Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

This year, one of the greatest pianists of improvised music, Marilyn Crispell became the winner of the famous NEA Jazz Masters 2025 award, thus joining the ranks of such jazz wizards as, among others. in Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Dizzy Gillespie, Sun Ra, Gil Evans, Sarah Vaughan, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Muhal Richard Abrams and Anthony Braxton, with whom, by the way, Marilyn spent several years in his second great quartet. As all of us intrigu…

In the second half of the eighties, I heard the duo of Charles Gayle and Peter Kowald at the Jazz Days in Novi Sad. A few years later, when Szilárd Mezei and I met, and played music together, I told him a lot about the experience that this concert had given me. I remember that the intensity, the density, the strikingly different quality of Gayle's music-making was beyond my comprehension, or even my measure. And then the world changed, and what seemed unattainable at the time became reality. A j…

*100 copies limited edition* A Radical Horizon is comprised of a series of duets between cellist Lori Goldston and pianist Stefan Christoff, recorded on a late Fall afternoon in Brooklyn, NY. A conversation between friends, these improvised excursions reflect a willingness to be open to the spirits in the space and between the notes; a spirit of communion that, as Stefan writes, "guides and dances with our dialogue together". Stefan Christoff is a Canadian musician, community organizer, and jour…

Musician A.M. Frison, known mononymously as Coultrain, is well-known for his experimental, psychedelic and world-building music. Coultrain is an esteemed experimental artist and active member of 577 Records’ sub-label, Positive Elevations, which is dedicated to electronic experimentation and avant soul. On MUNDUS, Coultrain overlays spoken word performance and his honeyed voice over smooth soul-inspired instrumentation, gentle snare and electronic melodies. The result is a lyrically-focused albu…

From the cosmic creative musical mind of Swiss/Catalan studio whizz, Zeleste Nightclub engineer, Video Nasty film composer, occasional Jaume Sisa (Música Dispersa) collaborator and future electronic music therapy pioneer comes the synth-ridden vocoder-loaded 1984 sci-funk soundtrack to Barcelona's daytime TV response to the universal E.T. phenomena. Get ready to meet your new alienígena amic and the unidentified flying object of thousands of Catalonian kids' affections through the 1980s as Finde…

Building off of their debut album last year, legendary musicians and 577 mainstays reunite for a second volume. As in the first, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter, pianist Leo Genovese, bassist William Parker (also playing Gralla and Shakuhachi on this album), and drummer and vocalist Francisco Mela, unite for another cosmic album. This project again draw from classic jazz arrangements, juxtaposed with a modern experimentalism and a huge range of instrumentation. Shine Hear, Vo…

*400 copies limited edition* A fantastic live recorded in Bremen on 8th November 1975 set from reedman Gary Bartz – captured here with his ultra-hip NTU group – who you might know from their classic albums on Milestone in the 70s! 1 hour and 46 minutes of free and spiritual jazz.

Until now, the earliest recordings anyone has heard by Joe McPhee come from the period around his 1968 debut album, Underground Railroad. McPhee had just started playing tenor saxophone at that point. A couple of years earlier, the bassist featured on all of McPhee's early recordings, Tyrone Crabb, led a band of his own, the Jazzmen, in which McPhee was featured on his first instrument: trumpet. Indeed, McPhee was a trumpet legacy – his father was a trumpeter. In the mid-'60s, Joe was a serious …

PolyTropos / Of Many Turns is the highly-anticipated new release from influential saxophonist / composer Steve Coleman. Comprised of two live sets recorded during a tour in France, it features his band Five Elements, with long-running partners Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet and Sean Rickman on drums, with new addition Rich Brown on bass. Recorded in concert in Paris and Voiron, the performances are raw, relying on spontaneous conversions of rhythmic and tonal shapes that weave musical figures int…

‘The Susceptible Now’ is the new record by drummer and 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner Tyshawn Sorey, who on this occasion offers covers of some of his favourite tracks. With his trio consisting of Aaron Diehl on piano and Harish Raghavan on bass, Sorey continues in the wake of his masterful ‘Continuing’, a record that placed fourth in the 2023 rankings voted by over 150 jazz critics in the Francis Davis Poll and was described by The Guardian as: ‘5 stars: seething with reinventions of ancient magic.…

