This 2LP bundle includes the two latest Formalibera albums: John Tchicai "Wigmore Hall 1968", and John Tchicai, Peter Kowald "John Tchicai Quintet, John Tchicai Peter Kowald Duo".


John Tchicai "Wigmore Hall 1968" (LP)

* Edition of 300 copies. High thickness cardboard with opaque laminated cover. Comes with a printed insert.* John Tchicai (1936-2012) was one of the most visionary free jazz saxophonists of the 20th century - a rare artist whose voice stood apart even among giants. Born in Copenhagen to a Danish mother and a Congolese father, his path to New York came through a chance encounter at a socialist youth festival in Helsinki, where Bill Dixon and Archie Shepp heard him play and urged him to make the move. A simple gesture that changed the history of jazz.

Arriving in the city in late 1962, Tchicai rapidly entered the innermost circle of first-wave American free jazz: co-founding the New York Contemporary Five alongside Shepp, Don Cherry, Don Moore, and J.C. Moses, then the legendary New York Art Quartet with Roswell Rudd, Milford Graves, and Lewis Worrell. He appears on Albert Ayler's New York Eye and Ear Control, Shepp's Four for Trane, Coltrane's Ascension - the full constellation. Back in Denmark from 1966, he co-founded the Instant Composers Pool and launched Cadentia Nova Danica, a radical cross-disciplinary orchestra whose two LPs - Cadentia Nova Danica (Polydor, 1968) and Afrodisiaca (MPS, 1969) - remain legendary documents.

Now FormalIibera unearths a live recording from London's Wigmore Hall, October 1st, 1968 - BBC-taped, partially lost to tape erasure, and all the more precious for it. Four pieces, eight players, and a band at the absolute peak of their powers: furious, rich, and dense, moving between freeform improvisation and African touchstones before erupting into incandescent free improvisation. Essential archival work, beautifully presented.


John Tchicai, Peter Kowald "John Tchicai Quintet, John Tchicai Peter Kowald Duo" (LP)

*Edition of 300 copies. High thickness cardboard with opaque laminated cover. Comes with a printed insert.* John Tchicai was extraordinarily prolific during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and this second archival release from Formalibera captures two essential, previously undocumented chapters of his story. Side one takes us to Danish Radio House, Copenhagen, October 1969, where Tchicai leads a remarkable hybrid quintet fresh from a European tour: Danish collaborators Hugh Steinmetz and Pierre Dørge alongside Instant Composers Pool co-founders Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink. Two distinct creative worlds in direct conversation - the ICP's ironic subversion and willingness to disrupt set against the joyous, internationally-minded modernity of the Danish scene. The four tracks that follow - 'Babaji Smiles', 'No Enthusiasm', 'Is Is Is A Question', and 'Broken T' - are as distinct and remarkable as that meeting suggests: lurching tempos, moments of pure abstraction, nine minutes of focused ensemble fire, and a closing solo saxophone statement by Tchicai of pure lyrical force.

Side two crosses to Kyoto, 1983, where Tchicai and German bassist Peter Kowald - a giant of European free jazz and a veteran of Peter Brötzmann's early bands and Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra - found themselves in Japan at the same time and seized the moment. Twenty-five minutes of duo improvisation, spacious yet relentless, saxophone and flute against bowed and plucked bass, two musicians so deeply attuned to each other they seem to anticipate every move before it happens. Engrossing, mind-blowing, and tragically their only recorded encounter.

Issued by Formalibera as a beautiful limited vinyl edition with archival photographs and new liner notes by Ed Hazell, this companion to the Wigmore Hall recording is every bit as essential.