Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

A definite set of bare essentials from the Spontaneous Music Ensemble – especially given that at this point, the group was stripped down to just the duo of John Stevens on percussion and cornet, and Trevor Watts on soprano sax! The material was a…

Steve Lacy (soprano saxophone), Irene Aebi (voice), George Lewis (trombone), Jean-Jacques Avenel (double bass) and John Betsch (drums). After a long tour of North America, this quintet concluded by playing two concerts in Boston (March 2004) - most o…

Featuring the earliest published recordings of Barry Guy & Evan Parker, percussionist John Steven's presents transitional sextet and septet performances of his groundbreaking free improv group from 1966 & '67 with Trevor Watts, Paul Rutherford, Ke…

Two concerts from an eight-year gap in the published recordings of the Iskra 1903 trio of Paul Rutherford (trombone), Philipp Wachsmann (violin & electronics) and Barry Guy (bass & electronics), masterful improvisation blending acoustics and electron…

The 1969 Oliv session was the third Spontaneous Music Ensemble LP to be issued, following on from Challenge (1966) and Karyobin (1968), currently awaiting reissue. Familie appears to be the earliest recorded example of a large Sme group. This music i…

Their earliest meeting on record - the complete London (Wigmore Hall) concert (organised by Emanem), featuring them both at the top of their form. Highly acclaimed by both enthusiasts and critics. Reissue of 4006 which contained the concert section o…

"Two recordings from the beginning and the end of the longest-lived version of the SME - the trio of John Stevens (percussion, cornet or mini-trumpet, voice), Nigel Coombes (violin) & Roger Smith (guitar). The 1978 Newcastle concert was considered…

Available again SME reveals their free jazz roots with only hints of what was to come. "Pure pleasure is the way one might react to this glorious recording, which lays the foundation for Spontaneous Music Ensemble's more radical works to come. In p…

The 1972 Avignon concerts were Steve Lacy’s very first solo concerts, although he did make an excellent overdubbed solo record for Saravah the year before. (For ‘solo’ read ‘alone’ or ‘unaccompanied’ rather than the usual music business meaning of ‘v…

It is a disturbing fact that most of the major disputes throughout history have been settled by physical fighting involving killing. Have we really risen much above the rest of the animal world? On the contrary, many animals do not kill members of th…

“In 1962 I went to New York for the first time. My father had worked for Boac for so long that the flights were free - I had only to pay 7/6 (=37½p) airport tax. I stayed in NY for two weeks, only leaving Manhattan to take the standard tourist boat t…

An incredible package – one that brings together two very important albums from reedman Steve Lacy – plus unreleased material from the same time too! First up is the record Disposability – presented here with the first-ever correction to the cymbal s…

Much needed reissue of Emanem 4301, a classic concert and studio performances from '70-'72 by the innovative trio of Paul Rutherford (trombone, piano) Derek Bailey (guitar) and Barry Guy (double bass), which was a much expanded reissue of the early a…

In 1970, the Virgilio Armas Trio released De Repente on the tiny Discos A&B label, very likely a one-off, self-financed project. Virgilio Armas recalls: “The nightlife in Caracas of the 1950’s and 1960’s inspired me to record an album in 1970, with s…

We Are Busy Bodies announces the reissue of the rare and sought-after 1973 Venezuelan jazz album Espejismo ('Mirage') by Virgilio Armas Y Su Grupo, offering a fascinating snapshot of the thriving music scene in early 1970's Caracas, until now largely…

Contemporaneous examples of some of the pieces described in the classic manual, Search & Reflect by John Stevens. Outrageous sounds produced by a workshop orchestra directed by him in 1973 - an SME-type improvisation; instrumental & vocal drones; a…

Solo saxophone performances of three of Lacy's rarest cycles. The eight-part SHOTS (Moms / Pops / The Kiss / Tots / The Ladder / Fruits / Coots / The Wire) comes mostly from a 1977 Roman concert, with a couple of missing pieces taken from other conte…

The Jimmy Giuffre 3 with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow only lasted about a year, but their work, which ranged from blues to tempo-less group improvisation, became a major influence on a wide variety of subsequent music from 'soft jazz' to 'hard-core'…

We Are Busy Bodies reissues Sadayasu Fujii Trio's 1977 album, Like A Child. Led by pianist, Sadayasu Fujii, the album includes jazz standards "A Sleepin' Bee" and "If I Should Lose You", along with original compositions.

s, never before released on vinyl from Peter Brötzmann Octet's Machine Gun (1968). As Brötzmann has said: 'It was the feeling, the very naive feeling that we could take a little part in changing the world.' Adopting its title from Don Cherry's nickna…