Zealous Angles is the first documentation of pianist/composer Matt Mitchell’s long-running trio featuring bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Dan Weiss.Pi Recordings’ not-so-secret weapon, Mitchell now has six releases as a leader or co-leader and fourteen appearances on the label. His 2024 release Illimitable (on his and Kate Gentile's Obliquity Records) was called “one of greatest albums of spontaneously composed solo piano music, ever…. a masterpiece of twenty-first century solo piano music” by…

Bassist Kim Cass is among a vanguard group of Brooklyn-based improvisors who are creating works at the leading-edge of rhythmic acuity. Levs, his debut with Pi Recordings, features pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who called Cass “a singular composer and player: the man can do things that don’t seem possible on the bass, displaying a technical command of the instrument on the level of the most celebrated virtuosic performers in any genre of music.”The compositions on Levs were in…

Unknown Rivers is bassist Luke Stewart’s debut for Pi Recordings. An omnipresent and galvanizing force on the music scene, Stewart is a leader or co-leader of such bands as Irreversible Entanglements, Exposure Quintet, Blacks’ Myths, Heart of the Ghost, and Remembrance Quintet. He is also among the most in-demand collaborators, having performed with the likes of David Murray, Nicole Mitchell, Moor Mother, Jaimie Branch, Nate Wooley, Ken Vandermark and countless others. Stewart is also a curator …

Brian Marsella is one of the most accomplished keyboard virtuosos in the Downtown scene. A vital member of projects by Cyro Baptista and John Zorn for decades, his fluid keyboard stylings and intense energy is legendary—and Medietas is his masterwork: a sprawling three-hour long work that embraces jazz, rock, funk, classical, world music, exotica, folk, soundtrack moods, and so much more. Segueing from song to song seamlessly, this is a work that puts you into an ecstatic dream world—a psychedel…

Thirty-three years after their first meeting, Samsara is a spectacular reunion of three of the world's most extreme musical explorers—John Zorn, Bill Laswell, and Mick Harris.

This long-awaited third volume featuring John Zorn's newest and most exciting ensemble, New Masada Quartet was recorded live at Roulette, one of Zorn's home bases in NYC. White hot and razor sharp, an intense electricity is in the air from the very first note. Resplendent with burning solos, telepathic group interaction, heartfelt lyricism, hypnotic grooves, and of course Zorn’s ever-surprising conducting techniques, this is truly one of the most transcendent sets they have yet performed. With a…

In Straight Up, Without Wings, Joe McPhee surveys sixty years in creative music. Starting with his trumpeter-father's influence and formative years in the U.S. Army, McPhee recounts experiences as a Black-hippy-cum-budding-musician based in upstate New York, perched at an ideal distance from Manhattan’s free jazz demimonde of the 1960s and its loft scene of the 1970s. A natural storyteller, revealing never-told tales and reveling in the joys of noise, McPhee puts the influence of – and encounter…

The Bill Evans Trio's 1973 concert in Tokyo was his first recording for Fantasy and it produced yet another Grammy-nomination for the presentation. With bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Marty Morell, this LP mixes offbeat songs with overlooked gems, familiar standards, and surprisingly, only one Evans composition, the demanding "T.T.T.T. (Twelve Tone Tune Two)”. The Tokyo concert reveals the trio functioning at a high level, with each member by this time able to anticipate whatever direction the …

Fou has struck again. Jean-Marc Foussat has volunteered so much of his time to collect all this free improvised music in its most explosive, confusing and emotionally charged moments that his litany becomes infinite! Summary of A Century (in Memoriam Annick et Fred). The musicians: the career of Antwerp pianist Fred Van Hove is so special (and ultimately little known to cognoscenti) that it seems to me to be a symbol of openness, a quality intrinsic to this “kind of musical practice. In the mid-…

