Jazz /
In The Moment
2016 restock. One venue, 28 shows and 48 hours of live, improvised music. These are the ingredients for Chicago-based drummer Makaya McCraven's album In the Moment. However, McCraven, as the producer he also is, has not just thrown some random sounds together. Instead, he has carefully culled, cut and remixed the music into a coherent whole and 19 complex and catchy compositions emerge from his hands. The meeting between completely fresh improvisations from some of Chicago's finest musicians and…
The Fantastic Jazz Harp Of Dorothy Ashby
This is the sixth album by Dorothy Ashby, a Detroit born jazz harpist who passed away in her early 50s in 1986 way before her time. She left us a rich legacy of music with this 1965 release being one of her milestones. The music is pure bright and swinging with a joyful mood. Dorothy Ashby performs her lines big time with her harp and captures your soul with the melodies she picks from its strings. She is always there upfront while the brass section mostly fills the background with colour if the…
Evidence
Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy continued his early exploration of Thelonious Monk’s compositions on this 1961’s Evidence Lacy worked extensively with Monk, absorbing the pianist’s intricate music and adding his individualist soprano saxophone mark to it. On this date, he employs the equally impressive Don Cherry on trumpet, who was playing with the Ornette Coleman quartet at the time, drummer Billy Higgins, who played with both Coleman and Monk, and bassist Carl Brown. Cherry proved capable of p…
So Far
Between 1961 and 1965 Eje Thelin formed his first own group with which he toured across Europe. In 1964 he performed in Copenhagen with George Russell; from the late 60s to the mid-70s he played with Joachim Kühn and John Surman and turned to Free Jazz. This quintet is famous for the cooperation with Belgian Joel Vandrooogenbroeck, who had played with big names such as Barney Wilen and Zoot Sims. In 1968 Vandroogenbroeck formed the experimental rockband Brainticket. This 1963 session featur…
Burj Al Imam
140-gram LP in gatefold sleeve with a special drawing by Mazen Kerbaj. Mastered for vinyl by Harris Newman. Edition of 500. Entirely recorded at Tunefork Studios on the outskirts of Beirut, Burj al Imam's five tracks include three largely improvised numbers, a loose reworking of Sun City Girls track "The Imam," and a cover of traditional Americana song "Gently Johnny" (a highlight of Alan Bishop's live Alvarius B. shows). True to their habits, the Lebanese trio of trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj, guitari…
Separately & Together
"Given the number of musicians involved listeners will be surprised at the coherence and delicacy of much of the music here. As is so often, the pieces mainly consist of 'conductions' wherein one musician directs the orchestra, giving an overall form and structure to each piece - at least, that is the intention. So, Philipp Wachsmann's On the point of influence closes with a long restrained duo for cello and bass, while Ashley Wales' Study for Oppy Wood is an atmospheric tone poem.
In addition t…
Miller's Tale
Miller's Tale is the high point of the collaboration of the distinctive musicians Sylvie Courvoisier, Mark Feldmann, Evan Parker and Ikue Mori. In September 2015, they recorded the fully improvised pieces for this album. The album's track sequencing of first four whole group pieces followed by five duo pieces offer multifaced aural impressions and a rich listening experience. Henning Bolte writes in the liner notes: "Our ears usually first adhere to the known, the familiar. But they 'squint' to …
Blue Shroud
After his great compositions for the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and the Barry Guy New Orchestra, Barry Guy has written a large scale work for a new international ensemble. Guy's work The Blue Shroud is an hommage to the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso. It is for the people of the Spanish town, who were victims of the Nazi German air force bombardment during the Spanish Civil War. Guy also wants us to remember the occasion in 2003, when the Guernica-tapestry at the UN Security Council was…
Song Sentimentale
Outside of the 2CD release ‘Never Too Late But Always Too Early’ (Eremite, 2003) there has been scant documentation of one of the most dynamic pairings in all free jazz. Featuring unique material on each format Song Sentimentale rectifies this anomaly with a full blown audio account of the breathtaking communicative heights obtained by these three legends of the living. Over 3 nights in January 2015 the trio seduced a winter worn crowd with the kind of organic interplay only these three can conj…
Avocado
As listeners to the experimental, improvised, Jazz, Ethiopian and style-free music communities in Sydney will testify, Peter Farrar has been doing astonishing solos the last few years. He’s been honing techniques that use various extensions on his alto sax, (mainly plastic bags and bottles as mutes). Instead of an instrumental line, he produces startling layers of distorted tones and overtones with pervasive, insistent, generative rhythms. This is pioneering research — he has re-imagined the ins…
Ariha Brass Quartet
Axel Dörner trumpet. Franz Hautzinger trumpet. Mazen Kerbaj trumpet. Carl Ludwig Hübsch tuba. Recorded (on the 20th and 21st of november 2013). Artwork & design by Mazen Kerbaj.
