Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

*2023 stock* "In February 2010 my good friend, pianist Nobu Stowe, invited me for some concerts in the Baltimore area. Since in the same period I was scheduled to perform in duo with John Zorn in New York, I gladly accepted. What thrilled me was the idea to play again with Nobu and with some terrific musicians that I never had the chance to perform with Dave Ballou, Daniel Barbiero and Achille Succi. The quintet recorded some of my compositions structured in the way to present instrumental combi…

*2023 stock* "On February 20th 2010 I had the privilege to start my musical collaboration with Don Preston, performing live a concert of improvised music at the South Pasadena Conservatory of Music. A very versatile keyboardist who deserves much greater recognition, Don is one of the few synthesizer players to develop his own sound on the instrument. Preston may be best known as the keyboardist with Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, but is first and foremost a fine jazz pianist who has worked …

*2023 stock* After being inspired by contemporary artists and later by Far East culture, composer/percussionist/video artist Andrea Centazzo founded in Leonardo Da Vinci a new lymph for his multimedia concept. The music while retaining his contemporary flavor is widely open to all influences, namely sacral music.  The show and music material is divided in 6 parts each inspired by a different subject of Leonardo Da Vinci genius.

*2023 stock* Percussion improvisations and compositions from the early years. Using an array of 300 percussion instruments and the first models of electronic analog percussion Centazzo created a sonic landscape where the interaction of skin, metal and wood sounds and electronic sounds are endless in an original and futuristic blend.

*2023 stock* "Nine years passed between the "Indian Tapes" triple LP box set and this "Visions" CD. It’s a long period of time in a musician career; especially when you are continuously changing from one artistic activity to another: from solo percussion performing to orchestra conducting; from composing for large ensemble to improvising; from video making to teaching and writing books… Through the years playing percussion became just a part of my artistic vocabulary. This was not only due to th…

*2023 stock* In this project inspired by the name of the Buddhist Universe, Centazzo once again combines percussion, digital percussion and computer sequencing with his award winning videos bringing the emotion of a new sonic and visual adventure to the audience. Using an array of 200 percussion instruments and the latest models of digital percussion linked to the computer, Centazzo create a sonic landscape where the interaction of live sounds and sampled sounds are endless in a blend of astonis…

*2023 stock* In the history of free improvised music, there has been arguably no greater advocate for the idiom’s power and potential than the English guitarist Derek Bailey. Fiercely principled, between his emergence during the 1960s and his death is 2005, he cut a wide path, positioning this music at the height of creativity, transpiring in real time, and a means through which people from diverse background could come together, express, and commune. For Bailey, “playing is about playing with o…

*2023 stock* Originally issued in 1977 as the 5th entry in the Ictus catalog, Trio Live was recorded in 1976, only a handful of days after Steve Lacy and Andrea Centazzo’s Clangs was laid to tape, presumably capturing another moment on the same two-week tour that had rendered the recordings for its brilliant predecessor. This time, the pair - Lacy and Centazzo - is joined by the American bassist, Kent Carter, a sinfully under-appreciated artist who had worked extensively in Steve Lacy's group, p…

While it would be an exaggeration to suggest that there was a house style for the adventurous Lithuanian No Business imprint, the European saxophone trio nonetheless forms a significant strand in its output. Recent winning entries in the format have included sets from the Anglo Polish Riverloam Trio, Thomas Borgmann's excellent US-German unit, and Evan Parker's longstanding trio. To these illustrious sessions must now be added the Fabric Trio featuring German reedman Frank Paul Schubert alongsid…

A colossal encounter of drummer William Hooker and the late wind player Thomas Chapin performing at the 9th Street Gallery in NYC in 1992, 3 massive improvisations from the jazz underground. This is a monster duo! One of the greatest duo events of all time. There were a series of weekly duo encounters with William Hooker and different saxists at Jerome Cooper's loft during the summer in the early nineties. I caught two of these with Louie Belogenis and Thomas Chapin and both were incredible.I re…

