Jazz /
Horsky Park
Two instruments with totally different histories come together and look for a connection across two great sets from 2006 & 2010. "What counts is who you are performing with....in the end that is more important than the actual instrument"-Thomas Lehn
Heart's Reflection
An incredible double CD from trumpeter Leo Smith's Organic with Michael Gregory, Pheeroan AkLaff, Angelica Sanchez, Skuli Sverrisson, Brandon Ross, &c &c... incredible electric and acoustic jazz from the legendary improviser and innovator!"Lauded as "one of the most vital musicians on the planet" by Coda, Wadada Leo Smith is one of the most visionary, boldly original and artistically important figures in contemporary American jazz and free music, and one of the most distinctive trumpet pla…
Black Love
Saxophonist Carlos Garnett recorded with Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis and Art Blakey. His 1974 spiritual jazz album features an amazing line-up of Reggie Lucas (Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins), Buster Williams, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Alex Blake (Sun Ra), Charles Sullivan, Mauricio Smith (Tito Puente), Norman Connors, and Billy Hart. Exact repro reissue.
Invisible
A new series designed by Clare Cooper. Xavier Charles is an active clarinetist in the world of improvised music, known from a variety of constellations and ensembles like Dans les arbres and Contest of Pleasures. This is his first solo release for Sofa. Listening and perception are important elements in Invisible, which consists of both solo clarinet and field recordings. A total openness to moment and utterance characterizes his sound explorations, where we in a poetic fashion, are led to a pla…
Different Tessellations
Two very different versions of Weston's compositional framework based on a cycle of pentatonic scales. Tessellations I explores the possibilities of improvising with a pre-established form as a soloist and was conceived for acoustic piano. (The composer recorded a version in 2003 on a Luthéal piano in Brussels released as Emanem 4095). Only the first half of the 2010 version by the young concert and improvising pianist LEO SVIRSKY is included here because of CD durational limitations. His interp…
Figures And Grounds
'My role in bringing together this group was to provide a new context for the diverse talents of these musicians. From the outset, the aim of the group was to explore the range of possibilities at the intersection of jazz and computer music.' Adam Linson. This is a terrific CD with this stellar line-up: Axel Dorner (trumpet, electronics), Rudi Mahall (bass clarinet), Adam Linson (double bass, electronics) and Paul Lytton (drums, percussion). Recorded on 14 January 2008 in AL's studio, Josetti Hö…
Lio Leo Leon
The whole of the performance at the 2010 Freedom of the City festival by the 38-strong LIO. Conductions by Alison Blunt, Steve Beresford (featuring guest Leon Michener), Philipp Wachsmann, Caroline Kraabel, and Dave Tucker (featuring guest Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith), were interspersed with free improvisations.
Trance Map
Evan Parker (soprano saxophone, sample collection, co-composition), Matthew Wright (live sampling, turntables, co-composition and sound design). In which the studio becomes the arena for an expanded method of improvisation where successive layers of sound making are built up, revised, scrapped, edited, revisited... (As the notes say 'the tweaks went down to the wire.') In short, the way many musicians have been working for decades, but a new experience for a hard-core, real-time free improviser …
Unknown skies
...Every trio without a piano, or without a drums, or as in this case without a double bass, gains in incline what it loses in “balance”. It only takes a little sometimes. Everyone plays at ease across. Everyone can split themselves. There are no more solos as solos but phases, circles of influence and predominance which do not last. The duos bind and unbind more clearly, the contrasts stand out better. The theme is no longer material to develop but, as in Unknown Skies, a lyrical and volatile s…
Conversations
William Parker has long taken an active role in the presentation of his own art (self-produced records/CDs, concerts, festivals, publications) and that of others. That initiative continues with this major work, an anthology of musician-to-musician interviews in the lineage of Arthur Taylor’s seminal “Notes and Tones”. Approximately 12 years in the making, “Conversations” has hallmarks of being a very personal project, spotlighting many musicians who are largely unknown to even avid fans of the…
Whobub
