Jazz /
Àlea
"Sofa is delighted to announce the Italian musician and composer Andrea Giordano (b. 1995)’s Àlea, a suite for large mixed ensemble in which Giordano also performs as vocalist and multi-instrumentalist. Dedicated to Giordano’s friend and mentor, the Italian jazz musician and pedagogue Alessandra Giachero, who died unexpectedly in 2020, Àlea is at once a lament and testament to Giordano’s multifarious musicianship. In dense, rending orchestration, the artist shows us the multidimensionality of gr…
L’Album Vert
Tip! *300 copies limited edition* ‘L’album vert’ is a compilation of asynchronous steps for an imaginary dance foor. A strange but amusing place were eyes listen in and ears peek around. Glass breaks, someone stumbles, something always happens. The dancers inevitably hop to moments of tension of which they free themselves again and again. Almost always there is some kind of beat. Not the kind of beat that makes the hips wiggle, but rather the pulse of a crooked factory or a quirky steam engine …
Dawn & Dusk
*2024 stock* The Wind (music by Scott Clark, lyrics by Laura Ann Singh/Scott Clark)Dawn & Dusk (music by Scott Clark, lyrics by Laura Ann Singh)Silent Singing (music and lyrics by Scott Clark)Above The Gray (music by Scott Clark)
Tracks 1-4 recorded August 16, 2021 and mixed at Minimum Wage Recording by Lance Koehler.Tracks 5-8 recorded live March 28, 2022 and mixed at Spacebomb Studio by Curtis Fye.Tracks 1-8 mastered at Minimum Wage Recording by Lance Koehler.Album art + design by TJ Huff (huf…
Clamor
*2024 stock* Clamor rethinks the notion of 'women's work' as a space for both collaboration and singular voice. Just as our ensemble is limited and enabled by the written score, so might be individual enunciations of how gender norms limit agency. Clamor utilizes a collective, improvisational vision that prioritizes an intentionally fluid style by employing indeterminacy, navigated by the performers via time-based scores. These principles are balanced with metered notation to shape the overall f…
Entwined
Avant-garde bassoonist Karen Borca's first proper leader record is a series of duos with drummer Paul Murphy who she first played with in Jimmy Lyons group.
Symphony for Improvisers
Biggest Tip! 180 gram Vinyl Edition. Recorded in 1966 and released by Blue Note Records in August of 1967, Don Cherry's Symphony for Improvisers features Gato Barbieri, Henry Grimes, and Ed Blackwell, all of whom had appeared on Cherry's previous album Complete Communion. Also featured are Karl Berger, Jean-François Jenny- Clark, and Pharoah Sanders. The abum received a rating of ***** on AlMusic, with reviewer Steve Huey string that, "Even though the album is full of passionate fireworks, there…
Daughter of a Temple
For "Daughter of a Temple", ganavya invited over 30 artists from various disciplines to a ritual gathering in Houston. Consequently, the album features numerous contributors, including renowned musicians such as esperanza spalding, Vijay Iyer, Shabaka Hutchings, Immanuel Wilkins, and Peter Sellars. The results—an innovative and deeply moving blend of spiritual jazz and South Asian devotional music—were initially recorded by Ryan Renteria and then further edited and mixed by Nils Frahm at LEITER'…
Sanje
Antonio Della Marina is an electronic music artist and composer who has been working for over twenty years almost exclusively with sine waves, focusing his research on the exploration of the physical properties of sound and on tuning systems derived from the laws of natural harmonics. Active in a liminal space between music and visual arts, his compositions are conceived as actual sound sculptures, for which he uses mathematical abstractions and self-built generators. For several years he has be…
Cinemascope
CD deluxe, gatefold mini LP replica with obi & Japanese insert. Pianist-composer Joachim Kühn has been a force on the international jazz scene for half a century. Trained as a classical pianist, Kühn migrated to jazz, playing fusion with Alphonse Mouzon, free jazz with Ornette Coleman, and modern jazz in his iconic group with bassist JF Jenny-Clarke and drummer Daniel Humair. Here he teams up with acclaimed German electric guitarist Toto Blanke, the eclectic Afro-American bassist John Lee, and L…
Kunstkopfindianer
CD deluxe, gatefold mini LP replica with obi & Japanese insert. Fantastic work from avant saxophonist Hans Koller – rare material that stands with the best Free Sound albums he released for MPS in the 70s! By this point in his career, Koller was really exploding with talent – a sax player who first begun in the postwar years with modes that were more California modern, but expanded and changed throughout the 60s – to the point where Hans was one of the most open-minded, freely-creative musicians…
Unicorn
Originally released in 1973, this jazz funk album features Steve Grossman and a lineup of exceptional musicians, appealing not only to jazz fans but also gaining significant support from the Rare Groove and DJ generation worldwide.
