Jazz & Improvisation / Contemporary

A collection of some of McCoy Tyner’s best Montreux Jazz Festival live performances!  The audio has Expertly restored and remastered in superlative HD audio; The Montreux Years is released on superior audiophile heavy weight vinyl and MQA quality CD.…

“The Way, The Truth, The Life” is the title of the album of the exceptional duo – Piotr Damasiewicz and Dominik Wania. The duo’s music is adapted by the musicians of songs by Artur Olender, who is both the producer and publisher of the project. The m…

Ingrid Schmoliner and Alex Kranabetter are pillars of the improvised and experimental music scenes inAustria stretching back more than a decade. Although the former is known primarily as a pianist and vocalist and the latter as a trumpeter, they both…

1994 release ** "David Liebman is at his best in pastoral, ethereal situations. This trio session, recorded in 1992 and '93, contains both lengthy tunes and shorter works in which Liebman's intense soprano sax and flute and more robust tenor solos ar…

2024 repress. "Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy, x2 LPs of long-form, lyrical, groove-based free improv by acclaimed guitarist & composer Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet, is at last here. Recorded live at ETA (referencing David Foster Wallace), a bar in…

2014 release ** "On his second octet release, Mise en Abime, Lehman continues his pioneering amalgamation of spectral harmony and jazz improvisation. Lehman’s music is that rare thing: experimental and avant-garde but also accessible. There’s a lot o…

2015 release ** "The members of Nikolaus Neuser's "5tet" are new Berlin residents, some of them from the post-reunification era. The bandleader is a trumpet player in Silke Eberhard's two Eric Dolphy Project bands, and Eberhard, in turn, is the featu…

1994 release ** The Mosaic Sextet is Dave Douglas on trumpet, Michael Jefry Stevens on piano, Mark Feldman on violin, Michael Rabinowitz on bassoon, Joe Fonda on bass, and Harvey Sorgen on drums.

1992 release ** "Icaros was a project of the last line-up of Saxioma. A longplayer was planned but this was never realised. This recording of Icaros is based on a tape from a show in Waregem, April 1987. The variations (tracks 7 & 8) are probably rec…

2001 release (RARE) ** Limited edition 750 copies. The first two studio recordings of The Ganelin Trio Recorded in Vilnius, 1976 and 1978. Vyacheslav Ganelin - piano, campanelli, guitar, tromboneVladimir Chekasin - saxophones, flutes, okarina, bass c…

2011 release ** "When jazz critic Peter Margasak interviewed Nicole Mitchell for the liner notes he wrote for Awakening, she explained: "I wanted to dig back into the old-school jazz a bit and yet still make room to branch out into never-never land."…

In winter 1976, a few years before Olexandr Shapoval headed up the well-known band Vodogray, a jazz band called Shapoval Sextet recorded three pieces "Kobzareva Duma" in live at the Donetsk Jazz Festival. The tape has been lost for almost 45 years, u…

Anchored in the idea that, despite all obstacles, the human experience casts a net of possibilities, Defiant Life – Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith second duo recording for ECM – proves a profound meditation on the human condition and both the suffer…

1991 release **

1996 release ** "The thing to do would be to get all misty-eyed about what a great bassist the late David Izenson was and how he brought in the whole deep-bowing technique to jazz with Ornette Coleman in the early '60s. It would also be summarily rea…

1989 release ** "For his recording debut, Ivo Perelman performs seven folk melodies, five of which are traditional Brazilian children's songs. A powerful tenor player whose style and sound at times recalls Albert Ayler (without the vibrato), Gato Bar…

2004 release ** "The percussionist as poet, the drummer as sound painter, the composer as storyteller, and the improviser as artist of survival. What Pierre Favre writes for the Arte Quartet is like a choral fantasy, a suite for individualists with a…

For Lullaby, Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick draws on the quartet formation in a programme that includes some of his most exploratory and improvisatory qualities, with a cast of ECM familiars Kristjan Randalu and Ole Morten Vågan on piano and bass, …

After Chick Corea’s Piano Improvisations, and Keith Jarrett’s Facing You, Paul Bley’s Open, To Love was the third fabulous chapter in ECM’s quietly revolutionary solo piano manifesto, whose impact endures and continues to influence improvisers today.…

