Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

Charlie Mingus’s 1956 Jazz Composers Workshop showcases his visionary blend of hard bop, classical, gospel, and avant-garde. The album captures Mingus’s restless innovation—by turns explosive, tender, and genre-defying.

*Back in print!* First released in 1964 under the expert production of Blackwell for Island Records, this remarkable album captures the essence of Jamaican soulful jazz through the extraordinary talent of Ernest Ranglin. As a pioneering guitarist and…

*Warehouse find* After the convincing performance at the fifth Jazz Festival di Sanremo 1960, Basso and Valdambrini realized for Jolly the third album, adding to the original formation of the quintet that has recorded the album LPM 2079, the promisin…

Ornette! is the seventh album by Ornette Coleman as a bandleader and the second credited to his quartet (following This Is Our Music). Though considered one of his early works, by the time it was recorded on 31st January 1961, Coleman was already an …

**Abstract (200 characters):** Released by Atlantic in 1962 from earlier sessions, "Coltrane Plays the Blues" showcases the quartet’s innovative blend of blues, jazz, and avant-garde, earning cult status and critical acclaim.

The killer tandem of Lee Morgan and Clifford Jordan takes center stage in these exhilarating 1960 studio sessions, delivering an unforgettable Hard Bop experience. Known for their fiery improvisations and melodic mastery, Morgan on trumpet and Jordan…

Big Tip!  *Limited edition of 500 copies.*  The cultish London-based Mushroom label - already known for releasing some of the most uncompromising British improvised music - brought together three musicians whose approaches seemed fundamentally incomp…

*Contains printed inner sleeve with archival photos and extensive liner notes by two Italian soprano saxophone specialists Roberto Ottaviano and Eugenio Colombo, and pianist Martin Joseph himself* Recorded Live in Italy in October 1985 and mastered d…

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'…

Big Tip! While stationed in Germany in the RAF during the late 1950s and early 1960s, York-born alto and soprano saxophonist Trevor Watts met the drummer John Stevens, with whom he would form the Spontaneous Music Ensemble upon returning to the UK in…

Recorded in 1957 this is one of Charles Mingus's lesser known sessions. Here the master was at the head of an awesome band including some of his regular sidemen. Jimmy Knepper - trombone, Shafi Hadi - alto saxophone, tenor saxophone and Dannie Richmo…

Spanning five pivotal years, Live and Radio Recordings 1957-1962 captures Krzysztof Komeda at the edge of Polish jazz’s modernist awakening. These performances surge with lyricism and quiet provocation, showcasing a composer whose restlessly poetic i…

Reissue, originally released in 1963. Lou Blackburn's debut Imperial session has to be considered mostly a bop album, even though traces of contemporary pop culture and soul are clearly an influence. The trombone player is joined by Freddie Hill (tru…

'Dorothy Ashby was the very best and most swinging performer on the multi-stringed instrument associated with the gates of heaven. Here on Earth, Ashby adeptly plucked and strummed the harp like nobody else, as evidenced on a single reissue containin…

Frank Lowe was a very dynamic tenor saxophonist who derived inspiration from the initial and subsequent movements of free jazz throughout the 1960s. Lowe is most known for his collaborations with drummer Rashied Ali and a few of the many albums relea…

Recorded in 1957 by Rudy Van Gelder and released in the same year on the New Jazz label, this was a major statement from Ray Draper, who besides working with the likes of Max Roach, Jackie Mclean and Donald Byrd, he has been one of the few tuba playe…

2024 reissue This is the legendary Krzystof Komeda Quintet caught live at the Jazz Jamboree Festival in Warsaw in 1963. A marvelous combo featuring some of the greatest Polish jazz musicians, such as Tomasz Stanko (trumpet), Michal Urbaniak (tenor sa…

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…

Back in the mid 80's, Paul Motian, one of the greatest jazz drummers of all times, assembled one of the most inventive groups of the decade. Motian invited four highly individual players such as Joe Lovano and Jim Pepper on tenor sax, Bill Frisell on…

This was definitely a perfect title for Ornette Coleman's second and last album for Contemporary before switching on Ertegun's Atlantic label. Originally released in 1959 "Tomorrow is the Question" was an early evident step towards the revolution to …

