Jazz /
New Rap
Haino Keiji is a mysterious psychedelic minstrel who has been performing his peculiar blend of rock, medieval music and improvisation since the early 1970’s. Incredibly prolific, he has headed dozens of bands and released hundreds of CDs on a variety of labels around the globe. His latest project is a wild duo with Ruins mastermind Yoshida Tatsuya, the undisputed master drummer of the Japanese Underground. Featuring Haino’s unique singing and screaming style as well as his best guitar playing to…
Beyond Quantum
Anthony Braxton, Milford Graves and William Parker are quite literally three of the most important virtuoso instrumentalists in new music, each a vivid conceptualist as well an influential composer/perf o rm e r. This intense improvisational outing features them at their best: excited, inspired and in complete communication. Recorded and mixed by musical alchemist Bill Laswell, sparks fly in this important and historic meeting of creative music masters.
Standards
In early 2002 Derek Bailey astounded the free music community with his gorgeous album Ballads, a radical and steely interpretation of the standard repertoire. It became an instant classic, hit a dozen best-ten lists and remains his best selling cd of all time. The recordings here were made just weeks after the idea was first born at an intimate Christmas gathering in New York—and two months before the recording of Ballads. Here Derek is working out his personal approach to the standard song repe…
Pieces For Guitar
Private recordings of incredible historical importance (practically the holy grail to fans of free improvisation), Pieces for Guitar presents the earliest known solo recordings of guitar innovator Derek Bailey. Dating from 1966 (possibly 1965) these pieces were recorded for personal study during a transitional period and include some of the only instances of him performing his own written compositions!! Under the influence of the music of Anton Webern, Bailey began working through a variety of t…
As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977 (Book)
In As Serious As Your Life, photographer and historian Val Wilmer chronicles the free jazz revolution as a Black cultural vanguard, situating Ayler, Coltrane, Coleman, Sun Ra and others within the struggles, hopes and solidarities of 1960s–70s America.
One Atmosphere
An original member of the legendary Black Artists Group (St. Louis' counterpart to the AACM), and founder of the World Sax Quartet, Julius Hemphill was one of the most important composer/performers in creative music. His work is marked by a sharp, edgy melodicism steeped in the blues, contrapuntal complexity and a striking formal logic. One Atmosphere presents the full range of his compositional talents: a long, epic work for seven woodwinds (one of his greatest compositions, here receiving its …
The Straight Horn Of Steve Lacy
Originally released in 1962 on Candid Records, The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy finds a young Steve Lacy stepping forward with quiet confidence and a sound unlike anyone else at the time. Stripped of excess and focused on tone, space, and intent, these sessions reveal a musician already thinking beyond convention. The soprano sax cuts clean and direct, moving between sharp angles and lyrical calm, with a small group that listens as closely as it plays. Nothing here feels rushed or ornamental, jus…
Live at Bau 4
Gerry Hemingway Live At Bau 4 features a profound collaboration among Gerry Hemingway, Izumi Kimura, Frank Gratkowski, and Christian Weber, creating a vibrant interplay of rhythms and melodies. Recorded live at Bau 4 in Altbüron, Switzerland, where Hemingway has lived since 2009, the album opens with “Slivers,” a 20-minute exercise in sound that resembles a kaleidoscopic landscape of textures and colors. This piece pays tribute to Bau 4's founders, Hildegard and Walter Schaer, celebrating their …
Septober Energy
Centipede’s Septober Energy (1971), released on RCA and produced by jazz pianist Keith Tippett, is a sprawling double-album manifesto of British avant-garde jazz-rock that brings together an enormous ensemble of more than fifty musicians, including members of King Crimson, Soft Machine, and other key figures of the Canterbury and progressive scenes. Conceived as a large-scale orchestral jazz composition, the record blends free improvisation, electric jazz fusion, progressive rock dynamics, and c…
Sketch Of My Life
The first-ever reissue on Studio Mule of the debut album by Japanese jazz legend and bassist Yoshio Ikeda. Having performed with such illustrious figures as Sadao Watanabe, Masabumi Kikuchi, and Terumasa Hino, Ikeda’s first album as a leader features pianist and vocalist Ichiko Hashimoto—also known for her involvement with YMO—Berlin-based jazz pianist Aki Takase, and leading Japanese drummer Motohiko Hino.
