Jazz & Improvisation / Cosmic

Maurice Louca and his Elephantine Band commit a live, raw, collective sound to record. One of Egypt's most adventurous experimental figures pulls cosmic jazz, African and global musics and modal traditions into long stretches of hard-grooving, hypnotic intensity and avant-jazz abandon. Red and black vinyl mix.

*2022 repress. 400 copies limited orange vinyl + insert* On Elephantine, his new album released exclusively on Sub Rosa as vinyl LP, Cairo-based Maurice Louca guides a 12-piece ensemble through a 38-minute masterwork that might best be described as panoramic. Elements of free improvisation, Sun Ra's cosmic jazz, gorgeous Arabic melody, trancelike African and Yemeni music and minimalism meet in his wholly unique compositional vision. Louca also makes vital contributions on guitar and piano, and i…

** White Vinyl. Comes in a deluxe matte laminate gatefold sleeve. ** The first instalment of a landmark session by one of the most unique figures in black music is a shower of sounds that have come straight from another world.  Occupying a unique place in the history of black music, Sun Ra took the big band aesthetic of his role model Duke Ellington into thrilling new territory. A pianist and keyboard player with an ear for uncommon timbres, a profound interest in a wide range of non-Western cul…

Sun Ra's 1970 Saturn album, cut with a skeletal Arkestra of three sidemen and Ra on Rock-Si-Chord and Minimoog in a near-pop mood. Cosmic Myth's expanded 2LP adds six bonus tracks, including a 1971 TV concert and a 1973 live quartet.

Stellar Tip! Previously unreleased recordings of one of Sweden's most legendary jazz groups. A raucous and energic set of free jazz from the vibrant Swedish scene of the mid '60s – a perfect match for the groundbreaking German scene of the FMP generation! Quoting Jim O'Rourke from the hype sticker: “Someone quadruple booked the same session, because the music on this record is at the crossroads where FMP, Faust, The Insect Trust, and Catherine Ribiero met, but we know that road was never built. …

Sweden's late '60s creative explosion saw Roland Keijser's quartet forge unprecedented music, bridging American free jazz, minimal composition, and Swedish folk heritage. These lost Öppet Tre recordings capture a pivotal moment when Swedish musicians created sounds never heard before

Listening to the music of Al Doum & The Faryds is always like staying in the pristine nature of an exotic island, in the sacred harmony of a new organic society; imaging all brothers and sisters singing and dancing in the unity of the brotherhood. This is the message of love and joy that pervade this fourth album, Spirit Rejoin. Moving towards accents of jazz ancestry, the Faryds absorb and re-elaborate -- with remarkable insights -- disparate elements and influences of electric jazz of the '70s…

Outstanding freeform blow-out by Free jazz percussionist, experimental composer, and all-round awesome dude Cristiano Calcagnile. The album features Calcagnile’s technically-brilliant drumming accompanied by a menagerie of found objects, glockenspiel, aerophone instruments and electrified metal sheet. The resultant is utterly unique. A vibrant album that blazes a trail of rhythmic intensity taking in many styles on his journey, also incorporating combustible electronics and effects in complex bu…

** Temporary reduced price ** Quoting Dusted magazine "This is not a jazz album. This is the music of ritual. Any resemblance it has to jazz is purely coincidental and passing. This is the sound of utopia, of equality, of the universal egalitarian dream, of the earth, the water, and the life force in all its various guises." and "This is an album of education in practice. Don Cherry spent the summer of 1971 teaching at a youth music camp normally devoted to the study of classical music. Somewher…

** ** Deluxe 180gr. Marbled vinyl edition. Comes in a deluxe matte laminate gatefold sleeve. Original 1970 BYG album facsimile-edition. Mastered to vinyl from BYG tapes by Nick Robbins. Exclusive liner notes by author John Masouri ** **  Second chapter of Don Cherry’s "Mu" recordings for BYG - a landmark of free jazz improvisation. Don Cherry and drummer Ed Blackwell had both played with Ornette Coleman and contributed to the revolutionary free jazz movement of the late fifties and early sixties…

