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Dudu Phukwana and the "Spears"
Dudu Phukwana and the Spears recorded in London, but were only ever released in South Africa. The story behind this extraordinary music and the famous names involved are documented in this extended edition of Dudu Phukwana’s debut album.
In 1964 the Blue Notes left South Africa to play at the Antibes Jazz Festival in France, and more or less stayed away forever after. In January 1969 alto saxophonist Dudu Phukwana went home briefly along with producer Joe Boyd who persuaded Johannesburg record c…
Mona Lisa - Moldejazz 73
* Edition of 500 * An amazing loft tape find of a Norwegian Jazz concert suite taped at Molde Jazz Festival 1973, Christian Reim’s sextet Mona Lisa features Norway's top jazzmen at the time and it’s a rollercoaster post-bop showcase with influences from modal and spiritual jazz with folk undertones and pop psychedelia, one of a kind, never previously released and in great sound quality!
Live in Avignon, France 1989
On October 14th 1989, Horace Tapscott, founder of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, performed alongside his close friend and musical partner Michael Session at the Théâtre du Chêne Noir in Avignon, France. This was during a tour in which they traveled across Europe. The duo presented compositions by Leimert Park musicians Jesse Sharps, Nate Morgan and Tapscott himself.
The stark instrumentation of this concert led to minimal arrangements of compositions typically performed by much larger ensembl…
A Monastic Trio
**2020 repress** Born Alice McLeod into a musical Detroit family, Alice Coltrane began playing piano at age seven and later studied with Bud Powell in Paris. Upon returning to the States, she joined vibraphonist Terry Gibbs' group and eventually shared a bill with the John Coltrane Quartet. In 1965 the two wed in Juárez, Mexico, and played alongside one another until her husband's last performance in May, 1967.A Monastic Trio, created in the year following her husband's passing, is Alice Coltran…
Live In Paris, March 1979
Superb performance recorded in Paris, March 1967, and broadcast on French radio station ORTF.From the very beginning, Los Angeles-raised Don Cherry (1936) displayed an anti-virtuoso attitude that contrasted with the ruling dogmas of jazz music. Cherry shunned both acrobatic exhibitions and radical experiments in favor of humility and pathos (thus appealing more to the rock crowd than to the jazz crowd). His style focused on the idiosyncratic timbres of his pocket trumpet and on languid phrases t…
Contemporary Jazz Mass
Tip**Edition of 300 copies. Remastered reissue, released in conjunction with the artist** James Tatum's stunning, spiritualised Contemporary Jazz Mass is one of the only true jazz masses ever released. Inspired by Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts, Tatum's masterwork was recorded on its first ever performance at St Cecilia Church in Detroit, and released on his own private label in 1974. At the time Ellington’s Concerts were quite controversial. Whilst they contained scriptural references they d…
Swing
Big Tip! 2024 Stock. Edition of 300. Swedish free jazz trio consisting of piano, double bass and drums. The trio has during the years since their first recording moved from composition-like melodies, riffs and rhythms to 100% improvised music. However, the trio has strong roots in “conventional” jazz which shines through from time to time with tough swing and clear rhythms and melodies. Correction has received fine reviews from all over the world for their releases, the strong point being their …
Muster Point
US sax player Stanley J. Zappa and Finnish drummer Simo Laihonen come together on the new album "Muster Point" on We Jazz Records, August 7. The two students of Milford Graves add bassist Ville Rauhala on a couple of tracks to make a bold and adventurous album captured both live and in the studio while Zappa was touring in Finland with the Black Motor musicians. This is a set full of fire and thunder, but also features some more meditative spiritual jazz. RIYL: Milford Graves, ESP-Disk', spiritu…
Expansions
When Lonnie Liston Smith left the Miles Davis band in 1974 for a solo career, he was, like so many of his fellow alumni, embarking on a musical odyssey. For a committed fusioneer, he had no idea at the time that he was about to enter an abyss that it would take him the better part of two decades to return from. Looking back upon his catalog from the period, this is the only record that stands out -- not only from his own work, but also from every sense of the word: It is fully a jazz album, and …
Nothing but the Music
The sounds of late '70s and '80s east coast avant-garde jazz, soul, and punk rock are well documented, but in Nothing but the Music Thulani Davis gives us something beyond, delivering a collection of synesthetic, transportive documentary poems that breathe anecdotal and impressionistic life into a sonic-social history about which most can only speculate. Davis' verse takes free flight with its muses, scatting and leaping off the page and the shoulders of the musicians, nightclubs, and choreograp…
Armitage Road