Julia Hülsmann’s quartet resurfaces with a fresh Norwegian voice on horn in tow and presents an attractive batch of originals that finds the group thoughtfully exploring common ground with a knack for adventure. As on past outings, each quartet membe…

2002 release ** "Long before the Italian Instabile Orchestra, Andrea Centazzo was organizing and leading his Mitteleuropa Orchestra that focused on free improvisation, complex arrangements, and outstanding soloists. Most, although not all, of the mus…

William Hooker is a musician, composer, and poet with over 70 recordings as a leader, encompassing jazz, new music, experimental music and multi-disciplinary forms of expression (e.g. dance, silent film and spoken word). He has been recognized as “an…

After a wonderful concert at the Elastic Arts Foundation, Chicago, the ES Trio (Kwan/Zerang/Steyer), decided to record their music to document this inspiring collaboration. In their trio work they focused on sound oriented pieces, that were nurtured …

Norwegian guitarist Stian Larsen joins London-based musicians Colin Webster (alto sax), Andrew Lisle (drums), and Ruth Goller (bass) for an exciting collision of energetic free jazz, post-rock and noise that is dynamic, playful and hard-hitting.

Versatile guitarist Andy Moor known from Dog Faced Hermans and The Ex and Amsterdam based pianist Marta Warelis meet to explore the sound-world of acoustic piano and electric guitar. Their debut album 'Escape' is a collection of improvisations record…

The Amsterdam based improvisers quartet performs a song cycle composed by John Dikeman reflecting on colonisation, and the double edged sword of religion which can lead to transcendence or tyranny.

Recorded seven years before their only duo release, Ornery People (1998), in Parlour Games we can hear the beginnings of all that would follow in the work of Tim Berne and Michael Formanek.

2011 release ** "Canadian drummer André Michel Arraiz-Rivas is a versatile guy, one who you find grinding out prog with Quasiviri and post-folk ghosts with Ronin, just to name a few. Then he happens to be seized by the urge for jazz, and here he is, …

2010 release ** ""Giovanni Maier is an architect. No, not the traditional brick and mortar sense but a true architect of sound. With his latest CD "The talking bass" he is building musical bridges all over the map. The quartet he has assembled for th…

1994 release ** Audience, All Dax Band, Han Bennink, Steve Beresford, Lindsay Cooper, Tom Cora, Dietmar Diesner, ensemble Eva Kant, Fred Frith, Gianni Gebbia, Lars Hollmer, Catherine Jauniaux, Peter Kowald, Ikue Mori, Butch Morris, Hans Reichel, Rici…

1994 release **

For this very special release in The Book of Angels series, Zorn has brought together five of the most acclaimed musicians in modern jazz to perform nine of his most distinctive and lyrical compositions. Truly a jazz supergroup, these five master mus…

Composer and saxophonist Brian Brown produced some of the most refined Australian jazz recordings during the 1970s. A versatile musician whose distinct impressionist music melded modern jazz with the outer limits of free experimentation. Considered t…

bastille musique presents its twenty-eighth release »DLW: Extended Beats« featuring world premiere recordings by Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard, Klangforum Wien, Sonar Quartett, Tamara Stefanovich (piano), Martin Adámek (clarinets) and Johannes Brecht (e…

*2024 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…

Following in the footsteps of the landmark 1966 double-quartet recording by Joe Harriott and John Mayer, Indian born musician Amancio D’Silva produced some of the most adventurous and sophisticated recordings within the canon of ‘indo-jazz’, a term u…

1988 release ** Your Neighborhood Saxophone Quartet is a saxophone quartet based in the Boston area, from 1980 to the present, specializing in improvised music and original compositions by its members. The group recorded one LP on its own label and f…

1993 release ** "The trio setting of tuba and non-traditional percussion and Eskelin's compositions leave an uncluttered canvas free of many of the standard traps of head-solo-head without disolving into the total formlessness of much "avant garde" j…

1990 release **

1996 release ** "The recording debut of Affinity finds the quartet (Joe Rosenberg on soprano, tenor saxophonist Rob Sudduth, bassist Michael Silverman and drummer Bobby Lurie) exploring nine Rosenberg originals and Eric Dolphy's "Hat & Beard." The mu…