The second instalment of a landmark session by one of the most unique figures in black music is a shower of sounds that have come straight from another world.  Sun Ra and the various groups he led were as prolific as they were innovative. By conservative estimates they produced around 200 recordings over a fifty-year period, and the early 70s was as fertile a time as any. In a typical burst of creative energy Ra and an ensemble he dubbed The Solar Myth Arkestra produced enough material to be spr…

** 2-CD set gathering the seminal albums “Mu” First Part and “Mu” Second Part. Restored & remastered from the original tapes by Nick Robbins. New & insightful essay by author & music journalist John Masouri. 6-panel deluxe digi-sleeve echoes the vibe of the original LPs & includes a 16-page booklet. Two printed inner wallets replicate the original LP covers back and front **  Two historic 1969 recording sessions by Don Cherry and drummer Ed Blackwell now assembled on this deluxe 2-CD set that co…

Biggest Tip Possible! Lars Göran Ulander Septet (1965) Lars Lystedt Quintet (1967) Per Henrik Wallin Trio (1977) Curated by saxophonist and improvisational musician Mats Gustafsson, Caprice Music continues the Öppet series, focusing on a relatively unexplored period of Swedish creative, experimental music from the 1960’s and 70’s. Öppet Två presents saxophonist Lars-Göran Ulander, who made a big impression on this series' curator in 1982, when he witnessed a solo concert at an art exhibition. Ma…

Miguel Atwood-Ferguson marks John Coltrane's centennial on Impulse! with a 21-piece collective (Brandee Younger, Shabaka Hutchings, Flying Lotus, Jeff Parker, Azar Lawrence), recasting Naima, Giant Steps and A Love Supreme as cosmic, spiritual music.

Neil Ardley's visionary bridge: 1976's Kaleidoscope of Rainbows fuses British jazz-rock with Balinese gamelan scales. Seven Rainbow compositions built on pelog and slendro patterns, featuring Ian Carr, Paul Buckmaster, Tony Coe. Final part of Ardley's trilogy, pointing toward 1979's Harmony of the Spheres. Minimalist counterpoint meets exotic structures.

Big Big Tip! Certainly one of the most obscure and perhaps one of the most fascinating work of the English jazz revolution. Master of ceremonies is cellist Paul Buckmaster, known for his work with the Third Ear Band and for his (later) collaborations with Miles Davis, David Bowie and Elton John. Chitinous is his the only album as leader and it was recorded between 31 March and 13 April 1970, by an orchestra of no less than 51 players, with violins, violas and cellos. In this enormous line-up we …

On Timeless Records: From The Archives (1974–1991), Antal rethreads the Dutch label’s glory years into a double‑LP of modal and spiritual fire - from Pharoah Sanders to Art Blakey, Woody Shaw and beyond - built for dancers, diggers and late‑night headphones alike.

Cosmic jazz from the Canary Islands, recorded by Argentinian pianist Luis Vecchio.

Al Doum & The Faryds have always been an enchanting organism, a timeless land of wisdom, humility, brotherhood and love. Their blend of spiritual jazz, psychedelia and Afro-Latin rock holds a magical balance, turning their music into a tropical celebration filled with harmony and deep vibrations. A volcano of emotion, where the poetry of rising and falling voices becomes a gospel and soul illumination, echoing from faraway places. The expanded horn section — alto and tenor sax, soprano sax and b…

A new LP by JJ Whitefield (Poets of Rhythm, Whitefield Brothers etc) and Gonçalo Mortágua on Ultraääni Records.

