Jazz & Improvisation / Avant-Garde Jazz

A historical masterpiece recorded on 23 May 1969 at the Tokyo Studio Centre by the "Togashi Masahiko Quartet", consisting of Masahiko Togashi (drums), Motoki Takagi (saxophone), Masayuki Takayanagi (guitar) and Motoharu Yoshizawa (bass). Recorded at the Tokyo Studio Centre on 23 May 1969, this historical masterpiece has been reissued on CD from Germany.

Tip! LP reissue of Collective Calls, the first duo LP from Evan Parker and percussionist Paul Lytton. Mythically alluded to as ‘An Improvised Urban Psychodrama In Eight Parts”, Collective Calls utilises electronics, pre-records and homemade instruments to wryly in/act self investigation. Having just recorded the cliff jumping Music Improvisation Company with Derek Bailey, Christine Jeffrey, Hugh Davies and Jamie Muir, Parker was at the point where [he] was thinking, ‘what’s the next thing?’ On C…

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.

2025 stock  John Zorn and Bill Laswell are two of the Downtown scene’s most consistently intrepid musical explorers, and PainKiller, formed in 1991 is their longest running project together. “The Prophecy,” the first official PainKiller release in over ten years, was recorded live in Europe in 2004–5 and pulls together music from several concerts into a powerful and mind blowing suite unlike anything the group has ever released before. Featuring master drummer Yoshida Tatsuya (Ruins, Korekyojin)…

Big Tip!  180 gram Vinyl Edition. Gatefold Cover. One of the last records made by avant sax legend Albert Ayler – a really mind-expanding album that's unlike anything else he ever did! By the time of the record, Ayler had made a full round trip between the New York and European jazz scenes – leaving important influences wherever he went, and trying desperately to pick up new ones the further he moved on. Here, he's working in a style that's a bit like that of Archie Shepp at the time – still ste…

Deluxe limited-edition, 180-gram 2-LP set. Gatefold Cover. Transferred from the original reels at the French INA. Includes an extensive booklet with rare photos from the actual performance by Christian Rose, and an exclusive essay by longtime jazz critic/ historian and Down Beat contributor Kevin Whitehead. Transcendence Sounds - the groundbreaking new archival imprint from Elemental Music - makes its stunning debut with the complete, previously unreleased concert recording of spiritual jazz tit…

Eero Koivistoinen Quartet's rare live album from 1978 reissued for the first time in nearly half a century via Svart Records.

It’s not often that Aerophonic Records has put out recordings by bands that are first-time groupings. There are a few notable ones, including AR024 and 026 – Of Things Beyond Thule Volume 1 and 2 featuring Joe McPhee, Tomeka Reid, Brandon Lopez, and Paal Nilssen-Love. Another one was AR029 Stringers and Struts with Jeff Parker, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and Jeremy Cunningham. Those lineups and performances were just too stellar to let them pass without being documented (and those records are all l…

"I started Blink in the summer of 2024, aiming to create a band sound where collective improvisations and responses take precedence over individual solos. The compositions are inspired by group behavioral patterns such as insect swarms and bird flocks, with their organic swells in dynamics and density. Gabe and Nate’s instruments are tuned a quarter tone sharp, giving the band a distinctive, off-balance feel – one inspired by classic African High Life bands, Indonesian Gamelan ensembles, and Del…

*2025 stock* Driff Records proudly announces the release of PorchBone, the latest project from Dutch saxophonist and composer Jorrit Dijkstra, leading an adventurous ensemble that brings new colors and textures to contemporary improvised music.  On PorchBone, Dijkstra assembles a singular front line that sets alto saxophone and lyricon alongside the rich, brassy voice of the trombone. This unusual pairing creates a wide palette of timbres—by turns muscular, playful, and surprisingly intimate. Th…

As students in the late 1980s, Julia Werntz and Pandelis Karayorgis both enrolled in Joe Maneri’s Microtonal Composition and Performance class at the New England Conservatory, beginning a formative period of mentorship and collaborations with musicians in the scene surrounding that course. During those years a special mindset was cultivated regarding rhythm and musical form, as well as the rich world of microtonal melody and harmony. We also were married during that period, but our musical paths…

“Composition 429” is the first piece using a new writing method that Braxton calls “Lorraine.” The composer’s notes to the piece describe Lorraine as “a music system that governs the ‘sonic winds’ of breath.” Saxophonist and longtime collaborator James Fei contributes an essay detailing the Lorraine system, which uses a combination of traditional notation and color-coded symbols of the composer’s design to indicate “specific sound types or performance techniques,” drawing from Braxton’s long his…

