Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

Fela Anikulapo Kuti, inventor of Afrobeat, is one of the greatest musicians ever to have lived. He was an innovator, musically gifted, and more important, he was the people's musician.

Ursula Maehr, recorder. Carles Peris, saxophone, flute. Francis Petter, saxophone, bass clarinet. Valentin Vecellio, basset horn. Marco von Orelli, trumpet. Sabine von Werra, voice. Christoph Baumann, piano. Markus Fischer, double bass. Jacques Widmer, drums. Recorded 9-11 November 2007

First live document and fourth album overall from a band that mixes free jazz ecstasy with garage rock intensity. Even with no electricity, they make a hell of a noise and the album is an explosion of energy. Recorded at the Bla in Oslo.

Smalltown Supersound's "Superjazz" offshoot delivers this much-discussed darkcore jazz fusion album led by sometime sonic youth collaborator Mats Gustafsson, here rummaging through improvs and cover versions like a garage band picking up trumpets, double bass and drums for their heavily skewed but massively charming workouts. Sticking a hairy a tongue out at the polished slickness of the Bad Plus, The Thing offer up cover versions of tracks by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The White Stripes and Peter Bro…

The Thing pretty much tore my living room to shreds on the release of their last album 'Garage' with its rock 'n roll take on free jazz. Their rendition of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's 'Art Star' especially defined their sound perfectly with a distinctly punk rock ethic applied to what to most sounds like truly out-there jazz. It's hardly surprising that the band is made up of Norwegians then, the country that has birthed some of the most continuously exciting free jazz to date and continues to with lab…

Long awaited reissue of this historic pre-FMP album by Peter Brotzmann. Known to many for it's placement on "The List" (T. Moore's Top Ten list of free jazz artifacts as published in Grand Royal of course), this is one of the most desirable and completely unseen albums in the genre of modern improvisation. Recorded April 18/24, 1969 and released on the Calig-Verlag label. Simply put, Nipples is one of the rarest and most influential European energy jazz recordings of all time. The incendiary Sex…

Recorded on 20/21 December 2006 and 2 January 2007 at Studio Z, Berlin

Sound-track to the prize-winning movie. The Necks break with convention here and put several shorter pieces on one CD. All gems and all pared back to the reiterative imperfection that is the Necks' unique and glorious signature. This a band that seems to be coming into its golden age. Prodigious music and highly recommended.

FINLLY RESTOCKED! For the last 40 years the Logos Foundation in Gent has featured, produced and supported a vast programme of experimental music. One of its most distinctive projects is the massive robot orchestra - a huge and growing array of invented instruments - all of them Goldbegeresque physical constructions that produce internally generated acoustic sound, programmed and played through computer driven mechanical processes... Here they have been programmed to play a broad concert o…

RESTOCKED! Another remarkable performance from a group that has no peer and belongs to no genre or movement. Minimal in an essential and structural sense, they succeed where more formal attempts founder, in re-forming subjective time in a way that is genuinely gripping and as far from theoretical as great interpreters can get. Applying extraordinary technique in a remarkably discrete way, they here transfigure a single chord over a long duration, imperceptibly arriving far from their st…

Completely unique, stunningly musical, technically impressive & breathtakingly simple. The Necks have defined an endlessly productive area of performance that is at once both minimal and gripping, obvious yet profoundly subtle. Easy to say, hard to achieve. It can take time for a group with a completely original idea to find its public & The Necks have been pursuing this one for over a decade in their native Australia - but it doesn't age, it just matures.

Following the success of their very first performance together at the 2004 FREEDOM OF THE CITY festival (heard on Emanem 4215), Roger Smith and Louis Moholo-Moholo went into the studio to record some more. Their second meeting went so well that they recorded enough duo improvisations for a complete CD. The resulting music is heard complete, with Smith on Spanish guitar and Moholo on augmented drum set.

Flute, harp and percussion are the principal instruments on this recording, though you’d be hard pressed to identify them during the opening measures of “Hamida”, the longest track on the CD. But the buzzing, pulsing drone with which it begins gradually opens out into flute articulations that sound like jets of steam, a barrage of muffled percussion, and various harp-generated supplementary drones. The MUTA soundworld gets richer, louder and more pressurised as the track progresses, and…

'It gives me great pleasure to announce the first release of the new label 'substance over surface editions' - SoSEDITIONS - an offering of recent live and studio recordings by the improvising trio of Michel Doneda, Jack Wright, and Tatsuya Nakatani. The recording is accompanied by a poem by renowned poet Jerome Rothenberg.

Pascal Battus: guitar and electronics. Thierry Madiot: trombone and tubes. Seijiro Murayama: percussions and tubes.

