★Hat Hut Records

First visit archive offers previously unreleased recordings of historic and musical importance. "When, in this music, he succeeds in fusing the emotional (translated into its lyrical and dramatic qualities) pas- sage of ritual with the complex archit…

"Marion Brown was already defying categorisation in 1966 when he recorded Three For Shepp, whose six tracks open Three For Shepp To Gespächsfetzen Revisited. Brown’s opening “New Blues” and Archie Shepp’s closing “Delicado,” though compelling,are re…

"Each composition arises from a clear idea that the listener can grasp. That is their beauty, I’d argue – there’s no need for, or possibility of, any process of beautification. They are conceptual art in the broadest sense, but vividly concrete in th…

"Near Blue – A Taste of Melancholy is a soundtrack for being unstuck in time, if just for an hour. It is a glide through a rich past and present, with glimpses of a future worth reaching." - Bill Shoemaker Franz Koglmann - flugelhornGert Schubert - v…

"Heard together, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and Pre Bird suggest the enormity of  Charles Mingus’ artistic vision. No one album encompasses it in its entirety, and perhaps not even  two or three. However, these recordings, made six months…

"I've been listening to Christoph Gallio and the various incarnations of Day & Taxi for over three decades – almost since its inception. On this album, however, the Swiss saxophonist makes a debut with a different trio, featuring British improvisers …

Temporary Super Offer! "This CD, the third album of my piano works played by Satoko Inoue, presents all the pieces written for piano between 2015 and 2020, along with an introductory miniature piece." – Jo Kondo

Temporary Super Offer! "This Revisited disc chronicles the trio in transition. Formed in autumn 1959, the group recorded its debut album in December. Following a coast-to-coast tour, it opened at Birdland in March 1960, when the first five tracks her…

“He was nomadic. The strongest and most lasting thing you can say about Alan is that he was an original, as original as you can get. He didn’t want any academic guidelines to equip him to reinvent the wheel. If he saw something like that, he’d go t…

Temporary Super Offer! "For the followers of Ornette Coleman’s music, 1963 and 1964 were the lost years. His final session for Atlantic Records, Ornette on Tenor, was in March 1961, and though he played sporadic club dates in ’62, his self-produced T…

Temporary Super Offer! "One Step Beyond is rightly seen as a pivot point in Jackie McLean’s evolution, but its adventurousness was not without precedent. As A.B. Spellman noted in Four Lives in the Bebop Business, “Quadrangle” – the opening track for…

Temporary Super Offer! "Mingus the visionary composer. Mingus the virtuoso bassist. Mingus the volcanic bandleader. As the 1960s began, with the new decade bringing a radically expansive new view of the possibilities of jazz expression, Charles Mingu…

Temporary Super Offer!  "I ask how CALATO's use of graphic scores help them break down the divisions between  contemporary composition and improvisation? “We started as a noise improvisation band,” they respond. “We spent several years playing togeth…

While his recordings with Archie Shepp and 7-Tette established Bill Dixon as a distinctive jazz modernist, ahead of the curve, creating a niche within a crowded field of emerging artists, it is Intents and Purposes (Orchestra) that established his si…

Tip! *200 copies limited release. Vinyl version* ”In its sum, Draw From The Source recounts a multidimensional journey whose sources and paths constantly cross. Marco von Orelli and Sheldon Suter reveal a lot about themselves, about their individual …

Temporary Super Offer! When Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie went into the recording studio together on 28 February 1945, they had already served a shared apprenticeship in the big bands of Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine, had jammed informally explo…

Temporary Super Offer!  "This one was working. This one always had been working. This one was always having something that was coming out of this one that was a solid thing, a charming thing, a lovely thing, a perplexing thing, a disconcerting thing,…

Temporary Super Offer! Clifford Thornton and Arthur Jones have remained largely unknown ever since, except to collectors who treasure those early Parisian records and the world they evoke. We know little of what they did in later years, but if Heming…

“The word ‘jazz,’ to me, only means I dare you.” - Wayne Shorter

Temporary Super Offer! "If we just could have hung on for another year,” Rudd said of both NYAQ and the Jazz Composers Guild, “things could have turned out much differently. Things were about to flip, in a good way. A lot of government programs were …