Two side-long improvisations recorded in a spring evening beneath a 1908 shot tower. That is the whole record, and it is enough. Fysiikka ja Kemia - Physics and Chemistry - surfaced in late 2025 with Biologia, a debut LP on Tampere's Ultraääni Records that the label summed up in a single line: rural psych-jazz improvisations by the Finnish bastard sons of Arbete & Fritid. Three hundred copies, each sleeve screen-printed by hand by the band, gone quickly. We Jazz picked a track for their Friends …

In the years leading up to 1971, Sun Ra wrote many compositions and poems specifically inspired by the ancient African Kingdoms and many others with associated mythological and heliocentric connotations. As such, a visit to Egypt and the opportunity for the Arkestra to play there was a matter of necessity. Ra’s first ever concerts outside of the US had occurred in late summer and autumn of 1970 with performances in France, Germany and the UK and a second European tour was arranged for late 1971.…

* 300 copies, deluxe edition with two booklets, perfect replica of the original. * Joining their rapidly growing catalog of radical gestures of creative sound, Holidays Records returns with one of their most important releases to date, the first ever vinyl reissue of Pygmy Unit’s “Signals From Earth”, a towering private press obscurity, originally released by the band in 1974. Blending Native American references into a body of sonority that draws on free improvisation, experimental electronic mu…

Tip! Tip! Tip! Twenty years after its first publication, Art Yard are proud to present the fully revised 2nd edition of Hartmut Geerken's long unobtainable Omniverse Sun Ra, a definitive hitch-hiker's guide to the Sun Ra galaxy. 304 full colour pages / 1850 gramms - Size: 290mm x 245mm Portrait.The new, completely revised edition features:- unpublished photographs of Sun Ra and the Arkestra by Hartmut Geerken and Val Wilmer;- fully revised discography by Chris Trent, co-author of The Earthly Rec…

* Edition of 300 copies. High thickness cardboard with opaque laminated cover. Comes with a printed insert. * Founded initially as the The Beckerlee Quartet sometime towards the late 1950s and early '60s, a time during which time they went through various lineup changes before morphing into The Contemporary Jazz Quartet, in 1962 they began playing the Vingaarden club in central Copenhagen as one of the earliest European adopters of the emerging movement of free jazz. It was there that they came …

If Eternal Rhythm was Don Cherry's world fusion masterpiece of the '60s, then Brown Rice is its equivalent for the '70s. But where Eternal Rhythm set global influences in a free jazz framework, Brown Rice's core sound is substantially different, wedding Indian, African, and Arabic music to Miles Davis' electrified jazz-rock innovations. And although purists will likely react here the same way they did to post-Bitches Brew Davis, Brown Rice is a stunning success by any other standard. By turns hy…

Two sunken treasures from the same Copenhagen underground, gathered here as a pair. On one LP, Predetermination: The Contemporary Jazz Quartet caught in 1964 alongside Sunny Murray and Gary Peacock - the rhythm section of Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity - on music that stayed hidden for sixty years. Free jazz before the norm was set, exploding out of Denmark years ahead of the rest of Scandinavia. On the other, Beautiful United Harmony Happening / The Education of an Amphibian: John Tchicai at hi…

** Deluxe 180gr. Black vinyl edition. Comes in a deluxe matte laminate gatefold sleeve. Original 1969 BYG album. Mastered to vinyl from BYG tapes by Nick Robbins. Exclusive liner notes by author John Masouri ** Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell, graduates of the revolutionary Ornette Coleman quartet, are in perfect accord on this seminal free jazz set, recorded in Paris during the late sixties. The emphasis, as on all Don Cherry releases, is on the life-giving, often magical qualities of pure sound, c…

2025 stock Altoist Marion Brown is perhaps best known for performances on albums by his contemporaries, such as Coltrane's Ascension, but Brown stands on his own as one of the most creative and important forces to come out of the 1960s avant-garde jazz movement. Porto Novo is widely regarded as one of Brown's best recordings, captured during a 1967 session in Holland at the peak of his creative powers, accompanied by bassist Maarten van Regteben Altena and drummer Han Bennink. Previously out of …

This album is definitely a one-of a kind unique release on Strata East - out of print for nearly 50 years and unbelievably hard to find. Do not miss out if you want one as Strata East always sell out! Big Double 180gm vinyl plus gatefold sleeve - quality package!