**Seminal Spiritual Jazz from South Africa, 1970. Officially licensed and remastered re-issue**. With a unique sound founded on a persuasive mix of American and African jazz, Armitage Road, originally released in 1970, was the only studio recording released by South Africa’s Heshoo Beshoo Group. As a highly prized collector’s item, a re-issue and re-appraisal of this lost gem from the apartheid era has been long overdue. Heshoo Beshoo loosely translates from the inter-tribal lingo of the townshi…
Rejoice
Reissue. Originally released in 1981. "A two-LP set on Theresa, Rejoice features Pharoah Sanders in excellent form in 1981. Sanders sounds much more mellow than he had a decade earlier, often improvising in a style similar to late-'50s John Coltrane, particularly on 'When Lights Are Low,' 'Moments Notice,' and 'Central Park West.' The personnel changes on many of the selections and includes such top players as pianists Joe Bonner and John Hicks, bassist Art Davis, drummers Elvin Jones and Billy …
Black Is The Color: Live in Poughkeepsie and New Windsor 1969-70
Never-before-issued music from three very different settings in upstate New York, all recorded in the period running up to Poughkeepsie multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee's Nation Time (CVSD 054CD). From a year before that landmark LP, in the same hall at Vassar College, McPhee led a band with soulful vibraphonist Ernie Bostic and voluble rhythm section of Tyrone Crabb and Bruce Thompson, both of Nation Time fame, performing a John Coltrane-oriented set that included versions of Mongo Santamaria's…
Relativity Suite
**Strictly limited to 300 copies. Clear Vinyl** Finally available again on vinyl! Don Cherry's Relativity Suite, recorded with the Jazz Composer's Orchestra in 1973. At this time, Cherry was becoming increasingly interested in Middle Eastern and traditional African and Indian music, having traveled extensively and studied with Indian musician Vasant Rai. This suite of songs was particularly influenced by the Indian karnatic singing tradition, as can be heard from the very opening moments of the …
Why Don't You Listen? - Live at LACMA, 1998
CD Version. This previously unreleased concert recording by the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra of pianist-composer-bandleader Horace Tapscott and a chorus under the direction of vocalist Dwight Trible is a wonderful example of how Tapscott channeled the political and cultural aspirations of a community into music of deep beauty and lasting value.
The album opens with a big band version of “aiee! The Phantom,” a Tapscott original propelled by a vamp that spurs Michael Sessions into a melodic tenor…
The Weather Up There
Chicago drummer and composer Jeremy Cunningham wrote The Weather Up There in response to the loss of his brother Andrew, who died in a home invasion robbery in 2008. Co-produced by Jeff Parker and Paul Bryan, and engineered by Paul Bryan and John McEntire, this new work confronts the tragedy of violence and examines the acute ripple effect on several people's lives through the lens of memory, response, and collage. Further deepening the textural and emotive impact, Cunningham formed a “drum choi…
Jazz Rock
They say you can't judge a book by its cover, and going by 'Jazz Rock’, nor a record by its title. Though entering into jazz territory and featuring some distorted guitar, 'Jazz Rock' is more a beautiful marriage of funky breakbeat drumming and spiritual jazz instrumentation, combined with traditional Min'yō music performed on the koto and shakuhachi.
Originally released in 1973, the record sounds simultaneously vintage and contemporary. It is akin to something Madlib might dream up whilst lost …
A Love Supreme
One of the most important records ever made, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme was his pinnacle studio outing, that at once compiled all of the innovations from his past, spoke to the current of deep spirituality that liberated him from addictions to drugs and alcohol, and glimpsed at the future innovations of his final two and a half years. Recorded over two days in December 1964, Trane's classic quartet-- Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Jimmy Garrison -- stepped into the studio and created one of t…
Elevation
Born in Paris, raised in Vienna, resident in Ibiza, saxophonist and composer Muriel Grossmann embodies the borderless, pan-continental energies of contemporary European jazz. Her music emerges from the lineage of European jazz that’s absorbed the progressive music of Coltrane, Dolphy and Sanders.
Today, she cites players such as Illinois Jacquet and Lester Young in the same breath as the masters of the avant-garde, and her playing marries the directness and eloquence of the older generation with…
Deep Stream
It was way back in 1979 when multi-instrumentalist Dawan Muhammad joined forces with a swathe of talented fellow jazz musicians to record and ultimately release Deep Stream, a private press exploration of spiritual jazz that has long been a must-have among serious collectors. Here High Jazz delivers the reissue we've all been waiting for. The set remains as timeless as ever, with highlights including the breezy bliss of the title track, the epic, reach-for-the-stars flex of "Sun/Moon/Stars" (whi…