attention in the scene, and also solidifying his position with his albums as a leader, such as the magnificent “Country Dream” in 1970 and “Babylonia Wind” in 1972. “Our Time” was recorded with Akira Ishikawa on drums, Hiromasa Suzuki on e…

Skilled guitar dances over the ultimate groove by Marcus Miller and Omar Hakim. This important Japanese fusion album was recorded by guitarist Kiyoshi Sugimoto, who was extremely busy at the time as a first-call musician, together with Marcus Miller, Omar Hakim, and Warren Bernhardt, who were in Japan for Kazumi Watanabe’s "To Chi Ka" tour. The lively playing of Marcus Miller, then 21 years old and just before being discovered by Miles Davis, is a must-hear.

The long-awaited 3rd pressing, with a revamped obi design. The birth of a new classic in contemporary Japanese spiritual jazz and modal jazz. Experience a beautiful soundscape crafted with overflowing emotion and hidden energy.

SML is a Los Angeles based quintet featuring Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann.

Kuusijärvi/Rönkkö launches the concept of accordion jazz into orbit with their album Aika ja tila (Time and Space). Built entirely on improvisation, this six-track collection stretches both musical genre boundaries and the very fabric of spacetime. Harri Kuusijärvi’s electronic accordion sounds at times like the chirping of a cyborg bird flock, and at others like Brian Eno’s electric toothbrush just as the batteries are dying. The other half of the duo, Tatu Rönkkö, weaves through his drum kit, …

From The Edge is a long-form musical work shaped by the acoustics, history, and atmosphere of Dover.

With Writing, Ahmed - the quartet of Pat Thomas, Joel Grip, Antonin Gerbal and Seymour Wright - turn a decade of notes, essays and sleeve texts into a woven chorus, mapping how their deep dive into Ahmed Abdul‑Malik becomes a living method for making future music.