★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 architecture of his ensemble’s infrastructural procedures, we have a bridge into Cecil Taylor’s creative spirit, and far beyond." - Art Lange "I was present at the recordings, sitting in the recording truck in front of Fat Tuesday’s in NYC. The recording w…

"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 relatively orthodox expressions of mid 1960s NewThing. The four tracks they bookend, however, are distinctive even today. Brown’s exquisite “Fortunato,” though it sounds like nothing Pharoah Sanders ever wrote, inhabits similarly pretty terrain as Sand…

"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 their sonorous properties. So they are a paradigm of musical art – for music is an art that is abstract in form, concrete in utterance." - Andy Hamilton

"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 - violinKurt Franz Schmid - clarinetSandro Miori - tenor & soprano saxophones & alto fluteRudolf Ruschel - tromboneRaoul Herget - tubaRobert Michael Weiss - piano

"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 apart in 1960, vividly summarized his  work to date, as he headed towards to jazz’s pantheon." – Bill Shoemaker

"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 Dominic Lash and Mark Sanders. The result is pungent, powerful music on the cusp of free jazz and free improv – a dichotomy that helps define Gallio's work, though he also composes. Listening to this wonderful album invites re-consideration of the rh…

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 here were recorded on two separate dates. Already cooking, by the time of the April and May recordings the trio was touching on the interactive magic heard on ezz-thetics’ At The Village."  – Chis May

“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 the other way.” – Wayne Shorter

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 Town Hall concert in December was to be his last significant appearance until he accepted a Village Vanguard gig in January 1965. The reasons for this hiatus, apparently, were personal, economic, philosophical, pragmatic, and artistic, all at the same…

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 1959’s Jackie’s Bag; it was first recorded as “Inding” for Lights Out!, a 1956 Prestige date – “involved an elaborate group construction that [McLean] was afraid was too far-out,” so he used “I Got Rhythm” changes to mainstream it, which he later re…

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 Mingus, by virtue of his brilliantly nonconformist creative imagination, willingness to take risks along experimental paths, and (because of, or in spite of) an oft-times confrontational rebellious nature, had established himself among those in the forefr…

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 together without any kind of parts or scores, just working deeply on listening to each other, reacting and generating a kind of togetherness that made it possible to create live music in a very fast and intuitive way.” Then they started investigating diffe…

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 singularity. Together, they constitute the first chapter of a recorded legacy that continues to grow in status and influence.  – Bill Shoemaker

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 idiosyncrasies and about their common feelings in this performance carried by finest lyricism. But behind this journey from the north to the south, from urban stagnation to Mediterranean lightness, there is also a call for us to reflect on the true n…

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 exploring their common interest in adventurous extensions of swing harmonies and reconfigured rhythms, and were, individually and collaboratively, prepared to redirect the course of modern jazz. That session shouldn’t in any way be considered the public “…

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, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, an interesting thing, a disturbing thing, a repellant thing, a very pretty thing. This one was one whom some were follow-ing. This one was the one who was working.” Gertrude Stein’s 1910–11 descrip…

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 Hemingway was right, “If you are lucky enough to live in Paris  [read “jazz”] as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you”. Thornton died in Switzerland in 1989, largely forgotten in his “home” country. Jones died in Ne…

“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 starting up that we could have gotten  grants from. There was a change in perception about the music that was happening. People were starting to consider it as art. The music was moving out of the bars and coffee houses  and into museums and concert …

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 Howard and his bandmates represented a second generation, as creative attitudes were expanding.

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 Albert Ayler Quintet in Lörrach on November 7, 1966. This experience has indoctrinated me forever for the music of Albert Ayler. In 1975 I created the label Hat Hut Records and in 1978 I had the chance, thanks to the support of Joachim Ernst Berendt…

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 selected three songs from the Giant Steps album, and one from Coltrane Plays The Blues (although “Cousin Mary,” from the former release, is also a twelve-bar blues). This is significant because it illuminates the two sides of Archie Shepp’s conceptual persp…

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 that were a perennial feature on Blue Note A sides. Given its dedicatee – the flutist renowned for recording works like Varèse’s “Density 21.5,” which Dolphy performed at the Ojai Festival in 1962 – “Gazzelloni” is surprisingly boppish, ending the side w…

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 childhood? According to John Litweiler’s book A Harmolodic Life, he was either 13 or 14 when he received his first horn. If the year 1956 is meant to represent a significant event in Ornette’s musical life, it does mark his meeting with Don Cherry and B…

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 are conspiring, not in the political or legal sense, but simply breathing-together. It isn’t forbiddingly abstract music. It simply enacts our various ways of living together. Take a deep breath and enjoy." - Brian Morton

"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 new music at an international jazz festival there." - Brian Morton

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 late 1966 tour of northern Europe was, happily, well documented in one way or another, though not always with the best sound quality, something this reissue series is attempting to address (and doing very well). The recording at hand includes 3 tracks…

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 intimacy and emotionality of human relationships, about breathing as one. It is about being interested in each other beyond ever new superlatives. This is where the unobtrusive authenticity of this music comes from, what makes it special and thoughtful.…

"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 third party, the listener, who provides the synthesis. And there will be as many syntheses, and as much diversity among them, as there are those of us tuning in." -Chris May

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 sit at the piano and show me the answers just by playing them.“ – John Coltrane

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 from the music’s past  as he cleared a path to its future. Dolphy’s was a sensibility that could celebrate  Fats Waller and honor Jomo Kenyatta, its inclusiveness rare in the polarized early 1960s. Fortunately, his example has not simply endured, bu…

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. Old philosophers used to refer to reality – the solid bricks-and-mortar and fellow-beings that surrounded us – as “the extended world” or as “extensions”, and that applies to the music you are holding. It extends because it exists in space and time, a…

"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 Spiritual Unity was akin, as Ted Joans  wrote, to someone shouting “Fuck!” in St. Patrick’s"   – Chris May

"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 recorded solo improvisations, which were superimposed at the end. Mind you, without any subsequent editing." - Rudolf Amstutz

"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 yourself leaning forward because not a note or whisper should be missed ..." - Brian Morton

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 intimacy and emotionality of human relationships, about breathing as one. It is about being interested in each other beyond ever new superlatives. This is where the unobtrusive authenticity of this music comes from, what makes it special and thoughtful. …

'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, can be said? The performances are as close to perfection as makes no difference, and as close to  immortality, too, and if you are still reading thesenotes, you will not need to be told why.' – Chris May Executive producer’s notes: 'Once you start to …