Daunik Lazro - baritone & alto sax. Jean-François Pauvros - electric guitars. Roger Turner - drums & percussion. Tracks 1 and 2 recorded live at Instants Chavirés (Montreuil) by Jean-Marc Foussat and Dominique Pauvros on 7th November 2008. Tracks 3 and 4 recorded live at festival Jazz en Frache-Comté (Besançon) by Jean-Marc Foussat on June 30th 2010. Edited and mixed by Jean-Marc Foussat

In this quartet Amado gathers three of his strongest longtime influences: German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, Norwegian double bass player Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and American drummer Gerry Hemingway. For Amado this band represents a deep dive into his own formative roots, something he hasm been dealing with more and more in these last few years. With Schlippenbach, Håker Flaten and Hemingway by his side, Amado has the perfect context to explore the classic materials he considers to be th…

Ugetsu: Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers at Birdland is a live jazz album by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers released on Riverside Records in October 1963. The album was recorded at Birdland in New York City. The original LP had six tracks and producer Orrin Keepnews stated in the liner notes that "there were other performances taped that night that couldn't be fitted into the resulting album". The Jazz Messengers' tour in Japan had ended a few months before this live performance; then the band d…

“Ville Lähteenmäki Trio is a fresh jazz band formed in Trondheim 2022, featuring young Finnish and Norwegian musicians. Influenced by American jazz legends of the 60s and 70s, they blend energetic playing, bold melodies, and intense improvisations in the Dolphy-Murray-Mahall lineage”

*150 copies limited edition. Silkscreen printed cardboard box.* Finnish free jazz trio Ho Chi Moon released this cassette in July 2023 on the country's experimental/jazz label Ultraääni Records. It contains two incandescent sets. Don't miss this opportunity as it was instantly discontinued.

*2023 stock. 100 copies limited edition* Mesfin’s recording career, captured in nearly two dozen 7” singles and numerous reel-to-reel tapes, shows the strata of the most fertile decade in Ethiopia’s 20th century recording industry, when records were pressed constantly by both independent upstarts and corporate behemoths, even if they were only distributed within the confines of this East African nation. Though Mesfin was forced underground by the Derg regime that took control of Ethiopia in 1974…

With a Yamaha organ and a dream, Pops Mohamed started his musical journey in the mid-1970s as the bandleader and composer of Black Disco, creating a hip melange of chill-out jazz with futuristic drum machine sounds and spiritual overtones. His cosmic organ transmissions were accompanied by two of the most sought-after session players on the South African scene, the sax and flute wizard Basil Coetzee, who had risen to fame in 1974 as one of the soloists on the hit “Mannenberg,” and Sipho Gumede, …

Awe-inspiring debut of a prodigious young pianist, whose virtuosity on the keys has earned him recognition in Norway and beyond. Joined by his talented brothers in the horn section, this seven-man ensemble delivers a dynamic musical experience featuring compositions penned by the pianist himself. Mark it Spiritual Jazz / free with a tonal and groovy core, the album has made its mark already and is not to be missed!

*2023 stock* "The mid 1970s was an exciting time for free improvisation and a great deal was happening all over the world as like minded musicians were drawn to each other by a magnetic pull that had us crossing oceans and large distances of land to work together. England, America, Italy, Germany, Holland, Canada, Japan, Australia and many other territories all boasted scenes of various sizes, and players were mixing and matching in a wide variety of formations, across several generations. Recor…

*2023 stock* "There are no coincidences in life. Everything responds to the principle of cause and effect. In all that exists, what often seems to be the result of “chance happening” always comes from a precise and definite source located “somewhere out there,” but that in fact rests deep within each one of us. Everything is linked. There is a reason for everything that we find on our path, even if we do not understand what its purpose really is at the time of its first manifestation. It is ofte…

*2023 stock* "I have a vivid memory of the time I first met Steve Lacy in Milan: I had finally the opportunity not only to know but to perform with one of the myths of the avant-garde scene of the time. As hermetic and polite as his music, Steve was the man who, with his phrase 'play what you feel' tore down the curtain that separated my technique from my creativity. Clang swas the fruit of a number of concerts and two weeks we spent together, sometimes talking, sometimes just simply in silence,…

