Music from United States

The vitality you hear on Antique Blacks is a testament to the unique energy of the community around The Foxhole Cafe in Philadelphia, as Ra honed his unique brand of Afro-Futurism through the late 60s and 70s. Cosmic theatre, spiritual chants, and experimental electronics make this record an essential document that was ahead of its time. Ancient to future! The 1970s saw change in Sun Ra's recorded output, and as far as we can tell, the content of his live performances. By the middle of the decad…

CD Edition. Full title: In the past only geniuses were capable of staging the perfect crime (also known as a revolution) Today anybody can accomplish their aims with the push of the button. For its 50th release, Black Truffle presents the ninth album from one of the label's core ensembles, the power trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi. Drawn from a November 2015 performance at Tokyo's now-defunct SuperDeluxe, the record's opening piece drops us immediately into the maelstrom, ab…

2026 stock, reduced price. Trumpeter Bill Dixon and pianist Cecil Taylor, friends going back to their Truman-era school days, associated copiously in nearly every artistic fashion -- except making music together. Duets is their only meeting in studio apart from both artists appearing on Taylor's 1966 landmark Blue Note LP, Conquistador. In 1992 they made the briefest summer festival tour to Italy and France, budgeting in two additional days for this recording session. That musical output was pre…

Originally released in 1974, Doug Carn's final album for the Black Jazz label, and a set that pushes even farther than his previous efforts! Jean Carn isn't in the group this time around, but the set does feature a totally great twin-vocal approach – with singing by Joyce Green and John Conner, blending their voices together in a style that's right up there with the most righteous 70s jazz experiments by Horace Silver or Billy Gault! This vocal balance really brings a new sort of power to Carn's…

Doug Carn created a personalized strain of jazz music that expressed a loving hopefulness. He found a home at the Black Jazz label, where African-Americans called the shots and, of course, racial tension was nonexistent. Who was this 22-year-old whose first album, Infant Eyes, sold very well away from the machinations of the music industry? Once a child prodigy on piano and alto saxophone, Carn had attended Jacksonville University on a full music scholarship and afterwards performed on the Flori…

Unreleased synth based ambient creations from mid-'80s by "After the break-up of seminal punk-funkers Liquid Liquid, band member Dennis Young found himself at a bit of a loose end. He busied himself by making funny little new age/ambient creations in his bedroom on some synths and a Tascam tape recorder. Many of these curios have never seen light of day, so it’s a real treat that Inner Mood have managed to lock down a trio of tracks for the Portastudio Ambient Tapes. These are gorgeous, often be…

2018 re-release, 30th Anniversary Remastered Edition. California ambient pioneer Steve Roach released Dreamtime Return, arguably his finest album, in 1988 following extensive travels to the Australian outback. The word "dreamtime" refers to the Australian Aboriginal belief system, specifically to their notion of the distant past and its inhabitants. Though now considered a dated and anthropologically inaccurate term based on the faulty interpretation of an Aboriginal concept, in the '80s it was …

A Landmark in Minimalism and Process Music. 180 gram audiophile vinyl, remastered. The influence Steve Reich had on contemporary music can hardly be put into words. As one of the great innovators, he started playing around with tape loops and created rhythmic and tonal effects while recording the sounds of rain, it formed the basis of his ambitious project called " It's Gonna Rain". The great depth and complexity make this an outstanding song in his repertoire - an incredible tape loop piece tha…

**2019 stock, reduced price** Cut in the birth pangs of electric fusion and afro-funk, West Coast drummer Shelly Manne's brilliant score for the popular '60's TV series Daktari still stands as a global fusion landmark. The album, recorded in 1967, made heavy use of the marimba with various percussion instruments, and served the score well contributing to its huge success. On the album, Mike Wofford plays a tack piano to evoke an African sound, and Manne is joined by percussionists Emil Richards,…

**2019 stock, reduced price** Milestones was Miles Davis' third Columbia release after 'Round About Midnight (1957) and Miles Ahead (1957). The recording was made during one of Davis' most creatively intense periods, preceding his recording of the soundtrack for Ascenseur Pour L'echafaud (Fontana, 1958) in late 1957 and the subsequent recordings of Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else (Blue Note, 1958) and the repertoire that would become Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959). Milestones is significant …

