NoBusiness Records proudly presents Rivbea Live! Series, Volume 5, a previously released live document capturing the remarkable creative energy of the Black Artists’ Group at Studio Rivbea in New York City on February 6, 1974. Featuring alto saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill, trombonist Joseph Bowie, cellist Abdul Wadud, drummer Charles “Bobo” Shaw, and special guest violinist Raymond Lee Cheng, this essential archival recording offers an intense, searching encounter at the crossroads of free jazz, improvised music, and avant-garde composition.

The album opens with Bowie’s “Improvisation / Something To Play On,” an eight-minute exchange alive with shifting textures, abrupt turns, and collective momentum. It is followed by “Sequence,” a sixteen-minute performance that expands the ensemble’s sound through layered interplay, rhythmic disruption, and continuously evolving instrumental dialogue. The centerpiece is Wadud’s “Medley of Two Compositions,” a nearly twenty-five-minute suite in which the cello becomes both a melodic voice and a powerful source of rhythm, resonance, and abstraction. Across the recording, Hemphill’s incisive alto, Bowie’s sculptural trombone, Shaw’s explosive drumming, and Cheng’s vividly expressive violin create a volatile yet remarkably coherent sonic landscape.

Recorded at Studio Rivbea—the influential New York loft space founded by saxophonist Sam Rivers—this performance reflects a crucial period in the development of Black experimental music. The musicians of the Black Artists’ Group brought together composition, improvisation, theatricality, and radical ensemble interaction, challenging conventional ideas of jazz performance while building a new musical language on their own terms.