Communion, privately released in an impossibly small edition of twenty five cassettes in 1986, is a beguiling, politically underpinned meditation of cosmic improvisation and wayward folk music from Cleveland’s Universal Liberation Orchestra. The grou…

Tip!   Active as a professional DJ in Japan since the late eighties, DJ Yoshizawa Dynamite is also a renowned remixer, compiler and producer. An avid record collector and an expert of the Wamono style, Yoshizawa published the Wamono A to Z records gu…

Piano, handmade electronics, tenor sax, couple strings. I was after something tangible. Sounds you could roll around in your palm and consider different, complex, and flawed textures. Feel the weight, maybe even smell them. This desire is probably a …

If one was to interpret the whole output of EABS in general, an inquisitive listener would notice that each subsequent album stems from the previous one. The overtones are similar and they can be treated as variations on the same theme. The only thin…

When internally the plan came up to release a bunch of vinyl singles for Unrock's 30th anniversary as an entity, Richard just like his brother Alan, the other keyholder of Sun City Girls legacy was among the first to take a deep look into his archive…

If you ever witnessed an Alvarius B. show you are probably aware that there are a few things only in underground music matching this level. If you haven't, don't miss him when he's coming close next. Karaoke shows one of the many characters you could…

The grand old man of Finnish Jazz, Eero Koivistoinen, has not kept still in his old age. Far from it, he's played with rappers from the younger generation, Argentinian tango singers, you name it. The Eero Koivistoinen Quartet, onto its 10th year in e…

Corbett vs. Dempsey presents a reissue of Misha Mengelberg's Groupcomposing, recorded in 1970 and originally released in 1978. Comprised of a one-time international free music supergroup, and originally released as the sixth production on pianist Men…

*few copies available.* Recorded at Lila Eule, Bremen, Germany, November 1965. Published as a part of Stop Smiling, Issue 34 (2008) Peter Brötzmann, alto saxophoneHorst Prehn, alto saxophonePeter Kowald, bassGerd Panzer, drums

We Jazz Records kicks off their new series of archival 7" releases with Esa Pethman "In Belgium 1967" released 23 September 2022. The two-tracker is licensed from the Belgian VRT radio archives and both of the pieces are previously unreleased. Finnis…

Famed house band at Ronnie Scott’s the legendary London jazz hub through the ages. Inspired by Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath who were tearing up the scene in ’68, Mike Westbrook’s big band, also starring John Surman, Mike Osborne, Nisar Ahme…

Originally released on Deram in 1967, 'Celebration' is one of the most important albums of the 1960s British progressive and avant-garde Jazz scene. The Mike Westbrook Concert Band included some of the UKs most important jazz figures of the time, inc…

Corbett Vs. Dempsey presents a reissue of Joe McPhee's Nation Time, originally issued in 1971. It's been nearly five decades since McPhee assembled a group of musicians to perform the weekend concerts that would become Nation Time, his second LP. It …

Available officially for the first time, Revelations includes two hours of never-before-heard Albert Ayler recordings presented for the first time chronologically. Featuring some of the last recordings Ayler made before his passing in 1970. This is a…

Comet Records presents the Tony Allen & Afrika 70 reissue series with the classic late seventies first four solo albums of Tony Allen remastered and restored: Jealousy, Progress, No Accomodation for Lagos & No Discrimination, all coming in an heavy D…

* Contains 24 Pages Booklet-poster with photos and texts * For more than a decade, the versatile musician and composer Mirco Mariani has been pursuing a unique experimental journey on song-forms through the parallel projects he founded: Saluti da Sat…

An intimate solo set by Portuguese tenor saxophon player Rodrigo Amado, recorded at the Church of The Holy Ghost (Igreja do Espírito Santo), Caldas da Rainha (Portugal) on 4th July 2021. Amado is a key player of the current European jazz scene and ha…

* Strictly limited edition of 500 audiophile copies on black vinyl. * Led by pianist Svein Finnerud, “Thoughts” is the trio´s deepest, darkest, most personal and reflective album, and in our ears their finest hour on record. The original is quite rar…

"Ketil Bjørnstad´s credentials are so vast, it´s impossible to fit them all on a one-sheet. Born in Oslo in 1952, he soon became a prodigy, leaving primary school to study piano in Oslo, London and Paris. He made his debut at 16, playing Bartok´s Pia…

Plastic Strip Press presents the complete released works of the Norwegian avant-garde jazz pioneers Svein Finnerud Trio. After the critically acclaimed CD Preachers, containing the unreleased works of the trio, the label started the project to docume…