Jazz /
Síndrome De Abstinencia
Recorded on 24/07/2021 in Buenos Aires, Argentine. In Argentina, improvised music or free music (here, choose the label you like) is not something new. As early as the mid-sixties, Juan Carlos Cáceres, fine arts student, pianist and trombonist left his sound experiments recorded. Thus the scene, fed by musicians who come from free improvisation, jazz and even rock, has developed strongly in the last twenty years. In this context, Osvaldo La Porta, Darío Dolci and Omar Grandoso are, at the same …
The Centaur And The Phoenix
2022 Stock From his first explosion of recordings in the mid-'50s, Yusef Lateef was a player who was always gently stretching the boundaries of his music to absorb techniques, new rhythms, and new influences from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The Centaur and the Phoenix, however, takes the risks and the innovations that Lateef was known for, and expands them in a number of different directions all at once, leading to an album that bursts with new ideas and textures, while remaining accessib…
Citadels & Sanctuaries
*2022 stock. In process of stocking. 200 limited edition* Recorded during a month-long residency at Brooklyn art space Pioneer Works in late 2020, Cymerman’s fifth solo album is his most accessible work to date. While past releases have included extensive edits, overdubs, and effects processing to push his clarinet into the realm of abstraction, nearly each piece on Citadels & Sanctuaries was captured in a single take. “This album was recorded when playing lines and melodies were feeling really …
Arc
NYC-based electroacoustic improvisation trio Bloodmist presents Arc, their third full length album.
Decay of the Angel
*2022 stock. In process of stocking. 200 limited edition* “On a day such as this,” David Thomas once sang, “insist on more than the truth.” “Day Such as This,” from Pere Ubu’s Song of the Bailing Man, is an elaborate studio concoction in celebration of hyperbole. Jeremiah Cymerman has never signaled any great appreciation for Pere Ubu, but that song nonetheless proposes a way to describe what he does on Decay of the Angel.
The album is the outcome of years of solo clarinet concerts, some in his…
Were We Where We Were
Were We Where We Were is a recording of set of compositions by Michael Formanek, and performed here by him, saxophonist and clarinetist Chet Doxas, and drummer Vinnie Sperrazza, collectively as the Michael Formanek Drome Trio. These pieces were loosely grouped together as Palindrome Series 1 and Palindrome Series 2, from 2020. They started out as a series graphic scores that were then reinterpreted as conventionally notated music for this trio. The Drome trio learned the music and rehearsed outs…
Opinions
Torbjörn Zetterberg’s new record, Opinions, is not a conventional “solo” outing. It doesn’t represent the bassist, composer, and bandleader stepping away from all that to prove his mettle as a virtuoso unaccompanied improvisor. Anyone familiar with Zetterberg’s small group recordings needs no confirmation of his prowess. And anyway, strutting his stuff is not his vibe. Certainly not the vibe of this record, where the bassist plays more than bass, a solo venture on which he is occasionally joined…
Let Our Rejoicing Rise
*2022 stock* In the year that Juneteenth was finally declared a national U.S. holiday, 2021, Joe McPhee and Tomeka Reid united for a live concert in celebration. Multi-instrumentalist McPhee was deeply moved by the historical nature of the circumstances, the incredible freight of that history of oppression and liberation represented in the legislation, both the insanity of its overdueness and the joy of its institutionalization. As a preamble to the music, McPhee led off with two poems, read wit…
Rise Vision Comin
A breathtaking self-conscious free-jazz masterwork, 'Rise Vision Comin'' summarizes more than 30 years of musical and theoretical/political expression from renowned activist/scholar/free-jazz pioneer Haki R. Standing on the verge of spiritual jazz aesthetic, his music remains timeless & unforgettable after it's longstanding creation. The first album by the group Rise Vision Comin was released in 1976, and features among others Wallace Roney on trumpet, Clarence Seay on bass and Agyei Akoto on sa…
Medasi
If being the founder and chairman of Third World Press Organisation - the largest independent black-owned publishers - wasn't enough for activist and poet Haki R Madhubuti, he is also credited with a lesser-known yet remarkable music career. As the bandleader of Haki R. Madhubuti and Nation: Afrikan Liberation Arts Ensemble, Madhubuti combined his razor-sharp spoken-word poetry with a band of incredible musicians to create an unforgettable experience of avant-garde and spiritual jazz.
The second…
GSU Jazz Live!