* Digipack CD edition * On a brilliantly sunny mid-December afternoon in 2023, Parisian experimental music veterans, Patrick Müller (trAce Label, Orchestre Inachevé), Thierry Müller (Illitch, Ruth) and Quentin Rollet (Nurse With Wound, David Grubbs) convened in the Bastille studio of Paul Collins (P_LAB, Glenn Branca) to make music, to make sound, to raise hell, to record. "Correspondant à une lettre" is the result of that meeting of the minds and fingers. Patrick, the go-to recording engineer f…

"Duck Baker should be a national treasure. He should be an international treasure. Should be? In my book he already is. I first came across his work in the 1970s on early Kicking Mule LPs in my local library in the UK, which was his temporary base then, and is his permanent home now. Many years later I was astounded by Spinning Song, his CD of Herbie Nichols compositions. Around the same time, I made contact with him by way of thanks following a review he wrote of my work on Stuff Smith and, lat…

“Thollem is a modern griot who has absorbed sounds from every place he has visited.” – William Parker, from Conversations II (Rogue Art)

This package combines two LPs on one CD. Pathways was originally released on vinyl in the mid-70s at the very end of Sun Ra's relationship with Impulse and remained in print for less than one year. Evidence has remixed the original four track tapes and has added a track that was intended for the original album but omitted for technical reasons that have now been corrected. Like Cymbals and Crystal Spears, Friendly Love is an early 70s album that is being released for the first time. Sun Ra biogr…

Another much sought after and long unavailable title recorded in 1974 with a smallish ensemble consisting (probably) of stalwarts Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, Danny David, James Jacson, Akh Tal Ebah, Clifford Jarvis, Artakatune, and a new electric guitarist, Sly, and released on Saturn in the same year. This sounds like a studio recording and carefully thought out - most of the compositions appear only on this record (apart from versions of 'Nature's God' and 'Space Is The Place'), and include …

CD Version Ash Grey And The Gull Glides On is the new album by Scottish composers Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman. The pair have orbited each others worlds for a number of years through audio visual collaborations spanning record releases, films and sound installations. Wasylyk’s cinematic compositions have been nominated for the Scottish Album of the Year Award and been awarded BBC Radio 6 Music’s Gideon Coe’s Album of the Year. He has collaborated with former National Poet for Scotland, Liz Lo…

*Limited Edition of 100. Pink Vinyl! 2024 stock* Super groups are not a riskless endeavor—but when they’re made up of longtime friends and master improvisers, they tend to work. On their collaboration, simply titled Volume 1, up-and-coming American saxophonist John Dikeman (When The Time Is Right, 577 Records, 2021) is accompanied by a group of UK-based music masters: pianist Pat Thomas, a 577 Records mainstay (Shifa Live at Cafe Oto 2019, BleySchool 2019, Shifa Live in Oslo 2020, Educated Guess…

*2024 stock* Can music liberate us? Francisco Mela, who worked and partnered with the legendary jazz musician McCoy Tyner, believes so. On this album, the second volume of Music Frees Our Souls, Mela collaborates with pianist Cooper-Moore and bassist William Parker to build a 2-part extended track project of advanced dialogue between 3 of the genre's most important instruments. Tyner was well-known for his boundless musical talent, and perhaps best-known for playing in John Coltrane’s quartet, w…

*2024 stock* Before any instrumentation, Francisco Mela addresses his fellow musicians, pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist William Parker, with a sense of anticipation and affirmation, “Okay guys, ready? Rolling!” The sense of camaraderie and his artist-focused approach is heard throughout the album’s majestic improvisation—as well as in its inspiration, dedicated to Mela’s longtime musical partner, the legendary jazz musician McCoy Tyner. Tyner was well-known for his boundless musical talent, an…

*200 copies limited edition. 2024 stock* Electric Telepathy Vol. 2 is the latest installment from legendary multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter (Tenor Sax, Soprano Sax, Trumpet, Flute) together with Patrick Holmes (Clarinet), Matthew Putman (Keyboard), Hilliard Greene (Bass) & Federico Ughi (Drums), also known as the Telepathic Band. This new LP follows their previous albums Telepathic Alliances, Telepatia Liquida, and Electric Telepathy, Vol. 1, and Telepathic Mysteries, Vol. 1, further explori…

