Founded in the middle 2000s, taking a sweeping approach to underground music from across the globe, as they’ve progressed, the Milan based imprint, Holidays Records, has become decidedly focused on the explicitly experimental and avant-garde. The last few years alone have witnessed them issue a remarkably ambitious series of LPs by Henning Christiansen, Joe McPhee, Konstrukt, Peter Brötzmann, Four Horsemen, Maria Monti, Karkhana, Akira Sakata, Maurizio Abate, and numerous others, leaving us waiting on bated breath for what comes next. Now they’re back with two more stunners - Michael Zerang’s Assyrian Caesarean, and the Hüseyin Ertunç Sextet’s A New World, each raising their already high bar.

It’s confounding to think, with a career stretching across roughly 40 years, marked by notable collaborations with Ken Vandermark, Mats Gustafsson, Hamid Drake, Jaap Blonk, Peter Brötzmann, John Butcher, Joe McPhee, and a near countless number of others, that Chicago-based percussionist and composer, Michael Zerang has, until now, not released a solo LP. At long last, this is what he has given us with Assyrian Caesarean.

Springing from the diverse and innovative approaches to percussion that have made Zerang such a notable and sought after figure in the fields of improvised and experimental music over the years, Assyrian Caesarean incorporates the sounds of vibrating drum heads, resonant friction, shifting, rhythmic timbres, and intoxicating tribalism, intuitive trap-set drumming into a single, cohesive body, infused with fleeting melodic texture and rhythm. Not unlike fellow drummers William Hooker, Milford Graves, Terry Day, Han Bennink, and Chris Corsano, Zerang shifts the possibilities presented by solo percussion toward an almost orchestral scope, at times weaving such a complex field of sound that it’s hard to imagine it being generated by only a single set of hands.

Beautiful, rich, creatively challenging, and entirely intoxicating, Assyrian Caesarean distills decades of innovation and achievement into a single series of brilliant and fleeting moments which take the heart and ear on a transformative ride.

Over the course of his long career, until his untimely passing in 2017, the Turkish drummer and multi-instrumentalist, Hüseyin Ertunç, remained a figure of deep devotion for serious free jazz heads. His debut LP, Musikî, privately released on Intex Sound in 1974 and reissued by Holidays in 2016, is the stuff of legend, as is nearly every music object he graced. Initially emerging as a member of the early '70s Boston free music scene, playing with John Jamyll Jones, Cooper-Moore, Phill Musra, and Michael Cosmic, as well as working with William Parker in New York, he returned to Turkey during the mid-70s, popping up here and there over the decades, before enjoying an incredible final run collaborating with Okay Temiz and KonstruKt, within a shifting ensemble that sometimes includes such venerable figures as Marshall Allen and Peter Brötzmann.

A New World is a bittersweet document - the last recording made by Ertunç before his death, distilled from a two day recording session in Italy during 2017. It encounters him improvising with Umut Çağlar (percussion and bamboo flutes), Doğan Doğusel (double bass), Cem Tan (drums), Virginia Genta (tenor and sopranino saxophones, clarinet, flutes), and David Vanzan (percussion), stretching far afield on one of the few recordings on which he doesn’t grace the drums, but playing Fender Rhodes and organ, interspersed with vocal chant.

Wide open, bristling with space, writhing creativity and deep interplay, A New World is just what its title describes - an opening window into the remarkable possibilities opened by the international language of free jazz. Peppered with melodic flirtations from the ancient traditions of Islamic music, rushing into the future, tonality and rhythm dance with atonality and texture in a conversation which seems to defy geography, explicit culture, and time.

Fierce, spirited and invigorating from the first blast to last, this stunning LP sets a high bar, standing as lasting and noble proof that Hüseyin Ertunç went out with as much force and power as he came into this world with.