This is a studio recording, and thus somewhat different in approach and tone to the group's continuous live sets; an example can be heard on a compilation from the 2003 Freedom of the City festival. Here the emphasis is more on developing specific ideas with a consistent logic than on modulating between passages of tension and climax. On the longest track, the 13-minute Absolute Xero, the logic is sure and compelling; Skzypce is more playful, with Wilkinson vocalising through his reed and Noble,…

Recorded live at Verity's 1972, this CD represents possibly the finest duo performance of Derek Bailey and Han Bennink. Reissue of the rare LP on Incus

'Sillón is proud to present what has to be Italy's best kept secret on the improvised music scene. Based in Madrid, Spain, Alessandra Rombolá works in the field of contemporary music and improvisation. Her stunning debut-cd, Urueña, shows her great musicality and sense of form. Her sound is so rich that it fills the whole space of the beautiful Church in the tiny village in central Spain, Urueña. The music is captured in detail by sound-wizard, Pierre-Olivier Boulant. A must for all fans of crea…

Preeminent jazz composer/bassist William Parker has been working with large ensembles from the very beginning of presenting his own work as a leader in the mid-70s. His Essence of Ellington project is the very latest manifestation of his orchestral concepts, following in similar form on the extraordinary Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield project which was definitively presented on record by the acclaimed 2010 release, I Plan to Stay a Believer (AUM062/63). The Orchestra here interprets selections …

A much-needed reissue of Derek Bailey's 1978 2-CD Japanese release on the Morgue label, the first disc a series of studio improvisations and the second presenting two live performances in Nagoya and Kalavinka.Recorded and originally issued in Japan in 1978, the contents of this two-disc set quickly became something of a collector's item as the album quickly went out of print. Happily, the master tapes were reacquired for release on Incus in 2002, providing further documentation of a rich portion…

Reissue of two LPs from Bloc Thyristors label and two groups run by the drummer Jean-Noël Cognard. Empan with Judith Kan, voice, Jac Berrocal, trumpet, piano, Dan Warburton, violin, keyboards, Béatrice Godeau, cello. Tankj with Serge Adam on trumpet, Jérome Noetinger on electroacoustic devices and tape recorder, Titus Oppmann on doublebass. Recorded and mixed by Patrick Müller.

"The Koeln concert shows us these positive vibrations marching through "the complete continuance of creative music," and on towards the next millennium. The "success of the future" is not a lost cause as long as there is music like this in the air."-Graham Lock"Although Anthony Braxton does not play on this double CD (whose contents were released for the first time in 1995), his presence is certainly felt. He conducts the band through a fairly free improvisation and five of his compositio…

"The Art of the Improviser", a 2XCD, is Shipp's most audacious attempt yet to answer the enigmatic question of what it means to be a modern jazz musician. Already having explored the possibilities of electronically infused jazz on critically acclaimed projects with the likes of DJ Spooky, Scanner, and Anti-Pop Consortium, Shipp revisits an acoustic sound for this fearless voyage into the psyche of the improviser. Shipp's "idiosyncratic genius" shines through on this album, explaining once again …

The late 1960s and early 1970s were years when European jazz in general, and British jazz in particular, came into their own in terms of the music making a fundamental break with established, exclusively American precedents. This two-disc reissue of three Graham Collier albums made by the bassist/bandleader during the period underscores this contention. This is an exemplary reissue in terms of plotting the course of a music coming into its own. Equally importantly, both of these discs pass the r…

A 2008 sequel to his highly-acclaimed first solo CD 'More is More' on psi 06.08.Peter Evans writes: Over the past couple of years one of my main creative outlets has been solo trumpet performance. These discs are meant to show various aspects of my music's development and were recorded in two different settings (studio and concert) and under two different circumstances. Jazz musicians have often referred to the playing of a solo as 'telling a story', which is essentially how I look at this musi…

Collected here for the first time are the complete studio recordings of one of the major ensembles in the renaissance of Jewish Jazz. Featuring five Downtown New York improvisers, these four CDs originally released by Knitting Factory records from 1996 to 2001 embrace the Hasidic musical legacy with a fresh new voice. Blending together an intense mixture of ethnic and cosmopolitan sounds, Hasidic New Wave fuses spiritual songs from Hasidic dynasties to funk and jazz, Arabic dances with avant-gar…

A split single with Cremaster (Ferran Fages and Alfredo Costa Monteiro) on one side and Komora A (Karol Koszniec, Dominik Kowalczyk, Jakub Mikolajczyk) on the other side.

LP version with bonus 7". Every once in a while, a record presents itself so defiant in its refusal of categorization that it becomes the bane of those poor vinyl archaeologists whose business it is to file and classify. The aptly-named The Naked Truth (1975) is one such artifact; a wayfaring stray of an album that weaves its insouciant magic through the edgelands of sound. The musical provenance is palpable -- an electric blend of spiritual jazz, rhythmic black psychedelia and far-out ex…

Guitar, Voice - Derek Bailey, Eugene Chadbourne. Recorded 2-1-1995. Released by Rectangle, a Jazz and improvisation music label from Paris.

