Jazz /
Outward Bound
*In process of stocking* Avant-garde pioneer Eric Dolphy achieved incredible things with the bass clarinet, establishing it as a vehicle for solo improvisation, and was equally adept on alto and flute, gaining kudos from peers such as John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. Outward Bound holds a special place in jazz as Dolphy’s first LP fronting his dynamite quintet, leaving conventions behind from the get-go. With the entire group on tremendous form throughout and Dolphy reaching the heights of his …
I Dream I Was An Earopean
"Only ghosts don’t make footfalls (another Beckett title!) that we can hear, don’t need to open and close doors to effect passage. These men together are enacting over a longer duration a strong sense of life- as-lived. They are conspiring, not in the political or legal sense, but simply breathing-together. It isn’t forbiddingly abstract music. It simply enacts our various ways of living together. Take a deep breath and enjoy." - Brian Morton
One-Eyed Daruma
Swiss artist Lukas Traxel releases his powerful debut album One-Eyed Daruma on We Jazz Records, March 10. The trio features Traxel on double bass, Otis Sandsjö on sax and Moritz Baumgärtner on drums. Compact, deep, and organic to the bone, Traxel & co's sound echoes the innovations of rhythmically driven avantgarde jazz while keeping things moving at all times. There's both drive and freedom to this sound.
One-Eyed Daruma features eight new compositions by Traxel, who crafted the outline for the…
Off Course !
"There is a landscape of sonic ideas, of banging, of entity, of new forms of stimulating the body and of prehension moved by our human, urban, maybe even cubist surroundings, or by the big wild country where, we say, music does what it wants. Unless, we misread and “music knows what it wants.” Both! With one stroke, knowing and doing unanimously converge into one. A point of intersection - there are so many - between the desiredl iberties and sublime agitation provoked by the embrasure of paths …
Ripples
*In process of stocking* "Ostensibly ‘jazz’, but you’d be hard-pressed to adopt that term here, as the duo stretch the definition of such pat categorizations to the point where genre effectively becomes meaningless. Just gorgeous, pure music. Softly, as in a morning sunrise." - Darren Bergstein
Music the listener can sink into, immersing themselves in lush textures, and bathing in the richly varied harmonies and sonorities. Ripples began life with an experimental session designed to explore the …
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
"I imagined the four ensemble pieces that begin this album as belonging to the repertoire of a speculative musical culture — one potentially not so far removed from my own — whose sonic and lyrical affinities reflect chronic, hazardous inundation, and mystifying betrayal. Without my realizing it at first, they became, in their own way, more-or-less oblique renditions of the Jerome Kern / Otto Harbach standard “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” an object lesson in the transmutation of weather and grief i…
Unwalled
You know everyone, Canadian saxophone giant Francois Carrier his long-distance musical friend also from Canada, Michel Lambert, probably the best free improvised sideman John Edwards and the legend of the European free music world Alexander von Schlippenbach. New quartet, in the studio recording made at the beginning of this year!
Bla Bla Bla Duo
Double bass legend Joelle Leandre and young Catalonian drummer virtuoso Nuria Andorra together. Two generations of the improvised music world, two different approaches to improvisation, and one incredible world of music!
Osaka Bridge
Originally released in May 2006 through the German label Karaoke Kalk, »Osaka Bridge« was an album that captured the joyful amateurism of Tori Kudo's free-spirited Japanese collective Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Bill Wells’ rich, wistful and easy sense of melody. Approaching brass band and jazz music with a knack for making playing imperfectly feel perfectly right, »Osaka Bridge« became nothing short of groundbreaking when it was released to critical acclaim, becoming an instant classic among musi…
Lost Performances 1966
"Rare performances and concerts. The Sound of the Munich Filmprodction and the concert of Helsinki are first releases. The Rotterdam concert was available in the Holy Ghost bootleg box." – Werner X. Uehlinger.
"Albert Ayler’s late 1966 tour of northern Europe was, happily, well documented in one way or another, though not always with the best sound quality, something this reissue series is attempting to address (and doing very well). The recording at hand includes 3 tracks from a film session …
![[AHAD]/[WAHID]](https://cdn.soundohm.com/data/products/2022-12/-AHAD-jpg.jpg.500.jpg)
[AHAD]/[WAHID]
Tip! *Limited to 300 copies. [ahad] plays on 33rpm, [wahid] on 45rpm and with a locked groove. In process of stocking* On the 6th of September 2017 I experienced [Ahmed] for the first time. Celebrating the launch of their first LP – New Jazz Imagination at Café OTO, Dalston, London.
