Jazz /
The Fire Still Burns
45 years after his debut album Valley of Search (1975/India Navigation), jazz saxophonist Alan Braufman returns. The Fire Still Burns has that gritty, forthright sensibility we hope to hear in sonic collaborations borne out of beauty and struggle, but there’s a populist ease that comes with age and reflection. Put simply it’s natural music – complementary, individual, and full of the sweet, hot taste of celebration.
Valley of Search
The first ever reissue of the 1975 free jazz album originally released on India Navigation. What we know of Downtown New York comes from the countercultural and creative flowering that emerged in lower Manhattan in the 1960s, attributable to cheap live-work spaces called lofts. These were often abandoned and disused small manufacturing spaces and they became a nexus for artistic practice and life. From a jazz perspective, lofts were alternatives to the club scene, and they gained notoriety in th…
Live
**CD Edition** Live was mostly recorded on November 1st, 2019, at Haus der Berliner Festspiele in Berlin, Germany, during the 2019 edition of JazzFest Berlin. For Angel Bat Dawid and her band Tha Brothahood – which includes Deacon Otis Cooke, Viktor Le Givens, Xristian Espinoza, Norman W. Long, Dr. Adam Zanolini, and Asher Simiso Gamedze – it was the first stop of their first European tour. Forty-eight hours before the show, Angel and members of the band were on their way to the airport in Chic…
Music Of Inevitable Sounds
Trost presents Music of Inevitable Sounds by Luc Ex, recorded in Bologna, Teatro San Leonardo and Den Haag, Korzo, 2018. Mixed by Mika Szafrowski, mastered by Martin Siewert.
Joost Buis - trombone, Saartje van Camp - cello, Luc Ex - ac. bass, Renato Ferierra - bass/tenor sax, Pepe Garcia - percussion, Yedo Gibson - reeds, Nora Mulder - piano, Mika Szafrowski - guitar, Veryan Weston - piano/keystation, Nina Hitz - cello, Vladislav Psaruk - trombone.
Organic Music Theatre - Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972
* 2xLP on black vinyl, pressed at RTI and housed in a heavy-duty tip-on gatefold Stoughton jacket. * In the late 1960s, the American trumpet player and free jazz pioneer Don Cherry (1936–1995) and the Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry (1943–2009) began a collaboration that imagined an alternative space for creative music, most succinctly expressed in Moki’s aphorism “the stage is home and home is a stage.” By 1972, they had given name to a concept that united Don’s music, Moki’s art…
The Summer House Sessions
* LP on black vinyl, pressed at RTI and housed in a heavy-duty tip-on Stoughton jacket, with insert. * In 1968, Don Cherry had already established himself as one of the leading voices of the avant-garde. Having pioneered free jazz as a member of Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet, and with a high profile collaboration with John Coltrane under his belt, the globetrotting jazz trumpeter settled in Sweden with his partner Moki and her daughter Neneh. There, he assembled a group of Swedish musicians …
Rituals of Transition
In 2002 Misha Mengelberg was invited for the second time to the AngelicA Festival in Bologna. That edition, the twelfth, took part entirely in a squatted social centre of the city, and, in collaboration with Tristan Honsinger, was conceived as one large opera lasting six days – an opera within which the performances of many national and international artists fitted in like individual mobile “modules”.
Especially for this occasion and on the festival director’s suggestion, who had attended a perf…
At AngelicA 2000 Bologna
In the year 2000, when Bologna was European Capital of Culture, AngelicA Festival, then in its tenth edition, invited Cecil Taylor to hold a concert at the Teatro Comunale - Opera House of Bologna: solo, with his piano (and his dance and his poetry readings) he opened an evening that ended with a rendition of the luminous piece Coptic Light by Morton Feldman performed by the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, conducted by Jurjen Hempel.
This unusual juxtaposition (not in the history of th…
Writing In Water
Reissue, originally released in 1985. Gentle, incisive solo music for violin and electronics by one of the unsung giants of free improvisation. Philipp Wachsmann emerged in the fertile mid '70s underground free music scene in London, playing with everyone from Simon Mayo to Barry Guy to Derek Bailey to Evan Parker, starting a band called Chamberpot, making albums for the collective artist-run label he managed: Bead Records. These LPs, 26 of them in total, were made in tiny batches and are now ra…
Imaginary Junction
Performed by Cath Roberts (bariton saxophone and objects), Dirk Serries (acoustic guitar), Martina Verhoeven (piano), Tom Ward (flute, clarinet and bass clarinet) on July 18th 2020. This music was recorded simultaneously in two locations - Brockley and Sint-Lenaarts - using the JackTrip software to transmit/receive the live sound via the internet. The musicians could hear each other at studio quality in near-realtime, despite the physical distance separating them.
