Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

"It was once said of Paul Bley that he was the only pianist who could make a concert grand sound like an  upright. While that is not literally true, or only partly so, it makes a point that strikes home on these often  strange, offbeat, otherworldly …

"The material on From Out Front To Booker Little And Friend Revisited is Little’s collective chef d’oeuvre. It is exploratory but also strewn with retentions from tradition. The dense yet sonorous dissonance, the graceful tempo and metre shifts, the …

"...How Time Passes... and Essence were issued at a time when jazz history was being made practically on a monthly basis. There are a few reasons why they became submerged in the tsunami of groundbreaking  albums released in the first years of the 19…

"The two reissues presented herein include the last sessions that Donald would record with his brother, bookending a turning point in Ayler’s music. The Village Theater sessions, from late 1966 and early 1967 (the latter without Donald) mark, arguabl…

"The special qualities of this music emerge from the focus on Lacy’s soprano saxophone in this unique instrumentation; the transparency and intimacy of the bass and guitar create a nuanced background set against the variety of improvisational strateg…

First visit archive offers previously unreleased recordings of historic and musical importance. "When, in this music, he succeeds in fusing the emotional (translated into its lyrical and dramatic qualities) pas- sage of ritual with the complex archit…

"Heard together, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and Pre Bird suggest the enormity of  Charles Mingus’ artistic vision. No one album encompasses it in its entirety, and perhaps not even  two or three. However, these recordings, made six months…

Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation is an album by the jazz saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman. It was released through Atlantic Records in September 1961: the fourth of Coleman's six albums for the label. Its title named the then-nascent fre…

"This, the third release from the sequence of remarkable performances by Cecil Taylor’s Unit recorded at Fat. Tuesday’s in New York from 8-10 February 1980 (the previous two are It Is In the Brewing Luminous [Hat Hut], and Live At Fat Tuesday’s, Febr…

First visit live offers new mastering of the trio’s first performance at the cellar cafe, New York City 1964.

"In its entirety, the concert is lively and penetrating evidence of Braxton’s remarkable facility, powers of invention, and commitment to his principles at this point in time, with special emphasis on saxophone techniques energizing variables of tone…

At a time when the Japanese jazz scene was rapidly maturing and one accomplished musician after  another was emerging, another saxophonist worthy of new attention joined the scene: Masafumi  Yamaguchi. This work, his memorable first album as a leader…

A refined jazz work by Hiromasa Suzuki. Featuring Nobuyoshi Ino on bass and the accomplished Steve Jackson on drums, this album unfolds through interplay that is tightly knit yet relaxed throughout, and now makes its long-awaited first appearance as …

Following the great response to the previous release "Flash Up," a live recording from Shinjuku Pit Inn in March 1977, this new work composed by Takeo Moriyama was recorded about a year later. The second release left by the Takeo Moriyama Group on Te…

It happens very rarely that you can praise a records without any reservations, this is the case here!!! A lot of ink has flowed across the page since the Vogue/Swing release (1955) of that founding solo record. The repertoire was made up of pieces th…

Art Blakey was the new hero on the Paris jazz scene, thanks to his Olympia concert on November 22nd 1958, and his subsequent appearances at the Club St. Germain. People swore by his 'Blues March' and 'Moanin', so why not get him to do the soundtrack …

On Firebirds Live At Berkeley Jazz Festival Volume 1, Prince Lawsha convenes a dream quintet with Hadley Caliman, Bobby Hutcherson, Buster Williams and Charles Moffett, igniting a front‑line of reeds over vibraphone‑lit rhythms that balance spiritual…

On Foraging, The Blassics Experiment dig deeper into their analogue-funk soil, spinning nature-tuned grooves and mossy dub atmospheres into an eight-track crate of break-ready instrumentals that feel both forest-floor organic and dancefloor precise.

I travelled to Los Angeles and the USA for the first time in 2019. Although I had not met Carlos Niño in person, we connected via Instagram where he saw a video of me playing a piano motif (titled ‘The One’ in this sequence) that he really liked and…

Extra Stars is a deeply beautiful expression of Gregory Uhlmann’s ever-evolving sound world, and comes at a pivotal juncture in the LA-based composer, producer, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist’s musical journey.