The great surprise with the French quintet Hubbub comes with seeing them in performance before you’ve heard one of their recordings. Five men walk on stage, two carry saxophones, one a guitar, the pianist and drummer sit down at their instruments. It looks like a conventional notion of a band, the sole concession to the world of electronics the Gibson Les Paul, itself a guitar design that has changed little in the past sixty years. Every instrument carries with it the expectation of a characteri…
Old Sights, New Sounds
Recorded at Incus HQ, London, in October 2010, this duo is a delight that should refresh even the most jaded ears. Lol Coxhill and Alex Ward are both veteran improvisers and regular participants on the London scene, so it was inevitable that they would eventually play together as a duo. As evidenced below by YouTube, that happened in August 2010 at John Russell's annual Fete Qua Qua; the pairing was repeated the following month at Sybil Madrigal's monthly Boat Ting gig on the Thames (on the…
Under a double moon
With a career now spanning over 40 years and more than 100 recordings, Joe McPhee has shown that emotional content and theoretical underpinnings are thoroughly compatible — and in fact, a critically important pairing — in the world of creative improvised music. Since recording The Hated Music with Paul Flaherty in 2000, Chris Corsano has been hyper-active in far-reaching corners of the free improvised world. Under A Double Moon, recorded live in Paris during a spring 2010 tour of Europe, i…
New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
restocked: Colin Stetson was born and raised in Ann Arbor, MI and earned a degree in music from his hometown school, the University of Michigan, in 1997. Six years in San Francisco followed, then another four in Brooklyn, NY. Since 2007, Colin has made his home in Montréal, Canada.Throughout the past decade Stetson has developed his unique solo voice on saxophones and clarinets, culminating in the 2008 release of his debut solo record New History Warfare Vol. 1. As a soloist he has performed c…
Up To Earth
Vinyl edition of this joyous improvised music drawing on South African roots and European free jazz from Chris McGregor and a group including Evan Parker, Louis Moholo, Barre Philllips, &c. This album only had a few test pressings at the time of recording and this is therefore the first vinyl release of this classic work. In 1969 the Chris McGregor Group were riding high on the London jazz scene, playing and hanging out with all the rising stars of British free jazz. Sessions for the pre…
Love Life & Games
RESTOCKED: I wrote these tunes in 1968 when Micheal Cosmic and i were students at the AACM School of Music. i revised Love life & games in 2008. i had a band going on then with Micheal Cosmic. we played students concerts with Roscoe Mitchell. he also taught us our reeds. i had music theory with Anthony Braxton and Richard Muhal Abrams..." Phill Musra
Live in Berlin, Ballhaus 1987
Thomas ! Thomas wrote me one day and said to me to check out some audio called So long ago in Berlin... wow, i immediatly fell in love with that sound, really 60's and melancholic in a way... those were the rec. of a mini Tour that Norris Jones set up with his new sextet (2 gigs in Berlin/2 more in NYC). Sirone was one of the most respected bassist coming out of the New Thing, having played with all the greats: Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Noah Howard,…
Live at Lelli's
Roy Brooks ! what can i say about one of the greatest jazz drummers ?! a man who paid his dues, who lived an hard life...who's Detroit Jazz ! started to play in the 50's with Yusef Lateef, spent 5 years with Horace Silver doing the hard and the bop, then with Dexter Gordon, Lee Morgan, Jackie McLean, two years with Mingus, played with Max Roach M'Boom... plus many others... in the 80's he formed The Artistic Truth & The Aboriginal Percussion Choir... the rec. on this album is even more precious …
M.O.S.
'A new series designed by Clare Cooper. M.O.S. is Ingar Zach's second solo release for Sofa, six years after the critically acclaimed 'Percussion music'. M.O.S. reveals a large and almost monolithic sound world. Zach's horizontal bassdrum (gran cassa) functions as a gigantic, resonating membrane, where metallic and ceramic percussions create articulations over the bass vibrations in a ritualistic dance of pulses and overtones. The music moves slowly, but with a continuing drive, and stretc…
FMP in retrospect
Monumental! Who could have imagined back in 1969 that a German label religiously dedicated to uncompromising free-jazz would outlast the Berlin Wall? Such is the ongoing tenacity of Free Music Production, and its story is told in this intriguing 12-disc box set, compiled with a lavish book of photos and perceptive essays by such musicians as saxophonist Ken Vandermark and author Felix Klopotek. The company has been a true labor of love (or fanaticism) for Jost Gebers, who maintained a day…