* 150 copies Small repress* “Beautiful United Harmony Happening” / “The Education of an Amphibian” - the second release by Alga Marghen’s brand new free jazz imprint, Formalibera - is also dedicated to the output of John Tchicai following his return to Copenhagen during the mid 1960s. Comprising two pieces, remarkably, this single LP effectively bookends a rich period of activity for the saxophonist, capturing one of his earliest group formations as a leader from 1966, as well as one of his last…

Stunning conscious avant-garde free jazz featuring Roland P. Young originally released in 1975 on the eclectical 1750 Arch records.

*2022 stock* Recorded in 1973, “Morning Flight” by trombonist Hiroshi Fukumura is a stunning modal and spiritual jazz album! Genius work from Japanese trombonist Hiroshi Fukumura – working here at the helm of a twin-trombone group that also features the talents of Shigeharu Mukai – in a style that's filled with soul and free-thinking imagination! The two players work together beautifully here – avoiding any of the cliches of trombone-heavy groups from the past – and instead, using the open-ended…

In September 1968, Marion Brown, who moved to Europe two years earlier, recorded the soundtrack of the movie by Marcel Camus entitled 'Le Temps Fou' in the legendary Parisian studio Davout. The movie starring Nino Ferrer was released in 1970 under the title 'Un Été Sauvage'. Soon fallen into oblivion, 'Le Temps Fou' was printed in very few copies by the French arm of Polydor and is almost impossible to find in its original pressing. Finally, more than fifty years later, Le Tres Jazz Club has bro…

On Let the Sky Open Under Your Feet, Skyjack fuse South African groove, European improv and chamber‑level detail into a live‑wired suite of cosmic jazz, where deep‑rooted rhythms and free flights feel like earth and atmosphere trading places.

Enshrined in the Penguin Jazz Guide’s "Core Collection", this quintessential platter of Sun Ra’s late 1950s Chicago ensemble showcases the brilliant tenor sax stylings of John Gilmore, and introduces Arkestra mainstays Marshall Allen, Pat Patrick, and Ronnie Boykins. Recorded and issued in 1959, it marks a coda for the bandleader’s bebop/hard-bop stage, as his interstellar traveler persona began to transform the band (and the music). Many of the early works on these recordings would remain stapl…

Triple-LP version. Tri-gatefold cover. "Considering the monumental depth of Sun Ra's recorded oeuvre, there are surprisingly few solo piano albums. Monorails & Satellites Volumes 1 and 2 were the first commercial LPs of the artist's solo keyboard excursions. Recorded in 1966 and released on his Saturn imprint in 1968, Volume 1 featured seven idiosyncratic originals and one standard ('Easy Street') delivered in Sunny's singular manner. Volume 2 was released the following year, and contains five c…

When Angels Speak of Love, released in 1966 on Sun Ra's Saturn label, is a rarity, with limited pressings (150 copies, by one estimate), which were sold thru the mail and at concerts and club dates. The tracks were taped in New York during two 1963 sessions at the Choreographer's Workshop, a rehearsal space/recording den with warehouse acoustics. Ra spent countless hours at the CW from 1961 to 1964 sharpening the Arkestra during exhaustive musical huddles. John Corbett calls this "one of the mos…

2026 Re-issue. A cornerstone of postwar Japanese free improvisation, captured before three thousand listeners at the ninth Moers New Jazz Festival on 26 May 1980 and issued later that year as TBM-5023. By this point Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi had spent more than a decade refining his theory of mass projection - a model of collective improvisation in which the ensemble operates not as a sequence of soloists but as a single density field, modulating texture rather than line - and the New Direction…

Huge Tip! Oiro Pena is a Finnish jazz collective helmed by prolific composer Antti Vauhkonen. Their last album, Puna, recorded in bedrooms, studios and other salubrious locations around Helsinki during 2022, is a mix of lo-fi spiritual jazz, experimental, and avant-garde music forms. It includes four vocal tracks recorded with Merikukka Kiviharju, which feature both original lyrics and those sourced from traditional Finnish folk songs. Vauhkonen first attracted attention as saxophonist in the gr…