Jazz /
In Concert At Yale University
Bomb! Sourced from the master tapes. First-time vinyl reissue Black vinyl single LP version. The late percussionist Milford Graves was one of the most unique artists the world has ever seen. Born in Jamaica, Queens in 1941, he began his career in the early '60s as a part of New York's vibrant Latin jazz scene. His focus quickly turned inward, shifting towards a practice that explored the very nature of self. From his work in the New York Art Quartet and collaborations with Albert Ayler, Sonny …
The Complete Yale Concert, 1966
Bomb! ** Sourced from the master tapes. First-time vinyl reissue ** Groundbreaking early work from drummer Milford Graves and pianist Don Pullen – a set of long, free improvisations that were originally issued on Graves' Self-Reliance Productions label! The music is even more striking than sounds from the time on the ESP label – and also really predates some of the freer work of this type from the European scene – as Graves is a monster on the drum kit and a range of percussion, reaching out wit…
déluge
Tip! "Trombe’s 2019 self-titled debut LP kicked off the Nantes unit’s ongoing two-piece experiment with a short and sweet exercise in minimal brut-jazz, with percussionist Erwan Cornic rattling chains and trinkets just as often as he plays full drum set and Thomas Beaudelin yanking the sax valves like root vegetables. But even though the duo has garnered praise from devout skronk stalwarts like Mats Gustafsson, their particular style has always had a distinct, almost delicate melodicism at its h…
Aphelia
Berlin trumpeters Axel Dörner and Lina Allemano team up to create experimental improvised sonic explorations, both in duo and in larger trumpet-ensemble form. The pieces' titles reference the small lesser-known objects circling around the sun in our solar system; the album’s title Aphelia being the furthest distance away in orbit around the sun.
Reflection And Passage
Michael Fischer is an Austrian musician, composer and instant composition conductor. He works on the immanence of language within sounds, their sculptural and dramatic evidence, on the tenor saxophone, the violin, on cd-player setting and conducted instant compositions, in improvised and experimental music. Since 1999 he connects the electro-acoustic phenomenon feedback with acoustic instrumentation by creating and playing the feedback saxophone. He also collaborations with literary writers, dan…
Mountains, Meditations, Murmurations
Two mountains, three meditations, and three murmurations, interwoven in dynamic duo performance, presented in order of emergence at the time of the music’s making. Tromans and Sanders have worked together on a number of projects in the last decade, including Tromans’ Birmingham-Chicago Improvisers’ Ensemble (as featured on BBC Radio 3) and Sid Peacock’s acclaimed Surge Orchestra, but this is the first time they have recorded together in a duo setting. The session was suggested by Sanders in earl…
Crepuscule In Nickelsdorf
A dream-like aura surrounds these recordings by Evan Parker and Mathew Wright - Trance Map+ from the Jazz Festival Nickelsdorf: Crepuscule in Nickelsdorf. “Filtered through the silicon of the hard drive, birds and insects often sound electronically generated and some of the synthesized sounds, designed in software, sound like birds and insects with wings of their own,” writes American journalist Bill Shoemaker. The real seems virtual; the virtual seems real – it is the ambiguity essential to the…
Fläche & Figur (14 Duos Für Akkordeon Und Drumsets)
Rüdiger Carl and Sven-Åke Johansson are two fellow travelers on the path of experimental music who have worked together since the late 1960s in many formations, most notably as the wild-card Fluxus pranksters on Peter Brötzmann’s legendary 1969 recording Machine Gun, and on many more recordings and stagings of sonic interventions over the decades. In the words of Peter Margasak writing in the Chicago Reader in 2012: “Where to begin with percussionist and polymath Sven-Åke Johansson: Is he a beb…
Dangerous
Jinya Disc presents a live concert by New Direction. The album includes the last performance of Action Direct and the last performance of Takayanagi's life. In other words, it is Masayuki Takayanagi's "remaining work". An astounding force set free upon the world, heaving with life and fire, bound to stop even the most seasoned listener dead in their tracks It’s hard to offer a better description than that offered by Japanese free jazz critic Teruto Soejima who wrote "New Direction Unit performa…
Scenery Somewhere
"How magical that in an improvisation recorded in a former hospital funeral chapel, we hear the sounds of life. We hear the sounds of breath. Not only the gentle sibilance of the air spilling from the edges of the mouthpiece, as it escapes life as a note; not only the airiness of those low drums: but also the sound of the music being allowed to breathe within the space’s very special acoustic. We hear the sounds of the heartbeat in Cornelia Nilsson’s low drums, now urgent, now reassuring. And we…
Off Course !
