New Arrivals
Mephistopheles To Orgasm (Revisited)
“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
Eric Dolphy At The Five Spot To Iron Man (Revisited)
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…
With Archie Shepp, 7-Tette & Orchestra - Revisited
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
Adam’s Apple To Super Nova "Revisited“
“The word ‘jazz,’ to me, only means I dare you.” - Wayne Shorter
Four For Trane To Live Newport 1965
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…
New York Art Quartet "Revisited"
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 …
Ornette At 12 Crisis To Man On The Moon Revisited
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…
Miles Davis with Tadd Dameron Revisited
"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
Eric Dolphy Outward Bound To Out To Lunch Revisited
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…
Play Annette Peacock, Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! By 1965, Paul Bley had settled on the trio format, and touring Europe revealed a warmer reception for music that employed chordless improvisations, three-way rhythmic counterpoint, unfamiliar melodic constructs, and malleable song form. But there was an equally momentous conceptual change in the group’s material, as the adventurous pieces by Carla Bley were gradually being replaced by those of Paul’s new partner, Annette Peacock. - Art Lange
Celebrating 75 Years Of His First Recordings
Temporary Super Offer! Thelonious Monk devised a new theoretical basis for his compositional aesthetic, an unorthodox, deconstructed and reinvented pianistic approach that defined his music’s unique rhythmic and melodic parameters. The piano was the vehicle of expression for his compositional mindset. - Art Lange
2nd Session 1956 Revisited
Here is a chance to hear Miles Davis in something close to real time. Small matter that most collectors of hard bop will have these sides already and will be familiar with a particular running order. Perhaps those who have invested in the complete sessions will have a clearer sense of the continuity of these remarkable sessions, but that now familiar obsession with the burrs and snarf of the studio process may win out over musical appreciation. What happened at Van Gelder’s on October 26 1956 is…
Live New York, Revisited
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…
Fire Music To Mama Too Tight, Revisited
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…
Live Europe 1960 revisited
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
Favorites Revisited
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…
Ezz-thetics & The Stratus Seekers Revisited
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 …
At Slugs’ Saloon 1966, Revisited
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…
Miles Davis Quintets Stockholm Live 1967 & 1969 Revisited
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…
Where Is Brooklyn? & Eternal Rhythm
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…