Jazz /
Jazz Sahara
Decades before the advent of 'world music', bassist-composer Ahmed Abdul-Malik introduced Arabic music into jazz, creating a distinct, unique sound that was far beyond its time. Best known in jazz circles for his solid work with Randy Weston and Thelonious Monk, Abdul-Malik, who is of Sudanese descent, was also the first to use the oud, a pear-shaped, traditional Middle Eastern stringed instrument similar to a lute, as a jazz instrument. Recorded in 1958, with tenor saxophonist Johnny Gri…
The Rest
In June of 1977, Steve Lacy and Joe McPhee shared a double bill in Basel, Switzerland. Lacy invited McPhee to join him for a duet to close his set, for which McPhee elected to bring out his own soprano saxophone. The main part of Lacy’s performance was issued on the classic Clinkers LP; after 36 years, here is The Rest. This one-sided, limited LP marks the first and only time that these two master musicians played together, but the simpatico meshing of their distinctly individual voice…
Spiritual Jazz 4: Americans in Europe
Triple LP version. Housed in a deluxe triple gatefold sleeve with download card for the entire album. Jazzman Records presents the fourth volume in their Spiritual Jazz compilation series. It's well-known that throughout the 20th century, fed up with poor working conditions and racism in their home country, many American jazz musicians chose to leave the U.S. in order to live and work in Europe. What's less well-known is how their music developed and evolved during their time on the conti…
Inframince / Immensity
Michael Thieke (clarinet) and Olivier Toulemonde (acoustic objects) : 'Inframince'. Lucio Capece (bass clarinet & preparations) & Jamie Drouin (analogue synthesizer & radio) : 'Immensity'. The Inframince / Immensity split CD is the first in a series of discs exploring the work of musicians based in Berlin, a city which has been one of the most vibrant centres for improvised and contemporary music since the 1960's. The alternative music scene there is now huge, and musicians from all aroun…
Public private
Atolón : Ruth Barberán, Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Ferran Fages. Chip shop music : Erik Carlsson, Martin Küchen, David Lacey, Paul Vogel. Recorded by Simon Reynell, February 2012. Mixed and mastered by Ferran Fages. A collaboration between two established and highly-regarded improvising ensembles, Atolon from Barcelona and the Irish-Swedish group Chip Shop Music. The disc consists of the whole of a wonderful concert performance from February 2012 in which the two groups attempted to play tog…
Spoo
Released 10 March 2013. The album combines the inspired play of Eric Vagnon (saxophone) with a solid rhythm layer driven by the double bassist Eric Brochard and legendary drummer Nicolas Lelièvre. So good...
Boneshaker
"Boneshaker are Mars Williams (reeds, toy instruments), Paal Nilssen-Love (drums & percussion) and Kent Kessler (bass), three prolific powerhouse musicians, carrying among them a Grammy nomination and decades of experience with the top ensembles in the world.Norwegian phenomenon Paal Nilssen-Love has established himself over the last decade as one of the most important voices in improvised music from his generation. A powerful drummer of unbounded energy, he shows an ongoing ability to br…
Concert For Fukushima
Concert film by Pavel Borodin featuring the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet benefit concert at the Music Unlimited festival in Wels. Guests: Toshinori Kondo, Michiyo Yagi, Yoshihide Otomo and Akira Sakata It was a special wish of the curator of the 2011 Music Unlimited Festival (Wels, Austria), Peter Brötzmann, to organize a charity concert in aid of the Fukushima nuclear disaster recovery effort. For that purpose, the Chicago Tentet, one of Brötzmann's main bands since 15 years, invited f…
Live at the Montreux/Detroit Jazz Festival 1986/1989
World Premiere!! Available for the 1st time, this legendary live set by the near-mythical Roy Brooks' Sensational Aboriginal Choir. which used to be one of the highlight of the Montreux/Detroit Jazz Festival. unique & special ?! kind of.After the Improvisational Sphere & the Artistic Truth Roy Brooks recast his Artistic Truth band with a formidable, all-Detroit lineup and quickly established it as one of the region’s top groups. He teamed with established local jazz godfathers such as Kenny Co…
Winter gardens
180g LP in fine paper silkscreen printed cover. Recorded in London, December 2011 and in Milwaukee, October 2011. A solo album by saxophone virtuoso John Butcher featuring some of his most exceptional extended techniques which he has been developing during his career as a soloist as well as a member of some significant collaborative projects. Playing tenor & soprano saxophones, Butcher has developed a very unique style in free improvised music and composition, mostly by engaging with a se…
Zurich