A 4-CD box set of 9 "Spontaneous Sweets", elaborate, magnificent and melodic piano improvisations, recorded by Connie Crothers & David Arner performing in the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, NY. "It was magical from the beginning. The music seemed to create itself" "We trusted our spontaneity, our intuitive logic, our sense of form." "We had no set tempos, no preconception about soloing or accompanying." "We had no set themes or referents. What we did have was complete trust, i…

Lucio Capece, bass clarinet. Radu Malfatti, trombone. 'Do light waves disrupt sound waves ?' Francis Brown. Recorded live 25 September 2011.

After several years spent searching for a publisher for On The Road, in 1957 Jack Kerouac s fortune finally changed as he literally became a star overnight, thanks to rave reviews by the New York Times and others who heralded Kerouac as the voice of a new generation. It was during this initial period of fame (1957-1959) that Kerouac also recorded a trio of albums. His first effort, Poetry For The Beat Generation, was recorded at the Village Vanguard in 1957 with soon-to-be pop icon Steve …

"It has always been one of my desires to do an album with Brazilian musicians/flavours... i remember years ago trying to do a free-funk-samba album with saxophonist Ivo Perelman which unfortunatly never happened ?! when Hartmut told me about a very special number that he did with Don Moye and musicians/artists from Brazil under the effect of Santo Daime's sacrament, i sensed that this might be what i was waiting for so long... warning: you'll NOT be able to hear this music seated... hip DJs took…

Gatefold 2LP/DVD version. Ambitious, epic and grand in scale, In The Country's previous album Whiteout was an artistic triumph. Always a very powerful and exciting live act, it was only natural that a concert album should come at this stage of their career, after three studio albums and a number of Norwegian, European and U.S. tours. Originally planned as a concert DVD, In The Country invited video director Claus Arthur Breda-Gulbrandsen to bring a crew to film a couple of Norwegian shows i…

Milestone! A monographic box-set collection aimed at recounting the most beautiful chapters that revolutionised the history of jazz. This new series was launched in March 2010 with the simultaneous release of four box-sets, including albums by some of the artists who participated in the success of the outstanding labels. A philological work, beginning with the original recordings on multi-track master tapes, patiently integrally remastered paying strict attention to the sound quality. In…

the second full-length album by the  experimental/free-jazz quartet 7k Oaks, live recorded in concert at the  InterAct Festival in Hasselt.  This new release is at the same time a  confirmation of their musical background as well as an exploration of new  territories: about an hour of full-blast energy, with a variety of directions  ranging from walls of electro-acoustic noise to free-jazz bursts, hypnotic  rythmic patterns and lyrical melodic themes. It is the entelechy of …

Very loosely related in selected affinity to the late Austrian saxophonist and artist Hans Koller, this younger version has played football with clubs such as TSV Oberlauringen and Dynamo Kebab, has studied ethnomusicology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and also jazz composition with Mike Gibbs and Bob Brookmeyer.Over the past decade Hans Koller has played and worked with Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Phil Woods, Harry Becket, Kenny Wheeler, Bill Frisell, Steve Swallow, Jeff…

This recording is my attempt to play Evan Parker. Seven tracks were recorded in STEIM's Studio 3, trying to reflect the liveness of Parker's solo recordings. All of these are single takes with minor edits at the beginnings or ends. Two interlude tracks are short experiments looking at timbral characteristics when the rotation of the turntable is extremely slowed down. The last three tracks are compositions made from both Parker's and other improvisors' records.

Howard Riley : piano. CD 1 was recorded on 23rd July 1998. CD 2 was recorded on 11th April, 1999. CD 3 was recorded on 29th June 2004. CD 4 was recorded on 2nd August 2006. CD 5 was recorded on 27th June 2008. CD 6 was recorded on 22nd April 2010. All compositions by Howard Riley (PRS MCPS). Mastered by Ar nas Zujus at MAMAstudios. Design by Oskaras Anosovas. Producer Ð Danas Mikailionis. Co-producer : Valerij Anosov.' label info. 'The beauty of a short story, of course, is that it can be taken …

"Not since Albert Ayler stalked the hamnar of Stockholm and reverberated his fire music off the walls of LES tenements has there been an avant-garde jazz saxophonist who can all out wail like Virginia Genta can.  Don’t let her calm presence fool you.  Nor should David Vanzan’s taller stature lead to believe this is not an equal opportunity free jazz freak-out.  From when their poles first were converged by the Cosmic Force in 1999, Italy’s (with Finnish godparents) Jooklo Duo has been winning he…