By 1966, the first wave of free jazz had established the foundation upon which this radically generated music could be understood and personalized, shared as a communal activity and still invested with significant singular characteristics. Noah Howar…

Temporary Super Offer! Summertime from the LP My Name Is Albert Ayler made me discover Albert Ayler. His unique interpretation of Summertime motivated me to go to Lörrach crossing the border from Switzerland to Germany to listen to the concert of the…

Temporary Super Offer! Four For Trane became one of the classic, iconic albums of the post-bop era. The explanation is three-fold. First, the material. Rather than follow Coltrane’s lead into the most extreme of his free-blowing anthems, Shepp select…

Temporary Super Offer! In his comprehensive 1966 Jazz Monthly article, “Eric Dolphy,” Jack Cooke reported that the advance buzz aboutduet passages for bass clarinet and bass, “Something Sweet, Something Tender” approximated the hinge-like ballads tha…

Temporary Super Offer! "The title Ornette at 12 is something of a misnomer. Although Ornette is Denardo’s middle name, why wasn’t the album called Denardo at 12, his age at the time of the concert? Is there a hidden meaning related to Ornette’s own c…

Temporary Super Offer! "Only ghosts don’t make footfalls (another Beckett title!) that we can hear, don’t need to open and close doors to effect passage. These men together are enacting over a longer duration a strong sense of life- as-lived. They ar…

"In the spring of 1949, the music was ready to undergo a transformation. Both Miles Davis and Tadd Dameron were experimenting with their larger groups, but they were also presented with the opportunity to travel to Paris, to present a programme of ne…

Temporary Super Offer! "Rare performances and concerts. The Sound of the Munich Filmprodction and the concert of Helsinki are first releases. The Rotterdam concert was available in the Holy Ghost bootleg box." – Werner X. Uehlinger. "Albert Ayler’s l…

Temporary Super Offer! 'The music on this CD is an impressive document of such a search for meaning and artistic legitimacy. It doesn’t want to add something even louder to the supposedly spectacular. On the contrary: Here, it is about the subtle int…

"Dialog: Two Rooms One Vibraphone 1 to 6 & Five Interludes differs, however, from the classical Greek idea of dialectics, that of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, in one respect. There is thesis, from Armaroli, and antithesis, from Parker, but it is a th…

Reflecting both early experiences and recent developments with jazz’s avant-garde, these two albums are the most adventurous, and Let Freedom Ring quite possibly the most personal, music Jackie McLean ever recorded. – Art Lange

Temporary Super Offer! “Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order. I felt I learned from him in every way – through the senses, theoretically, technically. I would talk to Monk about musical problems and he would …

Temporary Super Offer! "Eric Dolphy’s legacy is well represented by these performances from The Five Spot and the sessions supervised by Alan Douglas. They confirm him to be an artist who  straddled the divide then so deep in jazz, drawing sustenance…

Temporary Super Offer! "Extended II seems to me to illustrate the same point as its predecessor. These are men at work. The work is sound, as projected in three dimensions and across time. The composition is the realization of that process of work. O…

"The almost five year span bookended in this particular Ayler revisitation marks, in a certain sense,  the beginning and end points of the most lasting and creative portion of his remarkable, though  sadly brief, career." – Brian Olewnick

"The emerging credo of western society’s post-Beat counterculture was egalitarian and  anti-hierarchical, be the hierarchy social, political or on the bandstand. Evans and Ayler shared  the belief; only their lexicons were different. If hearing Spiri…

"Basically, we witness an intimate dialogue between two improvisers. If there had not been a special circumstance leading to this result. Christine Abdelnour and Hans Koch could not hear each other. In fact, "FFlair" is based on two separately record…

"Here, then, are three men who have, if you will, won the argument already. They don’t need excess volume or headline soloing to get their message across. Their message is inscribed in elegant lower-case and rarely used aural fonts. You will find you…

Temporary Super Offer! The music on this CD is an impressive document of such a search for meaning and artistic legitimacy. It doesn’t want to add something even louder to the supposedly spectacular. On the contrary: Here, it is about the subtle inti…

'Mention of Motian and LaFaro brings us to this disc, perhaps belatedly. But other  than observing that the music is presented here following immaculate and unprecedented  sound restoration, what more needs to be said about it? What more, usefully, c…