Live in Zurich 1984. Reissue of a double vinyl publish on the same label. Donald Miller, guitar, alto saxophone (on one track). Jim Sauter, tenor, alto, baritone saxophones. Don Dietrich, tenor, alto saxophone, guitar (on one track). 'First off, there is this huge saxophone sound, the bells of the two saxes often jammed against each other with a microphone dropped inside, and then there is the guitarist as a generator of sounds more crazed than anything that has ever come out of the instr…
Cafe Oto/London
CD edition. Great work from this heavy heavy trio – a group that features the talents of probably the three greatest living avant saxophonists in the world – Peter Brotzmann on tenor, alto, clarinet, and tarogato, Ken Vandermark on tenor and clarinet, and Mats Gustafsson on baritone sax! The trio have worked together countless times over the past two decades – and together have an affinity that not only results in some of the most amazingly adventurous improvisation you'll ever hear from …
The Living Music
180 gram vinyl reissue of German free improvisation pianist and composer Alexander von Schlippenbach's The Living Music, originally released on his own Quasar label in 1969. Recorded by Conny Plank, it features Peter Brötzmann (tenor & baritone saxophone), Manfred Schoof (cornet, flugelhorn), Michael Pilz (bass clarinet, baritone saxophone), Paul Rutherford (trombone), Buschi Niebergall (double bass, bass trombone) and Han Bennink (drums, percussion). The Living Music remains one of the paramoun…
A Space Odyssey: From Birmingham To The Big Apple - The Quest Be
**Tri-fold digicase with 20-page booklet of liner-notes and photos** Kris Needs repositions the roots of Sonny Blount aka Sun Ra on three discs (60 tracks) spanning his earliest 1933 recordings of big band jazz and be-bop, thru the birth of Sun Ra and the "future shock" of his later visions. "CD1 (Pre-flight) features Sun Ra’s earliest recordings from the 1940s, playing piano for Wynonie Harris and Lil Green, jamming with Stuff Smith, and coaching or arranging for artists such as Andrew T…
Cuts
If jazz, as the eminent critic Whitney Balliet once wrote, is the “sound of surprise,†Cuts, an intensely cathartic, fiercely turbulent collaboration between Japanese noise purveyor Masami Akita (aka Merzbow), Hungarian drummer Balazs Pandi and Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustasfsson, is the “sound of shock and awe.†A sonic assault of epic proportions, it blends the bombast of Merzbow’s grinding white noise barrages with Pandi’s thunderous pulse on the kit and Gust…
For Adolphe Sax
At last, the reissue of German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann's long out-of-print first record, one of the most auspicious debuts of free music, and a trenchant tribute to the inventor of the saxophone. For Adolphe Sax is a roundhouse punch of European free jazz, delivered in1967 by the saxophonist's first classic trio featuring drummer Sven-Ake Johansson and bassist Peter Kowald. Initially issued in a tiny private run on Brötzmann's own BRO label -- silkscreened cover designed by Brötzmann, with h…
Musiki
Reissue of a very obscure free music document, recorded in Cambridge, MA, sometime in 1970. Notable for it's Saturn-esque paste-on cover artwork (eloquently reconstructed here), and general cosmic vibe, this record harkens back to days when "out" was merely a place people went to buy a sandwich. A trio, led by drummer Ertunc, with Michael Cosmic (as, cl, fl, bcl, sop, piccolo, organ, perc.) & Phill Musra (ts, ss, fl, zurna, cl, perc.). The albums features long tracks: "The Creator Spaces"…
At WKCR Studios NY 12-8-74
Massively unlikely unearthing of a previously unreleased live radio broadcast from legendary free jazz saxophonist Charles Tyler in a hand-numbered edition of only 99 copies: Tyler is a comparatively unsung player compared to the better known free music titans but his was a fascinating career, playing alongside Albert Ayler on Bells and Spirits Rejoice, cutting a hands-down classic run of private LPs – Eastern Man Alone on ESP Disk, Voyage From Jericho and Live In Europe, 1978’s Saga Of Th…
Quintet
Things get dislocated, gather themselves, spread across areas of varying intensities. More intimate or more complex song. closer to the sacred, left untouched by mediation, even slightly incomprehensible, though mostlyambivalent and reality-piercing. At times, the music seems to lead us to a meaning that is deeper than the textual level. or is it the depth of another possible song? That's when the music takes us to areas that seem perpetually urging, more than their simple addition of voi…
By the Stream
A study of free-form improvisation, rhythm and language using vocalizations, cello and analog electronics. These recordings in two movements can be taken as, on the one hand, pieces for two voices and improvisation chamber orchestra (which is what the musicians felt throughout the recording session) and, on the other hand, pure free improvisation. Both voices in interaction, perpetually urging the other on, producing more than their simple addition, producing a third voice -- like a semi-au…