"There is a landscape of sonic ideas, of banging, of entity, of new forms of stimulating the body and of prehension moved by our human, urban, maybe even cubist surroundings, or by the big wild country where, we say, music does what it wants. Unless, we misread and “music knows what it wants.” Both! With one stroke, knowing and doing unanimously converge into one. A point of intersection - there are so many - between the desiredl iberties and sublime agitation provoked by the embrasure of paths …
Live At The Berlin Jazzbühne Festival 1982
“In the afternoon we performed in a rather austere theatre in East Berlin. Then I remember we crossed Checkpoint Charlie that evening to play in a club in West Berlin. The atmosphere was completely different. I felt as though we were living in a black and white spy movie.” Nicolas Fiszman recalls that chaotic day of 13 June 1982. Two outstanding guitarists, Philip Catherine and Nicolas Fiszman, who at the time was only seventeen years old, were taken from one side of Berlin to the other in pouri…
String And Grid
*In process of stocking* "Sting And Grid is an album of great joy and great sensitivity which bears repeated listening due to its relatively calm nature. A real delight for any improv lovers." – Mr Olivetti, FREQ
Two world class players from the Manchester UK free improvisation scene deliver here a beautifully recorded set of pieces founded on pure instrumental skill. Hanslip's elegant, singing lines are delivered with calm and precision, driven by Cheetham's multi-textural percussion.
Ripples
*In process of stocking* "Ostensibly ‘jazz’, but you’d be hard-pressed to adopt that term here, as the duo stretch the definition of such pat categorizations to the point where genre effectively becomes meaningless. Just gorgeous, pure music. Softly, as in a morning sunrise." - Darren Bergstein
Music the listener can sink into, immersing themselves in lush textures, and bathing in the richly varied harmonies and sonorities. Ripples began life with an experimental session designed to explore the …
Searching For The Disappeared Hour
*2023 stock* "Even though they’re often neighbors in the rhythm section, piano and guitar are not typically a good fit for jazz duets. Some of that has to do with the difference between an electrically amplified instrument and a percussive acoustic one, and some with the fact that the close voicings pianists favor are difficult on guitar, while the open voicings guitarists love don’t easily translate to piano.
But as Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson suggest on Searching for the Disappeared …
Recorded Yesterday And On Sale Today
A pair of contemporary music giants re-release a long-lost 2003 live recording, previously available only as a CD-R.
Hush
*In process of stocking.* We can only answer that question from an individual perspective, based upon our perception of place, and space, and time, and stimuli. Each of these categories exists within a complex of contexts – for example, there is the stimulus of personal relationships, the stimulus of our health and that of others around us, the stimulus of political events, the stimulus of work, the stimulus of art. A work of art provides an interactive opportunity to ignite our perception with …
Magnitude
"Jeremy Brown might be a new name to many listeners of this music. He is a Professor of Music at the University of Calgary in Alberta Canada who teaches improvisation, is the Director of the University Jazz Orchestra and the Saxophone Ensemble and is a notable and prolific scholar of music. He is a busy professional musician who plays saxophone, flute, clarinet in classical, and jazz settings. He is a virtuoso, who is very highly regarded in Canada and elsewhere. I met him when I was the Killam …
Quaternity
**In process of stocking. 200 copies** Everything surrounding Brace looks simple and clear. The name, Brace, five letters, one syllable. The title of their debut album, “Quaternity”, refers to the four pieces in it. Even the straightforwardness of the song-titles leaves no room for doubt. The Bristol duo featuring Ollie Moore (reeds/keyboards) and Aidan Searle (drums/percussion) know what it is doing: plain free jazz born of instant composition. Moore has been around for a while, an active playe…
Memoirs of a Dream
*Limited edition of 600 copies* Nomadic spiritual jazz duo The Sea Ensemble embodied the ethos of their era and art to a uniquely poetic degree. Founded in the early 1970’s by ethnomusicologist Zusaan Kali Fasteau and versatile instrumentalist Donald Rafael Garrett (sideman to John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and Roland Kirk, among others), the couple’s lifestyle mirrored their music: restless, questing, collaborative, and improvised. Their itinerant journeying spanned Senegal, Congo, Morocco, Haiti…