Seated at our favourite table, the cheeseboard, me and my good friend John witnessed the telepathy and synchronicity between Pat Thomas, Joel Grip, Antonin Gerbal and Seymour Wright. Intensity, energy, raw power and…
Recorded Yesterday And On Sale Today
A pair of contemporary music giants re-release a long-lost 2003 live recording, previously available only as a CD-R.
Earscratcher
This newfound quartet was conceived in 2019, as a way to celebrate Austrian pianist Elisabeth Harnik’s 50th birthday in 2020. For the occasion, Harnik called on several longtime collaborators from Chicago with whom she’d connected at the Umbrella Music Festival back in 2008, on her first visit to the city. Since that time, she’s continued to stoke the fires she started there, not only in various collaborations with these three musicians, but also with Chicago legends like Ken Vandermark, Michael…
Naja
*In process of stocking* Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson might have a separate discography for his solo records. He's investigated the possibilities of unaccompanied reed music from almost every angle. Presented with the opportunity to make a new solo record under the isolation of the pandemic, Gustafsson returned to a project he'd conceptualized but never realized: the playing-card pieces of Peter Brötzmann. Although these Fluxus-like prompts are better known through the two card sets the G…
The Way Ahead - Kwanza - The Magic of Ju-Ju, revisited
Allow me to expand on a much restated quote from Albert Ayler: "Coltrane was The Father, Pharoah was The Son, and I was...The Holy Ghost.” If we remain with the Christian iconography, that makes Archie Shepp, Simon Peter, or the Apostle Peter whom Jesus called the rock upon which he built his church. Christened by his tenure in the early 1960s with Cecil Taylor, Shepp was baptized into what we now call a modernist approach. In meeting Coltrane, a man always searching for a purity of sound, Shepp…
Were We Where We Were
Were We Where We Were is a recording of set of compositions by Michael Formanek, and performed here by him, saxophonist and clarinetist Chet Doxas, and drummer Vinnie Sperrazza, collectively as the Michael Formanek Drome Trio. These pieces were loosely grouped together as Palindrome Series 1 and Palindrome Series 2, from 2020. They started out as a series graphic scores that were then reinterpreted as conventionally notated music for this trio. The Drome trio learned the music and rehearsed outs…
Eight Pieces for Two Cellos
*In process of stocking* Repertoire for cello represents a little-explored niche of the greater jazz songbook. In 2013, cellists Tomeka Reid and Fred Lonberg-Holm turned their arrangerly and composerly attention to this terrain, assembling a selection of four originals (three by Lonberg-Holm, one by Reid) and four works by other composers. The latter include “Pluck It” by pioneering jazz cellist Fred Katz, member of the Chico Hamilton Quintet and soundtrack composer for Roger Corman films; “In W…
Voices of Bishara
The title of Tom Skinner’s first release under his own name is a reference to cellist Abdul Wadud’s ultra-rare 1978 solo album ‘By Myself’, which Skinner listened to repeatedly during lockdown. Wadud’s album was privately pressed on his own label, Bisharra, and whilst Skinner’s title uses the more conventional spelling of this common Arabic name, they both have the same intention or meaning: it translates as ‘good news’, or ‘the bringer of good news’. This is a classic-sounding record that conne…
Tomorrow Is The Question!
*Limited edition of 500 copies.* This was definitely a perfect title for Ornette Coleman's second and last album for Contemporary before switching on Ertegun's Atlantic label. Originally released in 1959 "Tomorrow is the Question" was an early evident step towards the revolution to come. An adventurous yet accessible, bluesy album with Coleman and Don Cherry tasting for the first time the freedom of a pianoless rhythm section featuring Percy Heath or Red Mitchell on bass and the great Shelly Man…
Gravity Without Airs
*In process of stocking.* The exemplary & well-traveled cornetist Kirk Knuffke here introduces a bold new trio – with bassist Michael Bisio & pianist Matthew Shipp – on an intimate & expansive double album. Gravity Without Airs features the three world-class musicians on both Knuffke compositions and in open form, together creating a tour-de-force of poetry and verve. “Rhythmically precise, New Orleans funky and full of grace, Kirk Knuffke’s music is a reflection of his multifaceted personality:…