We use cookies on our website to provide you with the best experience.Most of these are essential and already present. We do require your explicit consent to save your cart and browsing history between visits.Read about cookies we use here.
Your cart and preferences will not be saved if you leave the site.
Point of Departure was an inflection point in Hill’s output for Blue Note, his penchant for formal complexity and compacted materials – which he revisited beginning in 1969 with a nonet date, tracks with a string quartet-augmented ensemble, and an album with voices – giving way to what proved to be a short-lived foray into the minimally scored pieces that distinguished Compulsion!!!!!. The two recording sessions were separated by only eighteen months, but they were among the most convulsive in j…
Recorded live 1958 in Stuttgaert. First time on CD. Performed by: Eddie Williams, Art Hoyle, Eddie Mullens, Dave Gonzales, Macky Kasper trumpets; Louis Blackburn, Wade Marcus, Larry Wilson, trombones; Leon Zachary, Bobby Plater, alto saxophones; Andy McGhee, Gerald Weinkopf, tenor saxophones; Lonnie Shaw, Werner Baumgart, baritone saxophones; Lionel Hampton, vibraphone & piano; Oscar Dennard, piano; Billy Mackel, guitar; Julius Browne, fender bass; Wilbert Hogan drums; Cornelius "Pinocchio" Jame…
Temporary Super Offer! Recorded 1964, 1965 & 1966 live New York. 7 Tracks, 2 tracks never on CD available. "This fabulous album, recorded during three New York club engagements in 1964, 1965 and 1966, ranks among the finest in the pianist/composer's illustrious catalogue. There are several things going for it: the quality and shared intentionality of the two, slightly different, lineups; the choice of material and its careful sequencing; the vibrancy of the performances, which is enough to pract…
Temporary Super Offer! 'Jost may have had Fire Music and Mama Too Tight in mind when he suggested that by 1965 Archie Shepp spoke “basically two musical languages whose grammar and syntax had hardly anything in common.” This reflected the commentaries’s insistence that a chasm existed between free jazz and mainstream jazz practices, and, implicitly, between the New Wave in Jazz and the New Breed led by James Brown. What was revolutionary about Shepp’s music is that it rejected the underlying bin…
Temporary Super Offer! 'The Miles Davis Quintet of early 1960 was an endangered, embattled entity. Davis and his frontline foil John Coltrane had been drifting apart stylistically and temperamentally for months. United in the embrace and exploration of modal devices on the trumpeter’s seminal Kind of Blue album released the previous summer, bandleader and sideman were increasingly at odds as to where to go next with the celebrated innovations.' - Derek Taylor
Temporary Super Offer! 'The studio side of Coltrane’s catalog has greater consistency in terms of caliber of aural presentation, but fewer occasions for extended improvisation and creation. This is particularly evident in an analysis of the recordings made of his Classic Quartet comprising pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones. An ensemble that was a work in progress well before it was a finished cohort, Coltrane’s most fertile band was also best suited to the hot h…
Temporary Super Offer! 'Cecil Taylor’s whole career was a wave-front of exploration. The analogy with light is apposite enough. He evolved so fast most of us never quite caught up and relied instead on a few safe generalisations that momentarily applied around 1962 and only occasionally thereafter. Taylor rarely referenced the space programme, and admitted towards the end of his life that he had found the moon landings “banal”. Like Sun Ra, he was a cosmonaut of sound, breaking free of gravity a…
Temporary Super Offer! On Ezz-thetics: Eric Dolphy alto saxophone, bass clarinet, Don Ellis trumpet, David Baker trombone, George Russell piano, Steve Swallow double bass & Joe Hunt drums. On The Stratus Seekers: Paul Plummer tenor saxophone , John Peirce alto saxophone, Don Ellis trumpet, David Baker trombone, George Russell piano, Steve Swallow double bass & Joe Hunt drums. The six albums that George Russell recorded in just two years – starting with Sextet at the Five Spot in September 1960 …
Temporary Super Offer! 'Among the jazz innovators, Albert Ayler is still considered a solitary figure to this day. From 1964 on he pursued his vision with firm determination. Like no other artist he used well-known melodies from military, marching, blues, gospel and minstrel show music as a starting point, and from these biographical earworm references he set out with the greatest expressiveness into an unconditionality that caused productive disturbance, which his music still does. On the one h…
