Jazz /
Awofofora
On Awofofora, Marion Brown folds funk, reggae and Afro‑Caribbean rhythm into his mature structural language, using grooves not as decoration but as architecture for golden‑toned alto lines and quietly radical collective improvisation.
Looking for Consonance
"The title Looking for Consonance popped into my head one day as I began thinking about a name for this collection of music. This title immediately felt important, so I kept sitting with it. I thought I knew what consonance meant in music, but I also knew it carried other meanings—ones that extend well beyond sound. Webster’s Dictionary defines consonance as “the harmony or agreement of sounds produced simultaneously, resulting in a pleasing and stable auditory experience.” The word that stands …
As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977 (Book)
In As Serious As Your Life, photographer and historian Val Wilmer chronicles the free jazz revolution as a Black cultural vanguard, situating Ayler, Coltrane, Coleman, Sun Ra and others within the struggles, hopes and solidarities of 1960s–70s America.
Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane (Book)
In Cosmic Music, Andy Beta traces Alice Coltrane’s journey from Detroit church pews to avant‑garde bandstands and ashram altars, revealing a visionary composer, bandleader and spiritual teacher whose work radically reshaped the possibilities of Black American music.
One Atmosphere
An original member of the legendary Black Artists Group (St. Louis' counterpart to the AACM), and founder of the World Sax Quartet, Julius Hemphill was one of the most important composer/performers in creative music. His work is marked by a sharp, edgy melodicism steeped in the blues, contrapuntal complexity and a striking formal logic. One Atmosphere presents the full range of his compositional talents: a long, epic work for seven woodwinds (one of his greatest compositions, here receiving its …
The Straight Horn Of Steve Lacy
Originally released in 1962 on Candid Records, The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy finds a young Steve Lacy stepping forward with quiet confidence and a sound unlike anyone else at the time. Stripped of excess and focused on tone, space, and intent, these sessions reveal a musician already thinking beyond convention. The soprano sax cuts clean and direct, moving between sharp angles and lyrical calm, with a small group that listens as closely as it plays. Nothing here feels rushed or ornamental, jus…
Future Present Past
Future Present Past is the second Impulse! Records album by the free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements. The album was largely recorded at the historic Van Gelder Studio and showcases how the quintet fuses atmospheric jazz, world music traditions, and spoken word with the story of our collective existence: a future full of possibilities, a present with all its uncertainties, and a past as a source of ancestral wisdom.
Irreversible Entanglements, formed in Brooklyn in 2015, consists of p…
Septober Energy
Centipede’s Septober Energy (1971), released on RCA and produced by jazz pianist Keith Tippett, is a sprawling double-album manifesto of British avant-garde jazz-rock that brings together an enormous ensemble of more than fifty musicians, including members of King Crimson, Soft Machine, and other key figures of the Canterbury and progressive scenes. Conceived as a large-scale orchestral jazz composition, the record blends free improvisation, electric jazz fusion, progressive rock dynamics, and c…
Kwasy I Zasady
What do jazz improvisation, Polish Radio, dingy rap from Memphis, cassette tapes, trap, drill elements and hip-hop loops have in common? These are the ingredients that the Błoto quartet used in their lab to cook an explosive mixture for their third LP entitled “Kwasy i zasady” (eng,“Acids and bases”). Nobody thought that a band who appeared suddenly and unexpectedly on the jazz scene would develop so rapidly and in such an unforeseen direction. A year ago, critics and music journalists treated …
Moons Melt Milk Light
Anenon's tenor saxophone breathes an emotive contemplation on loss, meshed with sustained piano and field recordings. 'Moons Melt Milk Light' is a hyper-personal statement contained in a visceral beauty.