Ssi-6
As a sax player, Junji Hirose has been a prominent figure on the free jazz/improvised music scene since the late 1970s. But he has another side: he collects odds and ends and everyday objects and puts them together to create instruments which he uses in noise performance. Hirose calls these noise instruments SSI (self-made sound instruments). He released the CD SSI-4 (hitorri-997) in 2013, and SSI-5 (hitorri-993) in 2015. This is Hirose's new release, SSI-6. In contrast to the roaring sounds of …
Nohome
Double LP version. After the internationally and heavily praised Caspar Brötzmann Massaker in the early '90s, not much was heard from the German "Modern Primitive" guitar player Caspar Brötzmann, aside from some collaborations for theater. Now he is back with a new band -- extreme, heavy, intense. In summer 2012 he was invited by the A L'arme Festival for a special gig with Swiss musicians Michael Wertmüller(drums) and Marino Pliakas (ebass) (those two form the group Full Blast with Caspar's fat…
Fragments
Vinyl versoin on 180 gram wax. Recorded live at the Elbo Room in Chicago on December 2, 1989.
Crumbling Brain
The core of Brotzmann reeds & Marino Pliakas on bass & Michael Wertmuller are joined by Peter Evans on trumpet, Mars Williams on reeds and Keiji Haino on guitar & voice. Recorded live at Jazzfest Berlin on November 2nd, 2008.
Morning Glory
At the time of its original release in 1973, Morning Glory, seemed a surprising departure for saxophonist John Surman. It seemed to owe more to the music being made by Miles Davis, Weather Report andTony Williams' Lifetime in the USA or Ian Carr's Nucleus and Soft Machine in the UK than it did to the often abstract, free but determinedly acoustic music that Surman had pioneered up to that point. Hindsight tells another story. Morning Glory stands as both a consolidation of his work to date and, …
Westering Home
Fledg'ling are very proud to bring Westering Home to CD. Westering Homewas originally released in 1972. John Surman plays everything on the album, drawing together many of the threads of his earlier recordings with the possibilities offered by technology (and his own prodigious musicality). "I took a break from being on the road. This was just around the time when mono had become stereo, and then - in a flash - multi-track recording became possible. I was fascinated by the possibilities of, say,…
Forgiveness Suite
Composed by Arthur Williams. Recorded on December 19, 1978 at WKCR, New York. Forgiveness Suite is another worthy rediscovery by NoBusiness Records, focusing this time on trumpeter Arthur Williams, an almost forgotten figure of the free jazz scene of the late Seventies. Williams participated in some interesting recording sessions of the period, like First Feeding by Jemeel Moondoc’s Muntu Ensemble, Lowe And Behold by the Frank Lowe Orchestra and most significantly Peter Kuhn’s Livin' Right, tha…
Live at the Open gate
Amid the structural redefinition of jazz music, which is continually ongoing and, as of late, has placed an emphasis on the merger between free improvisation, arch composition and pulsative, rock-based rhythms, there is still much conversation to be had on the relevance of tradition. Musicians are still reckoning with the world opened up by Ornette Coleman, an alto saxophonist (later violinist and trumpeter) and composer whose 1959 stand at New York’s Five Spot and subsequent LPs took the music …
Purple Patio
All music by Nate Wooley, Hugo Antunes, Jorge Queijo, Mário Costa, Chris Corsano. Recorded on 12th May 2012 at Sá Da Bandeira Studio, Portugal. Mixed by Manuel Reis. If I had to do it all over again, I would not have judged Purple Patio as soon as I dropped the needle onto the LP. Yes, this is a vinyl-only release, and yes, it is only an edition of 300 copies. Instead, I should have listened to both sides all the way through. But that would have required getting up to turn over the disc.
So, I …