Jazz & Improvisation / Contemporary

Japanese edition with obi of the 1981 album on Moers featuring Byard Lancaster, Khan Jamal and Vernon Reid. With obi.

Original German edition on ECM of the 1977 album featuring Charlie Haden.

Propomotional copy of the 1977 re-issue on Arista's "Jazz Right Now"" series with different cover of the Japan-only 1972 live album. With insert and obi.

Original edition of the 1971 Japan-only double-album on MPS' "W Punch Series" with a live recording from 1965 featuring Don Cherry. With insert and obi.

Sealed Japanese original edition on CBS/Sony of the 1985 album. With obi.

Original US edition on Windham Hill of the 1986 album.

Original edition on Next Wave of the Japan-only 1980 album. With insert.

Original Japanese edition on Blue Note of the 1976 live double-album. With insert and obi.

The inspiration for Album l and Album II began with a performance by Japanese musician Eiko Ishibashi at Cologne's Week-End Fest in 2019. For this appearance, the renowned experimental musician and composer of the Oscar-winning film Drive My Car was joined on drums by Tatsuhisa Yamamoto and Joe Talia; both integral members of the top-level improvisational/experimental scene in Tokyo. While in town for the festival, Ishibashi met up with the members of the Cologne-Berlin based group Von Spar who …

Original US edition on ECM of the 1983 double album.72 Japanese re-issue on Trio/Japo of the 1970 album. With insert.

Original Japanese edition on Enja Records of the 1983 album. With insert and obi.

1975 Japanese re-issue on Atlantic's "Jazz-Forever 2" series of the 1959 album. With insert and obi.

Original Japanese 1982 edition on DIW/Marge of the 1978 album featuring Johnny Dyani and Lawrence "Butch" Morris. With obi.

Original Japanese 1983 edition on DIW / Red Record of the 1978 album featuring Johnny Dyani and Lawrence "Butch" Morris. With obi.

Original UK edition of the 1979 live double-album on Cadillac Records featuring Lawrence 'Butch' Morris.

Original Japanese edition of the 1979 live double-album on Cadillac Records featuring Lawrence 'Butch' Morris. With obi.

Original Japanese edition on DIW / Black Saint of the 1984 album. With obi.

Original edition of the 1986 Japan-only album on DIW featuring Sunny Murray and James Blood Ulmer. With obi.

1975 Japanese re-issue on MPS' "Peterson MPS Collection" of the 1971 album. With insert and obi.

Original Japanese edition of the 1978 double-album on Pablo Live. With insert.

For their thirteenth installment, Felt look once again to their city of Copenhagen, specifically to more alumni of the Rytmisk Musik Konservatorium (Rhythmic Music Conservatory). Following soon after Ginte Preisaite’s debut for the label, this long player from Vincent Yuen Ruiz is a grand departure from Preisaite’s experimental electroacoustic pop compositions, instead offering an elegant and pensive suite of late-night, wide-eyed ambient jazz works centred on piano, double bass and percussion; …

Original 1977 Japanese edition with different cover of the 1976 double-album. With insert and obi.

The self‑titled Pat Metheny Group album is the moment an idea becomes a band. Emerging in the late 1970s, Pat Metheny Group arrive with a sound that feels fully sketched yet still buzzing with first‑chapter urgency. Pat Metheny’s guitar speaks in a clear, ringing voice that draws as much from Midwestern folk and rock radio as from bebop lineage, while the writing leans into expansive song forms rather than head‑solo‑head orthodoxy. The result is a music that sounds like it grew up on wide horizo…

On Blue Maqams, oud master Anouar Brahem brings his instrument into the very heart of the modern jazz tradition, recording in New York with a band of genuine giants. Bassist Dave Holland, drummer Jack DeJohnette and pianist Django Bates meet Brahem's Arabic maqam vocabulary on its own terms, translating its modal subtleties into the elastic swing, deep groove and open interplay of the highest level of jazz. Holland and DeJohnette, who have decades of shared history, provide a foundation that is …

Jan Garbarek crafts a brooding, electronic-tinged song without words, with violist Kim Kashkashian and drummer Manu Katché. Spacious, hypnotic and cinematic; ambient chamber music, unmistakably ECM.