*Limited edition of 500 copies.* Originally released in 1953 on Charles Mingus's own "Debut" label, this is Paul Bley's historical debut album. Here the young talented and technically strong pianist appears as leader of a super-trio with nothing but …

Saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi and drummer Jason Nazary present their new album, here i am no i, on September 18th. The release marks their duo debut for We Jazz Records, adding to an expanding release catalog also including Nazary’s solo album Spring…

Following his striking 1968 debut Ghetto Music, the radical trumpeter and composer Eddie Gale presented an extension of that vision continuing to seek truth and justice through his music on his magnificent 2nd Blue Note album Black Rhythm Happening, …

*250 copies limited edition* Every Time I Feel the Spirit is a collection of piano studies, epistles, sketches, improvisations, and meditations composed, performed, and recorded by the legendary writer Ishmael Reed at his home in Oakland, California,…

Like a breath that expands and slowly fades away, “Del Soffio”, Aniello Perduto’s debut for Maple Death Records, takes shape as a single composition lasting just under fifty minutes, stemming from an open score performed at the prestiguous AngelicA |…

** 180-gram pressing with a Japanese OBI and a new translation of Haruomi Hosono's original 1975 liner notes. Blue Ocean Vinyl. ** Fifty years after its original release, Haruomi Hosono's Tropical Dandy finally receives its first-ever international r…

The singular Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach, a long-time member of paradigm-shifting experimental ensembles like Huntsville and Dans les arbes, delivers his eighth solo recording, and his first on the superb Belgian imprint Aspen Edities. The per…

Alexander von Schlippenbach on piano and Sven-Åke Johansson on voice, accordion and drums, live at Onkel Pö in Hamburg in March 1978: a free improvised take on the German Lied, recorded by NDR.

Available for distribution for the first time! The new album by drummer producer Teppo "Teddy Rok" Mäkynen continues where his trio 3TM was last spotted: "Atonal Drums", out on Helsinki's We Jazz Records, lives someplace in & around the new spots whe…

Guitarist Marc Ducret reworks Tim Berne's compositions, recorded mostly at home in 2021 with horns, flute, cello and a wide range of guitars, basses, daxophone and percussion, favouring colour and texture over soloing.

Second album by the Finnish free jazz quartet Fågelbörs: sax, trumpet, bass and drums in an Aylerian spiral of chaos and joy, with marching band reveries and slow blues dissolves. Limited edition of 200 LPs on Monk's Hood.

Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon and Tony Oxley in concert at Victoriaville on 19 May 2002: piano, trumpet and percussion in an intimate, often delicate trio set.

Marilyn Crispell alone at the piano, live at the Victoriaville festival on 2 October 1987: dense, Taylor-inspired clusters and open lyrical passages, with a Coltrane piece. The CD reissue of the 1988 LP adds Threads in the Ozone.

On the 30th anniversary of the Victo Festival Anthony Braxton took to the stage for a magnificent solo performance on the alto sax, performing 8 spontaneous compositions and an 8+ minute version of "Body and Soul", seamlessly crossing lyrical and com…

Four double bassists, Barre Phillips, Joëlle Léandre, William Parker and Tetsu Saitoh, live at Victoriaville on 23 May 2003 in memory of Peter Kowald: bowed and plucked basses and voices in a shared farewell.

Jean Derome and Louis Sclavis share a quartet with Bruno Chevillon on double bass and Pierre Tanguay on drums, live at Victoriaville on 19 May 2001: flutes, clarinets and saxophone on compositions by both leaders.

Two masters who rarely play together--guitarist Fred Frith and saxophonist Evan Parker--performing together as a duo at the 30th Musique Actuelle Festival in Victoriaville, Canada for an amazing exchange of ideas and intensely subtle dialog.

Urs Leimgruber, Jacques Demierre and Barre Phillips recorded at Radio DRS in Zurich in January 2001: saxophones, piano and double bass in quiet, closely controlled improvisations where dynamics become the material.

Boris Kovač and the Ritual Nova Ensemble from Novi Sad: saxophones, clarinets, violin, piano, bass and soprano voice in a chamber music that joins Pannonian folk memory, minimalist repetition and jazz.

Barre Phillips on double bass, Catherine Jauniaux on voice and Malcolm Goldstein on violin, live at Victoriaville on 22 May 2010: three veteran improvisers in a delicate, conversational trio.