*2023 stock* When life started 4 billion years ago, Mars was also a blue planet. It lost its atmosphere and ever since then, there has been red and dead. It’s our own senselessness that we’re pushing our planet in the same direction. It’s a culture crisis rather than a climate crisis, one that can only be solved if we go right to the core of how we live as human beings. Jazz has always had a big spiritual connection with life and our place in the cosmos, searching for answers and finding meaning…

**Seminal Spiritual Jazz from South Africa, 1970. Officially licensed and re-mastered 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 townsh…

*2023 stock* "I started my musician career in 1970 as devoted jazz fan and hard practicing drummer. But I was also interested in electronics and experimental music, in improvising and composing. My goal was to blend in an unique form of musical expression all my interests, dream that 30 years later, I can happily say that I fully accomplished. Following the previously released Ictus collection in two discs (ICTUS 503) presenting the best of my early music recorded in solo and with my groups, her…

*2023 stock* This award winning CD contains the masterpieces of the percussive art of Andrea Centazzo. Realized in 1980, has been re-mastered and augmented with new pieces in 1993. This album took Andrea Centazzo at the peak of his percussionist career.Indian Tapes is not, as one might be led to think, an album inspired by the music of native Americans (which consists mostly of simple monadic and monorhythmic forms of expression) but an original work of art which pays homage to these peoples, to…

*2023 stock* Andrea Centazzo, LaDonna Smith and Davey Williams met for the first time in December 1978. They recorded the first part of this album in 1979 and the second in 2010. An exquisite and celebrated example of improvised music.

*2023 stock* Violinist LaDonna Smith and Guitarist Davey Williams teams up with Andrea Centazzo in this third release of their complete recording collection. Recorded in NYC at the Stone during the Ictus Nights Festival celebrating 35 years of Ictus, this CD is a must for improvised music lovers.

*2023 stock* Having been fortunate enough to witness these three masters of improvisation reconvene after nearly thirty years of separation at the 2010 Improvisor Festival, I can say with the utmost confidence that time has not diminished the creative fire that first led them to collaborate so many years ago. Driven by the same passion and intensity for sonic shapeshifting that sparked their first European and American tours together in the late 1970's- and some of the first transcontinental int…

*2023 stock* "Flanked by a pair of stalwarts who, in his own words, “have a history going back over thirty years”, guitarist Terrence McManus brings the right attitude and a considerable number of no-frills approaches to an instrument that, especially in jazz, has the potential to become the mother of all commonplaces. On the contrary, ever since the opening track “Written In The Cracking Of The Ice”, an unexpected subversion slashes the ears: not a clean pitch in sight, clumsily introverted str…

*2023 stock* Katarsis4 - saxophone quartet from Lithuania founded by Arminas Bižys, Kazimieras Jušinskas, Algirdas Janonis, and Danielius Pancerovas. Their music moves between structurally free improvisation, which makes it sound each time differently, as well as academic music and the motives of Lithuanian folk music. The saxophone quartet creatively presents the instrument itself - extending the use of saxophone by unusual methods. Also, the quartet not only uses extended techniques for extrac…

The 1970 album For Children by Eero Koivistoinen was originally released by the book publishing company, Otava, which was responsible for his earlier two albums as well. Jazzpuu/Sähkö Recordings  reissued For Children in 2006 as did we in 2016, yet both of these releases have been hard to find ever since. This time around Svart brings this important piece of Koivistoinen's career, a successful amalgam of acoustic jazz and funky fusion back on the market on a limited Svart exclusive blue vinyl ed…

Odysseus, Eero Koivistoinen's first proper jazz album, gets its title from the wandering spirit of its songs, traveling from one mood to another. Performed by the Eero Koivistoinen Quintet & Sextet, because Koivistoinen wanted to extend his standard quartet (Koivistoinen-Sarmanto-Laine-Hietanen) to a quintet and invited trumpetist Bertil Lövgren to join. Also Juhani Aaltonen is questing on two tracks. Odysseus is an excellent, youthful package of forward-thinking jazz played by ambitious young j…

Helen Merrill has done something very few others have done in the world of jazz for, just with one record, she has come to be considered one of jazz’s greats. Usually a budding new star has to do quite a bit of waiting before he or she can be acclaimed. It all depends on the public’s opinion of the musician’s merits. Sarah Vaughan—amongst the singers —and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley—among the instrumentalists—have had to take their place in the queue awaiting the people’s favourable reaction. I…