Crosscurrents
* Edition of 300 * Performed by Patrick De Groote (trumpet, bugel), Cel Overberghe (alto sax), Dirk Serries (acoustic guitars), Martina Verhoeven (piano). Recorded, mixed and mastered at the Sunny Side Inc. Studio, Anderlecht (Belgium) on December 14th 2019.
New Inventions
* Edition of 300 * Performed by Colin Webster (alto saxophone), Andrew Lisle (drums) at Shrunken Heads Studio, London on 24th May 2019. Recorded and mixed by Senor Al Funklinos. Mastered at the Sunny Side Inc. Studio, Anderlecht (Belgium).
Crossfade Estate
Crossfade Estate was a special, distinct project. It was made in November 2005. Recorded in 10 hours. Edited, mixed and collaged over 18 months. It was a development of Charles Hayward's long term relationship with The Albany in Deptford, London. They asked him to push their recently installed digital recording suite and see what he could make. The approach was a step further from the series Accidents+Emergencies which Hayward had curated in the late 1990's.
It was a pulling together of differen…
With, Without
Phil Minton is a jazz/free-improvising vocalist and trumpeter. He is a highly dramatic baritone who tends to specialize in literary texts: he has sung lyrics by William Blake with Mike Westbrook's group, Daniil Kharms and Joseph Brodsky with Simon Nabatov, and extracts from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake with his own ensemble. Minton is perhaps best known, however, for his completely free-form work, which involves "extended techniques" that can be as unsettling as they can be mesmerising. His voca…
The Gift
**300 copies** NoBusiness presents the latest trio offering by German brothers Conny and Matthias Bauer and Norwegian drummer and percussionist Dag Magnus Narvesen. The album was recorded live on July 4th, 2018 at Christuskirche, Berlin, Germany.Conny Bauer - tromboneMatthias Bauer - double bassDag Magnus Narvesen - drumsConcert produced by Jazzkeller69 e.V.Recorded and mixed by Dietrich Petzold / tonus arcusMastered by Arūnas Zujus at MAMAstudiosPhoto by Lena Panzer-SelzDesign by Oskaras Anosov…
Improdimensions
**300 copies** "The second side of this beautiful duo album was recorded more or less half a year after The Swiftest Traveller in Vilnius, while the first one in December 2019. The recordings took place live during the concert series dedicated to improvised music, "Improdimensija", at MAMAstudio. The music is a little less exploratory than this recorded with Don Malfon or Torben Snekkestad. It sounds for me more like a 21st century response to the late music of Jimmy Giuffre music from the end o…
Dental Kafka
Jim O'Rourke (of Gastr del Sol and Sonic Youth fame) plays a lot with Japanese Free jazz legend Akira Sakata in various formations. Together with Italian composer and pianist Giovanni di Domenico and the drummer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto they form this powerful band. Their second release combines contemporary Avantgarde and Free Jazz in a beautiful way.Line-up:Akira Sakata - sax, clarinet, voiceJim O’Rourke - double bassGiovanni di Domenico – piano, hohner pianetTatsuhisa Yamamoto - drumsRecorded Jim O…
Light Industry
**300 copies** "Colin Webster and Dirk Serries are skilled improvisers you can’t pin down on a single outlet. They remain restless seekers, never content with merely repeating themselves, not even within the same project. Compare Gargoyles to Light Industry. They are totally different." - Guy Peters"Serries and Webster meet again at their favorite studio, Sunny Side in Anderlecht, Belgium, in September 2019 for an intimate duo where Serries plays only acoustic guitars. They already recorded a du…
Praxis
**300 copies** "It’s the classic 'the journey, not the destination' attitude. Dealing with the moment. Dirk Serries, Martina Verhoeven and Colin Webster have a refreshing take on that. They use instruments, but it feels as if they are playing with wood and metal. With breath and touch. They caress, pluck, sigh, thump, blow, push, creak, sputter. There is no obvious order to what they are doing, yet you are aware of a certain concord, an understanding below the surface of what’s there. The openne…
First and Second
**300 copies** "To fully grasp the range of extended techniques, you should be able to see them in action, but it is also perfectly possible to listen to this music and focus on elements such as flow, density and responsiveness." - Guy Peters"SETT is a an acoustic strings quartet, featuring British most prolific double bass player John Edwards, Dirk Serries and Daniel Thompson on acoustic guitars and violist Benedict Taylor, recorded at the Dave Hunt studio, London in November 2019. SETT does no…