vd5
Vladislav Delay, primarily known as a highly regarded electronic music innovator, steps ahead with his acoustic jazz quintet. Echoing the forward-looking vd musical vision always ahead of the curve, the new album does not fit into any specific category, forging a path of its own across the 10 tracks. Recorded at Candybomber Studio in Berlin, the album brings vd together with Maria Bertel, Lucio Capece, Derek Shirley and Max Loderbauer. This is shape-shifting, elastic music that exists left of an…
The Forward Process
*200 copies limited edition* "In a somewhat inconspicuous passage in Ursula K. Le Guin’s sci-fi classic The Dispossessed, its main character — the brilliant physicist Shevek — meets a composer who has translated Shevek’s revolutionary theories into music: ‘I’m writing a piece of chamber music. Thought I might call it The Simultaneity Principle. [Several] instruments each playing an independent cyclic theme; no melodic causality; the forward process entirely in the relationship of the parts. It m…
Groundspeed
*300 copies limited edition* In October 2024, g a b b r o travels from Brussels to the mysterious village of Gabbro in Italy. Together with drumming virtuoso Casper Van De Velde, Hanne De Backer invites musical friends along the way to record in places that have personal significance for them. The quest to Gabbro takes them through five countries in seven days: Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland and Italy. The diverse landscapes and numerous encounters leave a deep impression. The pace of …
Quartet
Hatka performed at Telakka Jazz on the first Friday night of January 2025. The following Sunday the trio visited the studio to record a session - music captured in the festival afterglow, fuelled by a shared commitment to free expression. The album is titled Quartet for a reason. A fourth voice, saxophonist Jone Takamäki, was originally meant to join the group for both the live performance and the studio recording. Quartet is what was planned and what remains. Jone couldn’t make it, so he never …
In 2
Roscoe Mitchell and Michele Rabbia are made for each other, because they've always made everything audible in their respective music and improvisations. The materials their instruments are made of; the bodies, gestures and movements that breathe life into them; the ideas and visions that guide them or lead them astray; the systems of play and thought they freely use; their imaginations. You can hear everything on the percussion of one, the slightest contact, the slightest clash, the slightest im…
Devotional Fade
Matt Gold and Dustin Laurenzi present Devotional Fade, a collaborative record of electroacoustic rhythmic improvisations – equal parts meditation and dance, released on We Jazz Records, 24th April. Laurenzi and Gold, key collaborators in the Chicago creative scene and with genre spanning artists such as Bill Callahan and Makaya McCraven, step forward here with a major artistic statement, a product of extended improv sessions capturing the duo's hypnotic interplay. This is the sound of two of Chi…
Dream Archives
The trio-debut of pianist, composer and 2025 MacArthur Fellow Craig Taborn with Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith has been eagerly awaited. In its review of the group’s live show from Fall 2025 the German daily Hamburger Abendblatt found nothing put praise for their performance, calling it “unpredictable, exhilarating”. The trio’s approach on Dream Archives is full of complexities, and as the title suggests, a wide musical spectrum is covered as multitudes of idioms seem to be pulled from history and r…
Nineteen Seventy Seven
Brazilian avant-jazz vanguardists Grupo Um celebrate their 50th anniversary, sharing a second previously lost 1970s album from the vaults. Nineteen Seventy Seven (titled after the year it was recorded) is another rip-roaring instrumental fusion treasure from the band which spawned from within Hermeto Pascoal’s famed mid-1970s São Paulo collective.
Like their debut album Starting Point, Grupo Um’s Nineteen Seventy Seven was recorded when Brazil's military dictatorship was at its most repressive. …
Dance! Skip! Hop!
Tip! The Tomeka Reid Quartet - dance! skip! hop! (OOYH 041) releases February 13 2026 (LP/CD/limited streaming) on Out Of Your Head Records, featuring the steady quartet of Tomeka Reid (cello) with Mary Halvorson (guitar), Jason Roebke (bass), and Tomas Fujiwara (drums). Soon after finishing these compositions in June 2025, Reid realized that much of the music made her want to dance. Inspired by the title of Josh Berman’s stellar A Dance and a Hop, as well as her tendency to skip in public, the…
Half of What You See
*100 copies purple vinyl limited edition* Out Of Your Head Records announces the latest chapter in creative music: 'Half of What You See' by Wrens, a bold new contribution to the label’s tradition of boundary-pushing artistry and limited-run releases. Continuing their dedication to inventive sound and visual originality, Out Of Your Head Records—spanning Richmond and Brooklyn—invites listeners into a world where sonic textures and emotional immediacy collide.
'Half of What You See' showcases Wre…