Recorded 9-17-2020 by Jim Clouse at Park West Studio in Brooklyn NY. Kirk Knuffke is one of the most distinctive improvising cornetists working today, becoming a force on the New York scene with his boundless creative virtuosity and comprehensive understanding of the jazz tradition. As a bandleader, Knuffke’s projects include a longstanding quartet with trombonist Brian Drye, bassist Mark Helias and drummer Jeff Davis, and co-leading Sifter with guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Matt Wilson. …

Mototeru Takagi (tenor saxophone) Kim Dae Hwan (percussion) Choi Sun Bae (trumpet). NoBusiness Records in cooperation with Japanese Chap-Chap Records has started a series of releases of unreleased concerts that took place in Japan in the 90s. Concerts were organised by big fans of free jazz and improvised music Takeo Suetomi and Sadamu Hisada. The idea of the series of the concerts was to arrange and record cooperative projects of American-European musicians with Asian musicians, as well as to r…

NoBusiness Records presents Undulation, the fifth release of the Archive Series dedicated to Sam Rivers. Recorded May 17, 1981, Florence, Italy. Re-mastered by Arūnas Zujus at MAMAstudios. Photos (cover and pages 2, 7, 9): Courtesy of Monique Rivers Williams. Cover and Booklet Design: Jeff DiPerna. Liner Notes: Bill Shoemaker. Produced by Danas Mikailionis and Ed Hazell. Co-producer: Valerij Anosov. Sam Rivers - tenor saxophone, flute, pianoJerry Byrd - guitarRael-Wesley Grant - electric bass gu…

NoBusiness Records presents Live at Little John, Yokohama 1999 by Mototeru Takagi Quartet. Improvised & composed by Mototeru Takagi, Susumu Kongo, Nao Takeuchi and Shota Koyama. Recorded live on the 25th September, 1999 at Little John, Yokohama, Japan by Susumu Kongo and Nao Takeuchi. Mastered by Arūnas Zujus at MAMAstudios. Design by Oskaras Anosovas. Cover photo by Mitsuo Jofu 上不三雄. Booklet photos - Shota Koyama by Yutaka Narasaki 楢崎 豊 / Nao Takeuchi courtesy of Papillon / Mototeru Takagi by M…

*2023 stock* "This is a stellar freely improvised session featuring Rodrigo Amado on tenor saxophone, Goncalo Almeida on bass and Marco Franco on drums, recorded live in Portugal in December of 2015. "Shadow" opens the album with scraping bowed bass that is recorded beautifully, giving the sound a physical immediacy and presence. After the epic bowed bass opening, Amado's raw, rending saxophone and Franco's measured percussion enter, imposing their power upon the proceedings, burning a path thro…

NoBusiness Records presents Rested Turquoise by Szilard Mezei Tubass Quintet. Recorded on 21-22nd August, 2018, KCNS, Novi Sad, Serbia. Recording engineer - Lazar Živanac. Mixed and mastered by Szilárd Mezei & Lazar Živanac. Liner notes by Alexander Hawkins. Cover graphic by Erzsébet Mezei. Photo by Aleksandar Stojković. Design by Oskaras Anosovas. Produced by Danas Mikailionis. Co-producer - Valerij Anosov.Ervin Malina - double bass (right)Ernő Hock - double bass (left)Kornél Pápista - tuba (ce…

NoBusiness Records presents The Field by Rodrigo Amado Motion trio with Alexander von Schlippenbach. Recorded by Valdas Karpuška at the Vilnius Jazz Festival, Vilnius, October 18th, 2019. Mixed by Joaquim Monte and Rodrigo Amado. Mastered by David Zuchowski. Produced by Rodrigo Amado and Danas Mikailionis. Co-producer - Valerij Anosov. Cover photo by Rodrigo Amado. Inlay photo by Vytautas Suslavičius. Design by Rodrigo Amado. Rodrigo Amado - tenor saxophoneAlexander von Schlippenbach - pianoMigu…