‎Some records aren’t as simple as they seem. Most are capsules of beauty and creative vision, or sublime objects of expression which occupy the abstract realms. But the rare few are also discrete philosophies, realized in sound - a truth brought to the forefront by Mexican Summer veteran, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s, latest venture, Tracing Back the Radiance. A radical departure from pop drenched melodies which have defined his recent efforts, its experimental forms offer a dynamic rethinking of the t…

On this double album, the Albert Ayler Trio consisted of Ayler, bassist Torbjörn Hultcrantz and drummer Sune Spångberg. These four dissonant songs recorded during their live performance on 24 October 1962 were issued on the Bird Notes label in Sweden as Something Different!!!!!! and reissued overseas as the first edition of The First Recording. The tracklist includes a barely-recognisable rendition of the showtune I'll Remember April, an off-kilter take of Sonny Rollins' The Stopper - retitled R…

**2019 stock, reduced price** The Photographer is a chamber opera by world renowned composer Philip Glass, first performed in 1982 at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. The story revolves around the life and work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th century pioneer in photographic studies of motion and motion-picture projection. The centerpiece of the story is the trial for Muybridge's murder of the alleged real father of his child, an accusation Muybridge was indeed found guilty of. Remarka…

For this historical concert held at the Yubin Chokin Hall, in Tokyo on May 14, 1986, the legendary Japanese drummer Masahiko Togashi brought together an amazing line-up with such modern jazz luminaries as Steve Lacy (soprano sax), Don Cherry (pocket trumpet) and Dave Holland (bass). This particular album consists of four previously unpublished tracks (on vinyl), including some highly regarded Lacy's compositions such as The Crus and Quakes, and Don Cherry's African flavored anthem called Mopti. …

Right from the stop-start bass groove that opens The Emperor, it's immediately clear that Ethiopian Knights is more indebted to funk - not just funky jazz, but the straight-up James Brown / Sly Stone variety - than any previous Donald Byrd project. And, like a true funk band, Byrd and his group work the same driving, polyrhythmic grooves over and over, making rhythm the focal point of the music. Although the musicians do improvise, their main objective is to keep the grooves pumping, using their…

"After Liquid Liquid disbanded in 1985 I continued to record electronic music at my home studio in Edison, New Jersey, but I decided to mix the songs for Concepts at another studio so I could have another set of ears to help with the mixes. I was lucky when I looked in the local music ads to find Gabriel Farm Studios in Princeton, New Jersey, owned and operated by Andy Gomory. Andy was a true talent, a keyboardist and arranger, we hit it off immediately. After he recorded my mixes we would recor…

New Age meditative masterpiece Sojourn - only available on cassette until now - has been reshaped to include unearthed tracks from the archives, produced in the same time frame, for a long time overdue vinyl release! Young, the percussionist and marimba player in the seminal New York art-wave group Liquid Liquid, recorded a series of cassette-only releases in the '80s after the group disbanded. A couple of these were picked up at the time for Korean release, which is where Daehan Electronics, a …

New Age dance masterpiece Visions - only available on cassette until now - has been reshaped to include unearthed tracks from the archives, produced in the same time frame, for a long time overdue vinyl release! Young, the percussionist and marimba player in the seminal New York art-wave group Liquid Liquid, recorded a series of cassette-only releases in the '80s after the group disbanded. A couple of these were picked up at the time for Korean release, which is where Daehan Electronics, a South…

Live / Shapeshifter is the exemplary new double-album from one of master bassist - composer - improviser William Parker's eternal flagship groups, recorded live and presenting all-new compositions, including the extended suite Eternal Is the Voice of Love, along with a new iteration of the band's theme. Featuring pianist Cooper-Moore, alto saxophonist Rob Brown and (since 2012) drummer Hamid Drake, In Order To Survive is one of the great jazz groups of the past quarter century. Launched in 1993,…

A lifelong expatriate, Bana Haffar was born in Saudi Arabia in 1987 and spent much of her childhood in the GCC. Having trained as a professional bass player and a classical violin player, she has now embraced electronic music fully, exploring live modular synthesizer performance. She is an enthusiastic proponent of the latest Moog and eurorack technology and has a growing discography of releases (VENT, Make Noise Records) in the last couple of years that highlight a unique melodic direction. Thr…