*2024 stock* This project is the exciting, unusual and at times unexpected result of five musicians from different backgrounds getting together in a room and making music together for the first time. The chemistry they create is driven by a telepathic understanding, hence the title of the album. This is not the first project for musicians Daniel Carter, Matthew Putman and Federico Ughi. The three have been collaborating closely for the last ten years. Their first album, The Gowanus Recordings, (…

*200 copies limited edition. 2024 stock* On Fathom, we hear the sound of the world mirrored back to us. An improvisational collaboration from legendary British multi-instrumentalist John Butcher, Pat Thomas on piano, Dominic Lash on Double Bass, and Steve Noble on Drums, the four artists play generously together. Fathom is an impressive work of avant-garde jazz that’s reminiscent of the non-musical world: squeaky wheels, growing tension, a babbling brook, all winding into lush harmonies. This ma…

"Just want to emphasize that Detroit is my heart. That’s the environment of my imagination. From the beginning." Gerald Cleaver

*2024 stock* Exploring the iconic trio format, Sean Conly (Bass), Francisco Mela (Drums) and Leo Genovese (Piano) mix composition and improvised music into a shared language. Inspired by both contemporary and traditional musical arrangements, the musicians’ distinct inclinations blend together in playful form, delivered in an easy dialogue between the members of the trio. The Buzz’s 10 tracks are gentle and warm, displaying the comfort that the artists have with each other, and lending the album…

*2024 stock* Brazilian bossa nova legend with his much revered self titled 1973 album. Rolling Stone called it one of the 100 best Brazilan albums in history, features Miucha on backing vocals and famous American jazz drummer Sonny Carr.

UK supergroup Flock return with their anticipated sophomore album ‘Flock II’.

Biggest Tip! Limited Edition LP. Deluxe 180-Gram Reissue. Special Gatefold Edition Including Original Artwork. Again, we have the reissue of a true holy grail in our hands (yeah, we know holy grail gets thrown around a lot these days, but, if ever there was one, this is it) - Pharoah Sanders's absolutely astounding “Love In Us All”. Raw and emotive, soulful and thoughtful to points of profound depth, and entirely liberated and free, as well as one of the hardest, rarest Pharoah Sanders albums to…

Perhaps there is no need to introduce this legendary recording, but few people realized that this year it will be 50 years (!) since the band secretly set foot in Hrad Houska and started recording there in the winter of 1974. And Sváťa Karásek shined a light on them.

Tip! Archie Shepp has many made many Afrocentric statements in his long distinguished career but this meeting with Algerian and Touareg musicians in 1969 ranks among his greatest artistic achievements. The backdrop was the inaugural Pan African Festival Of Culture that took place in Algiers in July 1969 in order to promote solidarity among African nations at a time when many were emerging from the yoke of colonialism and some were still fighting for freedom. Their struggle chimed with the Black …

*2024 stock* Conversations Vol. 1 is the eagerly awaited first installment of a two part release by pianist Cooper-Moore and saxophonist Stephen Gauci. This project, with volume two scheduled for release in the near future, was recorded at legendary Sear Sound studio and showcases these two deeply idiosyncratic players as they reach a unique dimension in which separate parts unify to create a breathtakingly astringent whole. The artists combined experience, spanning three generations, presents a…

*2024 stock* ‘Live in Oslo’ is the sophomore album from Shifa, the outstanding UK trio featuring pianist extraordinaire Pat Thomas, celebrated saxophonist Rachel Musson, and sonic transcendent drummer Mark Sanders. The group derives its name from the Arabic word for healing and the music they make aspires to do just that. This album follows their acclaimed, Downbeat 4-star debut ‘Shifa Live at Cafe Oto’. Listen to ‘Shifa Live in Oslo’ and discover contemporary master musicians celebrating the mo…