Yowzers is a new album by Chicago composer, improvisor, instrumentalist and musical folklorist Ben LaMar Gay. The twelve track collection is a leap forward in the lexicon of Gay’s recorded output, and a veritable masterwork of ancient inner-body rhyt…

Kaleidoscopic Visions showcases Tom Skinner drawing together the many threads of his career as one of the UK’s most versatile and free-thinking contemporary musicians. Performing and recording with Sons of Kemet, The Smile, David Byrne, Meshell Ndege…

"Over the past few years, concert patrons have stopped the musician Carlos Niño after gigs to ask two simple questions: “Are you a shaman?” “I hear the medicine in your music, can I come to your next ceremony?” The queries are fair enough: Looking at…

Chicago Underground Duo is the long-running collaborative project of composer/trumpeter/electronicist Rob Mazurek (Exploding Star Orchestra, Isotope 217, New Future City Radio with Damon Locks) and composer/drummer/mbiraist Chad Taylor (jaimie branch…

Makaya McCraven’s International Anthem debut 'In The Moment' is the album that properly introduced the then-burgeoning drummer/producer to the world. In many ways, it also laid the groundwork for a working method that both McCraven and the label have…

The source material is drawn from moments of pure improvisation, recorded live in performance, shaped as much by the room and audience as by the musicians themselves.

The 2018 release of Universal Beings, in many ways, feels like the moment that the gates swung open for both Makaya McCraven and International Anthem. On one hand, it's a four-sided communal showcase of the inter-city exchange that had started to dev…

Sometimes the title of an album tells you everything you need to know. Laurence Pike’s Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet is like that: The music within represents a search for freedom, potentiality—liberatory strategies that transcend the ego and the…

577 Records announces the release of Atlântico, the new album by Portuguese vocalist and composer Manuel Linhares, arriving June 12, 2026. Shaped between New York and Porto, the record moves through experimental and contemporary currents, marking Lin…

On My Spare Time, Isao Suzuki steps out front on piccolo bass in a luminous set of standards and ballads, wrapping bossa, Ellington and songbook classics in a warm, conversational post‑bop glow with some of Japan’s finest players.

4LP set. Gatefold sleeve with photographs, concert poster, and new liner notes. Centenary edition. Limited to 2,500 copies worldwide. June 28, 1965: John Coltrane records Ascension at Van Gelder Studio - forty minutes of collective free improvisation…

Tip! 428 pages. This is exactly what we need. Big time. Johannes Rød returns with the massively expanded edition of his essential guide - a monument of discographic research spanning six decades of creative music documentation. 381 pages plus 47 unnu…

As part of the conclusion of its celebration of the 80th Anniversary of Wadada Leo Smith, TUM Records brings out the most extensive release of Smith´s recorded output to date, String Quartets Nos. 1-12. It is a seven-CD boxed set recorded by RedKoral…

“Sonny Clark’s music, in one of jazz’s truly magical periods, provides as good an example as any of both the music’s most lasting qualities and its transcendent nature.”

"A significant part of the success is down to the amazing tour de force by Norwegian experimental vocalist Stine Janvind Motland who brings an affecting mix of vulnerability, sexuality and sheer prowess to the party. Gustafsson selected a line from e…

"The Found Tapes: Live in Los Angeles is a box set from Tribe Records co-founder Phil Ranelin, celebrating a trio of LA club performances from 1978 - 1981 which remain especially significant to the visionary trombonist. Backed by a young Billy Childs…

Super tip! Holy ghost music. The real deal. The sound of four men tearing a hole in the fabric of what jazz was supposed to be and letting something else pour through - something ancient and raw and utterly new. In their short time together, Albert A…

Super Tip! *Cover design A* Tribe’s inaugural release in 1972 would see three editions released in as many years. 1972’s first edition featured a photo of the ocean on the front, the following year’s second edition had a drawing of the Earth, while 1…

On Schematics For A Blank Stare Volume 4, Jeffery Scott Greer digs deeper into his cracked-beat, sample-scarred universe, sketching late-night instrumentals that flicker between head-nod hypnosis and uneasy, half-remembered dream logic.

On Convergence: Live In China, William Hooker and John King turn a Shenzhen stage into a pressure chamber, stretching one unbroken hour of drums and guitar from whispering tension to volcanic release in a charged act of real‑time communication.