Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

Manu Katché's first ECM album as leader, ten of his compositions played with Jan Garbarek, Tomasz Stanko, Marcin Wasilewski and Slawomir Kurkiewicz. Recorded March and November 2004 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo, produced by Manfred Eicher, first released in 2005.

Chick Corea's first solo piano album, improvised at the Arne Bendiksen Studio in Oslo on 21 and 22 April 1971, produced by Manfred Eicher and first released by ECM in 1971. Luminessence LP reissue in gatefold sleeve.

Anthony Braxton invited Milo Fine to travel half way across the USA so they could make some music together for the very first time. The result was the extended free improvisation (with gaps) which is heard complete on this CD. Braxton used four saxophones, and Fine two clarinets, piano and drums. Recorded 2/25/04.

Alphea was formed in Hamburg 1991. The duo has performed in jazz clubs, art galleries and on jazz and contemporary music festivals, playing music structured exclusively by their own concepts.Hannes Wienert (alto and soprano saxophones, trumpet) studied visual arts. Peter Niklas Wilson (double bass) has performed and recorded with John Tchicai, Marion Brown, Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton.

'Amazing improvisation joining jazz tones with electronic sounds, embellished with Tamaru's production'.

Alexander von Schlippenbach: piano. Rudi Mahall: bass clarinet. Tristan Honsinger: cello. Paul Lovens: percussions. recorded in Berlin, september 2002.

Carried like a feather by the wind, crushed by the pressure unmistakably present, this soprano saxophone trio, sculptors of air columns, explorers of fullness, tamers of emptyness, plunges us in the complex relationship of three poets of the breath. It is recorded with a great attention by POB in a warehouse in Toulouse.

Alessandro Bosetti, soprano saxophone; Michel Doneda, soprano saxophone. Recorded in Castelmaurou on the floor of Adre L vocobs studio, nd. Cover drawing (reproduced above) by Alessandro Bosetti; design by Marcus Liebig.

Since the work of Anthony Braxton, Sonny Rollins, Steve Lacy or Evan Parker, solo saxophone recordings are no longer a 'problem'. And especially recordings of solo soprano saxophone ö Parker and Lacy (and Lol Coxhill) have more than just rehabilitated this instrument, long neglected by jazz and improvised music. Solo recording has become so canonized that an improvising saxophone player is expected, at some time, to make a solo album.Alessandro Bosetti, from Milan, Italy, but who has been livin…

By 1958, Albert Ayler and his horn had made some rounds: from boy prodigy to teenage member of Little Walter's Blues Band, from "Little Bird" of Cleveland to featured US Army Band soloist. Then he resolutely set out to forget everything he'd ever learned about how to properly play the sax so that he could really PLAY it -- unhinged, free from strictures of pitch and form, drawing on spirituals, folksong, marches, and other big whopping chunks of collective musical memory -- to channel symphonies…

ALAN TOMLINSON alto & tenor trombones. STEVE BERESFORD electronics & objects. ROGER TURNER drum set & percussion. Digital studio recording made in London by Mike Dailey - 2002 July 24.Excerpts from sleeve notes: “Is this a record? As the first full-length documentation of Alan Tomlinson since his 1980 solo LP issued by Bead and the 1986 FERALS (with Hugh Davies, Phil Minton & Roger Turner) on Leo, it must be. Most of you will know about Roger Turner, who has appeared on several recordings, and a…

A sequence of piano (and prepared piano) and saxophone (tenor & baritone) free improvisations recorded in Barcelona -- 8 duets and 2 solos. Recorded 7/30/04.

The earliest live recording of this Japanese free jazz saxophonist/loner catches him at an incendiary peak across two long, fully-gospelised/heavy tremolo wall-destroyers. Abe at his most Ayler/Wright-inspired. Liners list the backing as bass and drums, but it's actually piano and drums. Keiichi Chida on piano has a weird watery/cluster sound that's a little like Burton Greene's 60s recordings, while Kazunori Nitta's drumming is all splats and weights of blurry punctuation. Sounds fucking great.…

Alongside noise guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi, the late saxophonist Kaoru Abe was in the vanguard of Japan's new music, articulating an approach to the saxophone that matched extreme velocity with an elastic facility with the instrument's most phantom registers and a sculptural approach to instant composition that saw him carve poignant shapes from massive blocks of silence. Abe died of a heroin overdose on September 9th, 1978 at the age of 29, making 2004 the 27th anniversary of his passing, on…

Beautiful collection of early solo work from this amazing Japanese saxophonist who can burn personal co-ordinates into cold, black space with alla the harrowing force of Ayler, Haino, Brotz et al. Performances on alto and bass clarinet that combine an intimate, lyrical style with ferocious phantom register evisceration. Highly recommended.

Then onto the trios, of which the first one has the well-known Axel Dörner (trumpet), Leonel Kaplan (trumpet) and Diego Chamy (percussion). As this was recorded (in 2003) in Buenos Aires, Argentinia, I have reasons to believe that Kaplan and Chamy are from Argentina. This is top of new improvisation. Dörner continues to explore his techniques of trumpet playing, which has nothing to do with the trumpet as such, but everything with the instrument as an object and Leonel Kaplan proofs to be a good…