Guitarist John Scofield offers a warm and affectionate tribute to a lifelong friend and mentor on Swallow Tales, an album devoted entirely to the compositions of the great electric bassist Steve Swallow. Joined by Swallow himself and by longtime drummer Bill Stewart, Scofield revisits a songbook he has known intimately for half a century, having first studied with Swallow as a young musician. The trio recorded the whole set in a single relaxed day, and that spontaneity is audible in every track:…

On this absorbing recording Keith Jarrett steps away from jazz entirely to interpret the Württemberg Sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, performed on clavichord. Best known for his groundbreaking improvised concerts and his luminous jazz quartets and trios, Jarrett has long maintained a parallel life as a serious interpreter of notated keyboard music, and here he turns to one of the most adventurous composers of the eighteenth century. C.P.E. Bach's writing is famously restless and expressive,…

Where it all began: Keith Jarrett's first ECM solo piano album (1971). Spontaneous compositions of startling melodic and rhythmic invention that foreshadow The Köln Concert. A cornerstone of jazz piano.

Intimate duo standards from pianist Keith Jarrett and bassist Charlie Haden, from the Jasmine sessions. Unhurried and conversational, two old friends; a poignant and beautiful farewell.

My Song is the beloved high point of the so-called "European" or "Belonging" quartet led by pianist Keith Jarrett, and one of the most cherished albums in the ECM catalogue. Recorded in 1977, it unites Jarrett with three of Scandinavia's finest musicians: saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson and drummer Jon Christensen, a band whose chemistry was extraordinary. Where Jarrett's contemporaneous American quartet leaned toward fire and abstraction, the European group cultivated a more …

Swiss pianist Nik Bärtsch and his band Ronin deliver hypnotic 'ritual groove music': interlocking minimal patterns, funk-tinged grooves and Zen-like repetition. Precise, physical and mesmerizing.

The Pat Metheny Group at a joyous peak, with Lyle Mays, Mark Egan and Dan Gottlieb. Bright, anthemic and melodic, led by the soaring '(Cross the) Heartland.' One of ECM's most popular records.

Offramp marks a bold and pivotal step forward for the Pat Metheny Group, the album on which the band significantly expanded its sonic palette while deepening its emotional reach. The great innovation here is Pat Metheny's embrace of the Roland guitar synthesizer, whose vocal, brass-like timbres opened up entirely new textural possibilities and would become a signature element of his sound for years to come. Equally important is the arrival of the Argentine vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Pedr…

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…

Recorded on February 26, 1980 at United-Western Studios in Hollywood, Dial B For Barbra stands as one of the absolute peaks of Horace Tapscott's output for Nimbus West. Following his monumental orchestral sessions with the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, Tapscott here condenses his vision into a sextet of extraordinary cohesion, achieving with just six musicians the same sonic vastness of his larger ensembles. The album opens with "Lately's Solo," where Tapscott weaves Miles Davis's "Milestones" t…

"Yeah, I'm Nate Morgan. I'm going to play with you all." That's how a teenage Nate Morgan introduced himself to Horace Tapscott after hearing The Giant Is Awakened on the radio and tracking down the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. Not "I want to" - "I'm going to." He'd already been studying with Joe Sample and Hampton Hawes, but Arthur Blythe's wailing saxophone on that Flying Dutchman LP had gone straight to his heart. A spiritual experience, he called it. Over the next decades, Morgan became a c…

Original French edition on Europa of the second 1981 album by Evan and John Lurie's band, produced once again by no less than Teo Macero.

Original UK edition on Island of the third album by Evan and John Lurie's project, featuring Marc Ribot.

The source material is drawn from moments of pure improvisation, recorded live in performance, shaped as much by the room and audience as by the musicians themselves.

Lovely 1975 album on Japo of sax/flute and guitar duos by the illustrious Czeck musicians. Never re-issued on either CD or LP. Black labels edition.