Now reissued by the legendary "Wa-Jazz" label, TBM (Three Blind Mice), this iconic label has gained popularity in Europe, the U.S., and beyond. The long-awaited reissue of the original titles on vinyl has been expertly remastered and cut by the renowned Bernie Grundma…
Tennessee Blazes / Prospect Freeze
*2024 stock* "The opening and closing tracks from the Blazing/Freezing album on a 7" single by the genre-merging Downtown NY trio of Sam Day Harmet (mandolin), Sana Nagano (violin) and Zachary Swanson (upright bass) deconstructing Americana roots music by slicing and dicing it with jazz/improv, electronica, sample sources, and inexplicable errata." - squidco.com
Glass Bead Games
Glass Bead Games is undoubtedly one of the finest spiritual jazz recordings to come out of the 70s, and is one that you absolutely must not miss!
Broken Fall
*2024 stock* When Kid Millions and Sarah Bernstein conceptualized their new album, they decided to move away from well-trodden improvisational approaches and towards more transcendental, otherworldly sounds. Pulling inspiration from disparate influences such as early liturgical music, Ornette Coleman, Laurie Anderson, the minimalist metal band Sleep, Yoko Ono, masters of dub, drummers Milford Graves and Tony Williams, and composers Morton Feldman and Lou Harrison, they set out to create a cyclic…
Dust And Ash
“Weston lays down a ferocious groove with ecstatic shouts … tugging rhythmic displacements that tease like thunder and lightning throughout.” — All About Jazz
Africanism
“This is the time that we, who have benefited from the Last Poets should be able to say, ‘it’s the Last Poets. It’s them we should be honouring, because we did not honour them for so many years…” KRS One wasn’t just addressing the hip hop fraternity when he uttered those words by way of introducing the video for Invocation – a poem written thirty years ago, around the time of the Last Poets’ last significant comeback. He was speaking to everyone who’s been affected by the word, sound and power i…
The Burning Bright Light
The Burning Bright Light is a mind-meld between improvisation trio Dromedaries (saxophonist Keir Neuringer of Irreversible Entanglements, Shayna Dulberger on double bass and percussionist Julius Masri) and sci-fi writer/vocalist Alexoteric (Alex Smith), evoking epic sci-fi cinemascapes, vocabulary- and reference-rich underground writing, the liberatory jazz tradition, and playful avant-garde experimentation.
Recorded in a single high voltage burst of cosmic collaboration on an October afternoon …
At Sotto Il Mare, First Visit
"No music making can be entirely non-idiomatic. Removing the metaphor, the claim is that it is characterless, without personality. But despite his best intentions, perhaps, one can hear a range of influences in Bailey’s own work – even if jazz isn't one of them. And the present album shows that "non-idiomatic" is the wrong description for much free improvisation. The common description "abstract" is also misleading. All music is abstract in form, humane in utterance." – Andy Hamilton
Jag Dricker, Jag Dricker, Alltså Finns Jag
*200 copies limited edition* Gustafsson and Lindsjö had collaborated in the mid-eighties in the Swedish-American group The Bad Quartet. Playing local gigs in both New York and Lund. Lindsjö later moved back from New York City to reunite with Gustafsson in Stockholm, where the ensemble Gush had just begun to establish itself. With their shared American influences in mind, Raymond Strid was recruited on drums to form the trio Maxcolic.
The trio started off in a free improv funk/rock that contraste…
Winter 2024 "Zoning" (Magazine)
Thirteenth issue of We Jazz Magazine, "Zoning". 128 pages, 170 x 240 mm in size and printed on 140g Edition paper with laminated 300g Invercote covers.All articles presented in English. Includes Mary Lou Williams by Anton Spice, Tomeka Reid by Michael Mikesell, Horace Silver by Seymour Wright, Wind Up & Julius Eastman by Marc Medwin, Esmond Edwars at Prestige by Francis Gooding, Contemporary Ethio-Jazz by Nathan Hamelberg, Ivo Perelman & Matthew Shipp by Phil Freeman, Arooj Aftab by Rob Garratt,…