150 hand numbered copies. Kick-ass free music recorded in the glorious year of 1966 in Copenhagen. From Finn Von Eyben a leading exponent of the fertile Danish free jazz movement of the 1960s, comes these never-before-released live and studio recordings, offering an interesting addition to our understanding of a time in Danish music history where past, present, and future clashed to create a whole new sound.  This is as essential as it gets. Piano, double-bass & drums in total interaction. 150 h…

Gerry Hemingway Live At Bau 4 features a profound collaboration among Gerry Hemingway, Izumi Kimura, Frank Gratkowski, and Christian Weber, creating a vibrant interplay of rhythms and melodies. Recorded live at Bau 4 in Altbüron, Switzerland, where Hemingway has lived since 2009, the album opens with “Slivers,” a 20-minute exercise in sound that resembles a kaleidoscopic landscape of textures and colors. This piece pays tribute to Bau 4's founders, Hildegard and Walter Schaer, celebrating their …

Available for the very first time, the intergalactic icon Sun Ra and his Arkestra’s Lights On A Satellite: Live at the Left Bank was recorded on July 23, 1978 at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, Maryland by the Left Bank Jazz Society. The limited-edition 2-CD set contains audio from the Sun Ra Archives and was researched and compiled by Sun Ra archivist Michael D. Anderson. The critically acclaimed independent filmmaker Robert Mugge has also provided audio from the recordings he made at the Lef…

Big tip! This is it! Chicago spiritual jazz master Kahil El'Zabar delivers one of the most powerful live recordings in recent memory! Captured over two unforgettable nights at "mu" in London - July 15th & 16th, 2024 - this is music as ancient ritual, as communion, as healing force. El'Zabar created new material specifically for these performances, alongside reimagined arrangements of classics like Wayne Shorter's "Footprints", Gershwin's "Summertime", and Duke Ellington & Juan Tizol's "Caravan".…

Florida-born saxophonist, composer, poet, actor and playwright Archie Shepp was one of the most articulate exponents of politicized black culture in the late ‘60s, a time of enormous upheaval and radical thought. Relocating to Paris he made a number of highly influential albums, such as Blasé, that broached the essential themes of freedom and racial equality, and tapped into the bedrock of African-American music. Gospel and blues were a major part of the work, which also had a strong avant-garde…

Fire! tracking new paths and reaching new levels of excellence, still honoring their 12-year-old vow of presenting a fresh approach to improvised music. Their debut album, You Liked Me Five Minutes Ago, was released in 2009 to wide international acclaim. "The basic strategy of pairing the expressive energy of free jazz with a sturdy sense of groove has yielded something potent and self-contained" --New York Times. Between this and Defeat there´s been five albums, including collaborations with Ji…

Jimmy Giuffre, a versatile musician known for his innovative jazz compositions and arrangements, took a break from recording after a prolific career spanning from the 1950s. Following a decade focused on live performances, he returned to the studio with "Music for People, Birds, Butterflies and Mosquitoes." Giuffre's unique approach to jazz, fostering free interplay among musicians, emerged during his tenure as an arranger for Woody Herman in the late 1940s. Transitioning to the West Coast cool …

Something of a sequel to Eternal Rhythm, his classic meeting of free jazz and world music from five years prior, Eternal Now found Don Cherry entering the studio for the tiny Sonet label, once again with members of the European avant-garde scene (this time from Sweden). This time around, though, the focus swings decidedly to the world-folk end of things: The only standard Western instrument is the piano, featured on only two of the five pieces (one of which is a non-traditional, African-styled r…

** Deluxe 180gr. Marbled vinyl edition. Comes in a deluxe matte laminate gatefold sleeve. Original 1969 BYG album facsimile-edition. Mastered to vinyl from BYG tapes by Nick Robbins. Exclusive liner notes by author John Masouri **'A Jackson in Your House' is the first of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s renowned trio of albums for BYG's Actuel series. This album is The Art Ensemble’s most celebrated release and finds the American avant-garde jazz collective at their most sensational, mocking and st…

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…

2026 much-needed small repress. Hardcover Edition, large format. Labyrinth is a massive hardback book, 375pp in length, printed on high-quality art paper, with an embossed cover and cloth quarter-binding, written by Richard Morton Jack. This beautiful, limited edition hardback is the most comprehensive overview of the subject ever published. It celebrates over three hundred albums, offering detailed background info about each, alongside excerpts from original reviews and masses of high-quality i…

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 …

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.

