New Arrivals
Tirakat
New collaboration between the Jakarta trio Ali and Lebanese composer and multi-instrumentalist Charif Megarbane: 1970s Indonesian psychedelic funk, Melayu traditions, disco grooves and Arab melodic forms played on Western instruments.
Beirut City Pop
Ten tracks from Lebanon's private press cassette scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, many tied to Ziad Rahbani's Bypass Studio circle: disco, soul, jazz, bossa and AOR, some tapes issued in tiny runs and some never released at all.
Pieces Of A Dream
Unreleased recordings made in 1988 and 1989 in a small home studio in Amman by the Jordanian trio Nechazz: smooth soul, jazz and synth pop in the spirit of Steely Dan and Bobby Caldwell, recovered from a family cassette.
Bourj Hammoud Groove
Compilation of Ara Kekedjian, singer born in 1946 in Bourj Hammoud and a central figure of Beirut's Armenian pop scene in the 1960s and 70s: Armenian rhythms, hard drums, funky guitars and organ, compiled with Darone Sassounian.
Aco Dei De Madrugada (One Morning I Waked Up Very Early)
Paris, 1969: Grachan Moncur III's second album for BYG, cut with a Brazilian rhythm section and bassist Beb Guerin. Samba sway meets American creative jazz, with Fernando Martins' wordless vocals on the title track.
Dear Prof. Leary
Villingen, 27 and 28 June 1968. Barney Wilen, the tenor of Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, with a young Joachim Kühn on organ and piano, Aldo Romano and Wolfgang Paap on two drum kits, Mimi Lorenzini's guitar and Günter Lenz's bass. Ode to Billie Joe, Respect, Lonely Woman and the Supremes, dedicated to Timothy Leary.
Tiga Trombone
First release on Audible Beauty, Habibi Funk's sister label: eleven jazz pieces by the Malaysian pianist and arranger Alfonso Soliano, recorded for Radio Television Malaysia and pressed in only a few dozen copies.
music for strings
Three string works written between 2020 and 2023, performed by Ensemble Modern: a nonet locked in seven-eight, a piece that splits sound the way a prism splits light, and a score written in mirror notation. Ikeda's electronic precision, played on bowed strings.
Openness
A spontaneous musical transmission exploring healing, unity, laughter, and limitless possibility.
Nothing Space Music
Maya Ongaku has always been searching for what exists just beyond the edge of perception. Since forming in the seaside towns surrounding Enoshima, the trio has followed a path guided less by intention than intuition, allowing songs, ideas, and experiences to emerge through a process they describe as 自然発生 (shizen hassei), spontaneous occurrence. Nothing Space Music is the deepest expression of that philosophy to date.
Written in the aftermath of several years of international touring, the album e…
Let Me Perish Without Return: Lament and Longing from the Fading Russian Empire, 1889-1917
Twenty sides cut in the Russian Empire between 1889 and 1917, dug up by Gary Sullivan in the Russian shops of Brighton Beach and Forest Hills: music hall satire, drawing-room ballads and convicts' laments from the years before everything changed.
Our Mother The Mountain
Half-speed master edition of Townes Van Zandt's 1969 second album, cut at StarDelta by Lewis Hopkin. Folk and country songwriting at its most intimate, from 'Be Here To Love Me' to 'Tecumseh Valley', with new clarity and depth.
Triloque
Berlin Jazz Days, 6 November 1976. Albert Mangelsdorff's trombone, alone at the front, with Jaco Pastorius on electric bass and Alphonse Mouzon on drums, a year after Pastorius's debut. Five long pieces, recorded live, released by MPS in 1977. The trombone multiphonics against a fusion rhythm section.
The Wide Point
Walldorf Studio, near Frankfurt, 1 and 2 May 1975. Albert Mangelsdorff on trombone, Palle Danielsson on bass, Elvin Jones on drums. Seven pieces, thirty-nine minutes, released by MPS the same year.
Mangelsdorff had recorded with Jones once before, on the 1968 duet album Albert Mangelsdorff and His Friends. The Wide Point is the first of his trombone-bass-drums trio records, the format that would produce Trilogue with Pastorius and Mouzon the following year and the Montreux album in 1980. The ban…
Destination Unknown
Moonwalker, Aarburg, Switzerland, 29 March 1992. Sun Ra, fourteen months from the end, at synthesizer and piano with a ten-piece Arkestra: Marshall Allen, Michael Ray, Ahmed Abdullah, Tyrone Hill, Buster Smith. Ten pieces in fifty-six minutes, mostly repertoire, groove over improvisation. Released by Enja.
It's After The End Of The World
Donaueschingen, 17 October 1970, and Berlin, 7 November: Sun Ra's first German concerts, commissioned by Joachim-Ernst Berendt, with the Black Forest Myth written for the astrological moment and never played again. Berendt cut five hours of tape into forty minutes. Der Spiegel called it cosmic chaos.
Noon In Tunisia
Another of Berendt's meetings, SABA 1967. George Gruntz, the Basel pianist who would later run the Berlin Jazz Festival for twenty years, with Sahib Shihab on saxophones and Jean-Luc Ponty on violin, and a group of Tunisian musicians: a bendir and darbuka drum ensemble and Salah El Mahdi on ney flute. The title turns Dizzy Gillespie's tune on its head.
UK Vibe, reviewing the Nicola Conte compilation that includes Djerbi, points out that the famous names are not the point: it is the lesser-known …
Gittin' To Know Y'All
Baden-Baden, Südwestfunk studio, 12 to 14 December 1969, the annual Free Jazz Meeting. Steve McCall had persuaded the organisers to invite the Chicago musicians living in Paris: Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, and the pianist Dave Burrell. They met sixteen Europeans: Albert Mangelsdorff, Kenny Wheeler, John Surman, Willem Breuker, Terje Rypdal, Tony Oxley, Alan Skidmore, Heinz Sauer, Gerd Dudek, Eje Thelin, Bernt Rosengren, Hugh Steinmetz, Leo Cuypers, Claude Delcloo and Karin Krog…
Jazz Meets India
Villingen, 23 October 1967. Irène Schweizer's trio with Mani Neumeier and Uli Trepte, a year before Guru Guru, meets Dewan Motihar's sitar, tabla and tambura, with Manfred Schoof and Barney Wilen. Three pieces, two of them long, and the seventeen-minute Sun Love. All About Jazz calls it an unqualified success.
Ascending the Depths
Ithaca trio of Sarah Hennies, Willie B. and Keir Neuringer, three percussionists reaching into vibraphone, saxophone and piano. Eight studio improvisations, playful and energetic, held against a meditative core.