Temporary Super Offer! 'Was there more than one Miles Davis? Could he be both the Prince of Darkness and the purveyor of cool? A drug addict and an athletic boxer? A hip bebopper and a protohippie? A flamboyant dresser and a shy vulnerable soul? A brutal misogynist and an insecure romantic? The answer is yes, and yes. Miles Davis was both a creator and a destroyer. His chameleon-like nature can be explained by the times in which he lived and created his art. These live recordings in Stockholm, S…
Temporary Super Offer! These sessions were recorded exactly two years apart, in early November 1966 and 1968 (both were released in 1969). While they can’t be called “bookends” by any means, they do bracket a remarkable period in Don Cherry’s musical evolution, on his journey from the more strictly jazz environments, as adventurous as they were, of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and others, to a philosophy that embraced many non-Western traditions. While these included various African forms, espe…
Temporary Super Offer! "These Half Note recordings from March 26 and May 7, 1965, two dates from an extended stay at the club, were captured as a radio broadcast. ezz-thetics has re-sequenced the music here to demonstrate Coltrane’s approach to incorporating all his inventions into a performance, while also mapping a future to his music." – Mark Corroto
Producers note: "We have re-sequenced these tracks to allow the listener to become part of the development of the music and to follow J…
Temporary Super Offer! "Attempts to dismiss Sun Ra as an “outsider” artist, an eccentric who made strange claims, are always own goals. Of course he was an outsider. That was precisely his point. And not just an outsider. He came from so far away we could not imagine it. But he also came from right inside American culture and was deeply shaped by it. There is perhaps no more representative an American artist of the modern period. If the Saturn V rocket was the symbol one kind of hegemony, govern…
Temporary Super Offer! "Life Time posited a radicalism quite different from the other watershed recordings of 1964. Anthony Williams had an overt, unconventional approach to form, accentuated by the time constraints of a LP side and the various configurations he employed... By the time the 19-year-old Williams returned to Van Gelder Studio to record Spring with Hancock, Peacock, Rivers, and Shorter, the avant-garde was ascending... He retained some of the parameters
of Life Time ..." - Bill Sho…
Temporary Super Offer! New York is Now! and Love Call are rarely mentioned in surveys of Ornette Coleman’s music, and they are often glossed over when they are cited…. Even in commentary focusing on Coleman’s recordings for Blue Note between 1965 and ‘68, these albums tend to be overshadowed by the two volumes of At the “Golden Circle” Stockholm... However, these last sessions before Coleman’s departure for Impulse! are pivotal, influential albums that merit reassessment. – Bill Shoemaker"Alto s…
Temporary Super Offer! Despite persisting labeling of its music as avant-garde, The New York Contemporary Five played unthreatening contemporary jazz almost as often as it explored more daring materials. Two of Thelonious Monk’s loveliest melodies – “Monk’s Mood” and “Crepuscule with Nellie” – were embedded into their sets, aswell as three of Ornette Coleman’s more accessible, swinging vehicles, “O.C.,”“When Will the Blues Leave,” and “Emotions.” These pieces provided a perspectiveof contemporar…
Temporary Super Offer! John Cage was an evangelist for a new mode of listening in which we would listen to everything with the same attention that we bring to music. For John Cage proposes instead that we listen to this music as if it were everything. While these two instruments are playing there is nothing else, just a violin and a piano. Even the process of remembering, normally so important in helping us make sense of what we hear, is altered: the ‘tenuous’ rhythms of For John Cage articulat…
Perhaps more than any of Feldman other piano music Triadic Memories is about that reality, the acoustic space created bythe piano’s strings and soundboard, and in Judith Wegmann’s recording that space is withina magnificent Bösendorfer 280VC piano
"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
"To me, these guys sound as if they have a story to tell and enough confidence to believe that they can tell and retell the old stories in new and exciting ways. Hendriksen and Gisler have formed together on this kind of thing, but if it remains true in jazz that rhythm and the percussionist are at the heart of every new step forward, then Paul Amereller’s role in the trio is crucial. No one will mistake him for anything but a contemporary, but he plays in full knowledge of the history of the mu…