Avant-garde yet imbued with a distinctly Japanese sense of melancholy, this is a work tha…
Bête noire
*100 copies limited edition* Trombe's fourth album, 'Bête Noire' (2026), is a tribute to all those wild boars that tear up the countryside, slaughter sheep, and are chased and killed by bizarrely clad figures in orange vests, armed with rifles... Beware of the line of cars parked in a herd along country roads, because they're there, prowling. Don't meet their gaze, or you'll be petrified... In fact, I know some people who had to change their mode of transport after a collision with the beast... …
Quartet
Hatka performed at Telakka Jazz on the first Friday night of January 2025. The following Sunday the trio visited the studio to record a session - music captured in the festival afterglow, fuelled by a shared commitment to free expression. The album is titled Quartet for a reason. A fourth voice, saxophonist Jone Takamäki, was originally meant to join the group for both the live performance and the studio recording. Quartet is what was planned and what remains. Jone couldn’t make it, so he never …
In 2
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…
Hear, Sense And Feel
The Awakening’s debut album Hear, Sense and Feel is a landmark spiritual jazz statement that captures the restless, creative energy of early‑1970s Chicago and the vanguard of the Black Jazz Records catalog. Recorded in 1972 at Streeterville Studios and newly available again after years as a coveted collector’s item, the album finds the group balancing deep groove, free improvisation, and Afrocentric consciousness in a way that feels timeless and urgently contemporary.
Hear, Sense and Feel was t…
Mirage
The only 'group' on the Black Jazz roster, The Awakening today should be heralded as one of the great bands in early '70s jazz. That they're not is the result of the Black Jazz label's distribution woes; witness the fact that original copies of both of their records for the imprint command prices in the hundreds of dollars if you can find them at all. Mirage is their second (1973) album, the last one they made together; it boasts the same Chicago-based, AACM-centric line-up as the first, with th…
Half of What You See
*100 copies purple vinyl limited edition* Out Of Your Head Records announces the latest chapter in creative music: 'Half of What You See' by Wrens, a bold new contribution to the label’s tradition of boundary-pushing artistry and limited-run releases. Continuing their dedication to inventive sound and visual originality, Out Of Your Head Records—spanning Richmond and Brooklyn—invites listeners into a world where sonic textures and emotional immediacy collide.
'Half of What You See' showcases Wre…
Black Suite
Belonging to an incredible, audiophile reissue initiative dedicated to the seminal Jazz Actuel series - one of the greatest depositories of 1960s free jazz - at long last we're gifted one of the greatest of them all: the first ever fully authorized reissue of Jacques Coursil's towering 1971 LP, Black Suite, fully remastered from the original 1969 analog master tapes. Featuring an all-star line-up of Anthony Braxton, Arthur Jones, Burton Greene, Beb Guérin, and Claude Delcloo, it has long remaine…
Katcharpari
** Audiophile reissue from the original masters, 180gm vinyl pressed by Pallas, laminated hand-glued gatefold cover. Limited Edition. ** Katcharpari is the second solo album by Italian jazz trumpeter Enrico Rava, recorded and released in January 1973 and considered a cornerstone of the jazz-rock/fusion genre. Recorded in Milan and released on the German label BASF, Rava himself described it as his "breakthrough album." Thanks to the critical acclaim this work received, Rava caught the attention …
(Fake) The Facts
Special session in january 2013 for Recordstoreday 2013. Recorded at Martin Siewert‘s studio Garnison 7 in Vienna. First and final pressing of 400.
Let the Spirit Out/Live at 'Mu' London
Big tip! This is it! Chicago spiritual jazz master Kahil El'Zabar delivers one of the most powerful live recordings in recent memory! Captured over two unforgettable nights at "mu" in London - July 15th & 16th, 2024 - this is music as ancient ritual, as communion, as healing force. El'Zabar created new material specifically for these performances, alongside reimagined arrangements of classics like Wayne Shorter's "Footprints", Gershwin's "Summertime", and Duke Ellington & Juan Tizol's "Caravan".…