Jazz /
Thereupon
Thereupon is the long-anticipated return of the all-star collaborative trio Fieldwork, which has been described by NPR as a “power trio for the new century.” This long-standing collective comprises three internationally revered innovators of contemporary music: alto saxophonist-composer Steve Lehman, pianist-composer Vijay Iyer, and drummer-composer Tyshawn Sorey. In the seventeen years since their last recording, Door (Pi), all three musicians have climbed to the pinnacle of the creative music …
Listen Ship
Listen Ship is the latest masterpiece in the ever-expanding sound world of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, whom The New York Review of Books recently described as “one of American music’s great Romantics and a lifelong seeker of the sublime.” The new work is a suite for six acoustic guitars – including individual stylists such as Bill Frisell, Miles Okazaki and Brandon Ross – and two pianos that utilize Threadgill’s unique intervallic syntax to illuminate his idiosyncratic visi…
Unclassified Affections
Unclassified Affections is the entrancing new release from drummer and composer Dan Weiss that features the convergence of some of the most intriguing musicians on the scene: Peter Evans on trumpet, Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, and Miles Okazaki on guitar. The new compositions, which were written by Weiss specifically for these musicians, range from deep, meditative moments to intense, high-energy peaks, while every track unveils a new layer of exploration.
Brennan’s sonorous mallet work co…
Believe That Was Me
Believe That Was Me: An Existential Experience Starring Avant-Garde Minds, Pianist Matthew Putman, Bassist Hill Greene, and Drummer Francisco Mela
Climbing To Sleep
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…
Beyond Scope
"Ultimately, the best free improvisation performances—and the best films—are those that refuse to be bound by rigid formulas yet still adhere to a fundamental sense of logic and cohesion. They remind us that while structure is important, the real magic happens in the space between the rules." - Mark Corroto
The Eternal Now
Saxophonist, flautist, and composer Chip Wickham releases The Eternal Now, his most progressive recording to date and a heartfelt meditation on artistic practice and creative freedom. Co-produced with longtime collaborator Matthew Halsall, the album represents an expansive journey that pushes Wickham's sound into exciting new territories while maintaining the soulful grooves and heartfelt melodies that have defined his acclaimed catalog.
Chip Wickham casts a formidable shadow across the UK jazz …
One Weird Trick
British South African composer & producer Galina Juritz presents 'One Weird Trick', her debut solo album on London's home for interdisciplinary oddballs, Kit Records.
Magma
Esmeralda Sella is a young pianist from Ravenna, Italy. “Magma” is her debut album, and also a turning point. It’s the culmination of a journey that was «essential for understanding myself and the world around me» as she describes it. Sella recorded “Magma” with two key collaborators: Federico Giolito (double bass) and Giovanni Nardiello (drums), following years of mutual trust, shared musical experiences and extensive practice. «Our sound is the result of opinions, ideas, and doubts exchanged o…
A Near Permanent State Of Wonder
RogueArt proudly presents A Near Permanent State of Wonder, the first duo recording by pianist Alexander Hawkins and cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum. Two of the most distinctive and restlessly inventive voices in contemporary creative music meet in an intimate, exploratory session that balances lyricism and abstraction, rigor and generosity, fragility and fire.
The album documents a rare level of rapport between the musicians. Hawkins, celebrated for his agile navigation between tradition, avant‑gar…
Edges
For whom you play, for yourselves, for the departed who live within you, for all the dilettantes who listen to you, for the young and the old, for the joyful and the sad, the melancholic of all stripes, for the innumerable, unnamed crowd that flits about on the earthly ball, these are the words of Baudelaire before he evoked the itinerant musicians, “one of the two played one of his compositions, and the other improvised beside him a variation, an accompaniment, an underscore”. I really like thi…
We Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
Almost four generations of musicians; four very strong musical personalities, four very rich musical careers and, above all, four musicians who know how much the confrontation of different ideas pushes music forward; and it is exactly what we had hoped from this band, that they find a common language richer than the sum of the individual languages of each of them, a coherent musical material that respect each personality without reducing the great diversity of their individual approaches. If the…
Perseverance Flow
After fifteen years of patient evolution, Natural Information Society has arrived at something resembling a perfect ecosystem. Perseverance Flow, their latest transmission, distills the expanded lineups of recent years back to the core quartet—Lisa Alvarado on harmonium, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums, Jason Stein on bass clarinet, and Joshua Abrams on guimbri—for one continuous 37-minute composition that feels less like an album than a living organism breathing in slow motion. This is NIS at thei…
Playgrounds
Imagine the world that opens up to you when you turn on the power button on your childhood keyboard. A forgotten, dreamlike, carefree, rainbow, unique world. Longing for such a world, three representatives of Polish pianism - Piotr Zabrodzki, Marcel Baliński, and Grzegorz Tarwid - come together to create a completely new sound quality from their obsolete keyboard instruments.
Tokyo
Wolfgang Muthspiel and his trio with Scott Colley on bass and Brian Blade on drums (“Together they have something of the empathy of the Bill Evans trio” – Downbeat) goes into its third recording-venture swinging, setting the stage for what may be the group’s most adventurous trio recording with a delicate reading of Keith Jarrett’s “Lisbon Stomp”. Throughout the album however, the Austrian guitarist and his American cohorts turn the spotlight towards Wolfgang’s captivating originals, touching on…
Tramonto
Recorded live in Birmingham during a Contemporary Music Network tour in 2002, Tramonto finds UK pianist John Taylor (1942-2015) in celebratory, outgoing mood, fronting one of his most dynamic and quick-witted groups, with US musicians Marc Johnson and Joey Baron – the energetic team that would later collaborate on the critically-lauded ECM recording Rosslyn. Here the repertoire features the well-known Taylor tunes “Pure and Simple”, “Between Moons” and “Ambleside” (heard in an epic 15 minute…
Out From Athens
*2025 stock* A cross-generation and cross-genre collaboration bringing together two musicians who share a common city of origin and who find a common music thread in their distinct backgrounds. This beautifully recorded set of piano and bass duets and solos from the summer of 2023 in Athens, Greece, features a mix of original compositions and improvisations.
The Hasaan, Hope & Monk Project
*2025 stock* The spark for this project was the release of the newly discovered 1965 Hasaan recording Metaphysics (Omnivore, 2021). Upon hearing these beautiful compositions by Hasaan, I immediately felt the need to transcribe and understand them. For the recording I felt compelled to present them alongside pieces by Monk and Hope, who, like Hasaan, stood out for their brilliant—yet unorthodox—writing and their highly personal approach to playing the piano. The two elder pianists also had a clos…
Jazz Report From The Hood
Over the past few months, five young musicians performing under the name Omasta have taken the Polish and European jazz scenes by storm. Having gained recognition for their intense live shows, they are now ready to deliver their debut studio effort. Jazz Report from the Hood a collectively composed album immersed in the textures of city streets and everyday urban life. The name Omasta comes from a regional Krakow dialect word meaning “fat added to food for flavor.” It’s a fitting metaphor: the g…
SINN/ist
The Valentin Duit Quartett consists of Robert Unterköfler on saxophones, Tobias Meissl on vibraphone, Ivar Roban Križić on double bass and Valentin Duit on drums. The quartet interprets pieces by Valentin Duit which offer space for collective and solo improvisation in different ways. It emerged from the Tobias Meissl Trio in 2023 and has existed as a collective exploratory ensemble ever since.
Valentin Duit is a Vienna-based drummer who plays with various ensembles mainly in the fields of jazz a…