*2022 stock* This is a live album performed by a band of college students from the Governor's State University in Chicago under the direction of Warwick L. Carter. Although there were many college bands that existed at the time, this is one quite unlike any other and under the strong leadership of Carter, the group rose to tower heights in a performance very fortunate to be recorded to tape.
The almighty jazz-funk cover of "Freedom Jazz Dance" under the title of "Listen Here" bursts with a stron…
The Sojourner
Japanese label P-Vine sure know how to pick out the essential spiritual jazz reissues. This is another gold standard that came originally on Strata East in 1974. Vocals feature throughout and often soar to the highest of heights and make it a charismatic album. Sample hounds and hip hop lovers might well recognise the track 'Optimystical' which has been pillaged by Detroit great Andres before now. Elsewhere there is real freeform magic on 'Music Is Nothing But A Prayer', cosmic exploration on 'T…
Rock Joint Cither – Silk Road
After the space-time experience and the translation into music of the Bible of Japanese civilization, the Fulukotofumi, the following year, in 1973, Hiromasa Suzuki pushes his research and experimentation beyond the borders of his own country by venturing, with the usual companions of adventure (Kunimitsu Inaba, Hideo Sekine, etc.), along the lights and shadows of the Silk Road. A backward journey in search of the musical and cultural sources of mainland Asia, from the gates of India to the root…
Rock Joint Biwa
The Fulukotofumi is the most important and ancient historical chronicle of Japan. The content of this work becomes an inspiration for the creation of a sound transposition of the legends and myths that most marked the spirit and inspiration of Hiromasa Suzuki, as a musician and as a high-level composer. The music that is concentrated between these grooves is a representation of the best that moved in the early seventies in the jazz-rock orbit at an international level; in addition, very strong i…
Hidros 8 Heal
Tip! For the 8th edition of Mats Gustafsson's NU Ensemble, Gustafsson focused on the current state of the world, „Hidros 8 Heal" is an attempt to rise and find the questions about the state of things. there is an extreme unbalance on local and global levels at the moment — from ideological, economical, cultural and political perspectives – and we need an equilibrium of some sorts very soon. can it heal ? what can make it all heal? and for how long can it heal?
Anna Högberg - alto and baritone sa…
The Gift Of Love
For most though, this Detroit Soul Jazz veteran will likely be unknown, and unfortunately so because not only was Sanders a great saxophonist with his own warm and lyrical post-bop sound, he was an important fixture of historical significance in the Detroit jazz . "Prior to forming Visions, Sanders and trumpeter Marcus Belgrave fronted a band with pianist Harold McKinney called the Creative Profile. Belgrave and Sanders would continue to perform together, often with Sanders' big band, the Pionee…
Lost In Abstraction
Following her successful debut album After Dark, new ideas have led Whiting to create Lost in Abstraction. More than the expected ethereal washes of sound, the album playfully embraces her many influences into a soundscape of modernity. With rhythmical energies and the indulgent richness of an instrument so often associated with Ashby and Coltrane, the album resonates, leaving the listener lost in abstraction.
"This album explores so many elements of life. From my influences in music, to my own …
Japanese Jazz Spectacle Vol.II
Tip! "It is my great pleasure to introduce you to the second volume of the "Japanese Jazz Spectacle" series. Following the first compilation which focused on recordings from the Nippon Columbia catalog, this time we are digging into the King Records archives. It is almost impossible to capture the whole picture of Wa-Jazz in a couple of compilation albums since it is such a broad and deep genre, however, by extracting tracks from the Nippon Columbia and King Records collections - both labels hav…
Pelo De Rata
"Hey, there's this new guy around that plays like Herbie Hancock!!". When Chilean pianist Matías Pizarro arrived in Argentina fleeing Pinochet's dictatorship, word spread like wildfire in the local jazz scene. In the two short years that Pizarro spent in Buenos Aires, he became one third of the Viejas Raíces project alongside local jazz heroes Jorge López Ruiz and Pocho Lapouble, recorded with famed Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava and released his own solo album, Pelo de Rata ("Rat's hair"). Pizar…
Assagai
South-african jazz-rock worshippers alert ! Assagai was an Afro-rock band, active in the early 1970s in London, whose relatively short career produced two albums recorded in 1971. It has been described as "the second best-known African group of the late 60s/early 70s in Britain" after Osibisa. The original band consisted of five members, three from South Africa and two from Nigeria: drummer Louis Moholo, trumpeter/flautist Mongezi Feza, alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, tenor saxophonist Bizo Mngqi…