*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…

*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 …

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 …

*2025 stock* bastille musique presents its twenty-first release »Stefanovich, Dell, Lillinger, Westergaard: SDLW« featuring world premiere recordings by Tamara Stefanovich (piano), Christopher Dell (vibraphone), Christian Lillinger (drums, percussion) and Jonas Westergaard (double bass). Produced at the Teldex Studio Berlin, the album documents the collaboration between Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard and Tamara Stefanovich for the first time.

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…

Big tip! Spiritmuse Records is proud to present Journey To Nabta Playa, a new album from composer and multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid and multidisciplinary artist and musician Naima Nefertari (aka Karlsson), releasing May 2, 2025. A powerful meditation on memory, mythology, and ancestral science, the record draws deep inspiration from the ancient astrological stone circle of Nabta Playa, nestled in the remote deserts of Nubia. Journey To Nabta Playa is grounded in a shared inquiry between …

On John Zorn’s Bagatelles Vol. 6, John Zorn hands a fresh batch of his angular miniatures to the Brian Marsella Trio, who render them as a volatile, deeply melodic piano‑trio songbook where Monkish heads, free detonations and elusive “exotic” moods feel entirely at home.

On Exotica, Sun Ra is recast as an unlikely lounge visionary, folding the lush fantasy worlds of Les Baxter and Hollywood mood music into raw, off‑kilter Saturn tapes that turn easy listening into uneasy, Afrofuturist escape.

**2nd pressing, screen printed cover, risoprinted obi, letterpressed insert edition of 200**  Free Jazz band with a psychedelic touch, Phardah, is set to release their debut album Humans and Beings on the 2nd of May, 2025. The band features veterans of the Finnish experimental music and Free Jazz scene: saxophonist Sami Pekkola, double bassist Eero Tikkanen, and electric guitarist Topias Tiheäsalo, along with the younger generation drummer Veeti Hietala. The album was recorded and mixed by Teemu…

"This is special for me. Evan Parker and Paul Rogers have given their permission for this release. I asked Evan if he would write some notes but he wants me to do it – my memory of the gig. That was 33 years ago (1992), so I don’t remember much. It was at the old Vortex on Stoke Newington Church Street; I must have been sitting with Candy on a little table in front of the low stage. A Marantz cassette recorder in front of me and a cheap mic stand with a single stereo mic in front of that. The ma…

For the first time ever, the complete recording sessions for the Spotlite vinyl album ‘Fingers Remember Mingus’ expanded with bonus tracks. The original album sessions, and the extra tracks, were all recorded between 1979 and 1983. Co-produced by Jazz In Britain with Dave Green, who formed and led the Fingers quartet and who provided most of the recordings from his own tape archive and wrote new notes to complement the 24 page booklet which compiles contemporary reviews and articles about Finger…

Limited edition album by Tony Coe’s Axel featuring Tony, Gordon Beck, Phil Lee, Chris Laurence and Bryan Spring. Recorded during the Camden Jazz Festival at the Shaw Theatre in Euston, London in 1977. Featuring wonderful compositions from Tony, Phil Lee and Gordon Beck, who contributed the brilliant title track. The single CD comes in a 4-panel digisleeve, with a 20 page booklet containing notes from Dave Gelly, John Wickes, Chris Laurence and Chris Searle. In 1975, Tony Coe formed a co-operativ…

Tip! Space is the place! That classic piece - in a historically early version without lyrics - opens the album Paradiso Amsterdam 1970, which shows how the Netherlands was first introduced to Afrofuturism. A pivotal moment in the Dutch jazz experience. It was always thought that the recordings of the long-awaited first concert that the Sun Ra Arkestra gave in the Netherlands were useless for an album release.After all, the entire Arkestra, booked by Hans Dulfer, marched among the massive crowd a…

The bass, that metronome that marks the time for musicians of every style, of every era, that secluded, silent, but essential character for a band. Without the bass, the music would be deflated, the heart notes would leave a wasteland of rowdy high frequencies without any rules. But bass players who have character can elevate those low frequencies and even make them loud at times. Who knows if free jazz, if we want to call it that, is exalted by the Arabic background, those semitones between the…

"Despite its modest role on the world stage, Belgium has produced a number of internationally renowned musicians and composers. There is the iconic gypsy jazz guitar maestro Django Reinhardt, whose position remains unassailable, and guitarist/harmonica player Toots Thielemans, who became an internationally renowned artist performing and recording with Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Shirley Horn and Quincy Jones. The other key Belgian figure is composer/arranger Francy Bo…