Jazz /
Pink Saliva
2010 release ** Montréal-based trio Pink Saliva produce music that’s at once intensely deep and readily accessible. Accessible because drummer Michel F Côté lays down earthy rhythmic patterns that sound beamed to the planet through a reverb-y, distant mix. Intensely deep because trumpeter Elwood Epps (aka Gordon Allen) puts so much passion and focus into each and every sound, from kissing lip smacks to achingly beautiful single notes, suspended over the insistent thrumming of Alexandre St-Onge o…
Fammi
2010 release ** A long-standing member of Montréal’s extremely fertile experimental music scene, Jean René has lent his skills to many of his contemporaries. (...) Fammi comes across as a daring, idiosyncratic album. It's the 8th publication - out of 24, one for each hour of a day - produced by &records (Michel F. Côté & Fabrizio Gilardino).
Then Again
November 1978. Henry Cow disbands after a decade of music that redefined the boundaries of experimental rock. November 2022. Four founding members return to the stage. Not to look back - but to improvise the present. Fred Frith (guitar, violin, electronics), Tim Hodgkinson (keyboards, saxophone, lap steel, electronics), Chris Cutler (drums, percussion), John Greaves (bass, vocals): the original core reunited under the name Henry Now. The key is in the name - as Clive Bell noted in The Wire, this…
The Original Quintet (First Recording)
From the original "Theme" to a series of beautifully reimagined standards by Duke Ellington, Benny Golson, and Isham Jones, The Original Quintet (First Recording) captures a seminal moment in jazz history. Released in 1956 on Prestige and engineered by the legendary Rudy Van Gelder, this album perfectly synthesizes Miles Davis’s evolving artistic vision, marking a landmark in the bop revolution.
Featuring an extraordinary ensemble including John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Philly Joe Jones on d…
Descension "Out of Our Constrictions"
*2025 Repress!! 150 copies limited edition* Rich in musical associations yet utterly singular in its voice, joyous with an inner tranquility, the music of Natural Information Society is unlike any other being made today. Their sixth album in eleven years for eremite records, descension (Out of Our Constrictions) is the first to be recorded live, featuring a set from London’s Cafe OTO with veteran English free-improv great Evan Parker, & the first to feature just one extended composition. The 75-…
Song For Leluhur
26 October 2024, an album comprising a live performance by the Creative Unit of Yosaburō Toyozumi, Namchirak Signho, and Masatsugu Harada with Senko Terukina and Kosei Yamamoto at Gallery Mai within the Mōri Residence in Hofu City, alongside recordings from Masatsugu Harada's studio in Kure City. The performance at Gallery Mai could be described as ‘a once-in-a-lifetime resonance carved in Hofu by masters of improvisation.
Home Thoughts
Home Thoughts is the late, luminous farewell from Michael Garrick, written for his Lyric Ensemble and recorded in 2011. Working with poetry by Shakespeare, Browning, Blake and others, he fashions 12 song-like pieces where jazz harmony, chamber textures and spoken or sung verse fuse into an intimate, autumnal meditation on memory, love and mortality.
Tone Poems
Tone Poems sees Michael Garrick orchestrating textures and images in a powerful display of big-band colour. Released in 2011 and performed by the Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra, the suite of eight pieces draws on myth, landscape, and autobiography - each composition unfolding as a miniature drama of shifting harmony and luminous ensemble interplay.
Green and Pleasant Land
Green and Pleasant Land finds Michael Garrick turning the English landscape into chamber jazz, writing for a luminous string-based group with piano at its centre. Across live performances from the early 2000s, he folds folk melody, hymn fragments and knotty improv into quietly radical miniatures that make the countryside feel haunted, restless and very much alive.
The New Quartet
The New Quartet introduces Michael Garrick in close-up, stripped of choirs and orchestras and thrown into agile, conversational post-bop with Martin Hathaway, Paul Moylan and Alan Jackson. Across standards, Garrick originals and nods to Joe Harriott and Jaco Pastorius, the 2002 session turns lyricism into a pressure test, revealing how much drama four voices can conjure in a small room.
Down on Your Knees
On Down on Your Knees, Michael Garrick revisits his sacred-jazz obsessions through the language of a modern small big band, setting hymns, blues, and standards in luminous, late-20th-century colour. With vocalist Anita Wardell alongside Martin Shaw, Steve Waterman, Jim Tomlinson and others, the 1999 album feels like a devotional songbook rewritten for restless, metropolitan believers.
Lady of the Aurian Wood: A Magic Life of Duke
In Lady of the Aurian Wood: A Magic Life of Duke, Michael Garrick salutes Ellington not with imitation but with a gleaming fever-dream of big-band narrative. Writing for the Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra with Norma Winstone in a central role, he turns characters, ghosts and side-stories from Duke’s orbit into a 12-part, 75-minute suite of blues, prayer and hall-of-mirrors swing.
Peter Pan Jazzdance Suite
Peter Pan Jazzdance Suite lets Michael Garrick turn J. M. Barrie’s myth into airborne big-band theatre. Written for the Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra and premiered for his 70th birthday, this 2003 suite paints Peter, Wendy, the Darlings, Tink, Hook, and the Lost Boys in vividly dancing themes that swing, drift, and menace by turns.
Genius
Genius presents Joe Harriott in full, volatile clarity, stitching together live free-form recordings from 1961 with sharper-edged studio sides and collaborations. Across these eleven tracks, his alto saxophone burns through hard bop, standards, and abstraction alike, supported by Coleridge Goode, Phil Seamen, and pianist Michael Garrick, among others.
Gigs: Introducing Michael Garrick
Gigs: Introducing Michael Garrick catches Michael Garrick on the bandstand rather than in the chapel, a pianist still forming his voice through standards, ballads, and early originals. This live-feeling 2008 release frames him with a tight trio setting, revealing a restless, harmonically alert player already bending the jazz canon toward his own lyric intensity.
Yet Another Spring
On Yet Another Spring, Michael Garrick enlarges his sacred-jazz universe into a full-scale orchestral meditation on birth, loss, and renewal. Scored for the Michael Garrick Jazz Orchestra with recurring features for Norma Winstone, the 2006 suite moves from intimate prayer to blazing big-band catharsis, treating the life cycle as both liturgy and drama.
Inspirations
Inspirations finds Michael Garrick turning inward with his New Quartet, distilling a lifetime of big ideas into melodic, small-group conversation. Recorded in 2006, it honours John Coltrane’s legacy without mimicry, letting Garrick, Martin Hathaway, Paul Moylan, and Alan Jackson reimagine spiritual intensity as supple, lyrical post-bop.
Children of Time
On Children of Time, Michael Garrick stretches his sacred-jazz imagination into cosmic scale, writing for the Jazz Britannia Orchestra and reuniting with vocalist Norma Winstone to explore creation myths, Eucharistic ritual, and his own visionary texts. The result is a 2006 suite that feels like a liturgy drifting through deep space, turning theology into glowing, unsettled sound.
Jazz Praises at St. Paul's
With Jazz Praises at St. Paul's, Michael Garrick welds liturgical grandeur to jazz improvisation, conjuring an atmosphere as reverent as it is free. Featuring the Michael Garrick Sextet, John Marshall, and the St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir, this 2005 release radiates both spiritual inquiry and creative boldness, transcending boundary with every motif.
And So It Is
By no means a secret, (and in steady demand,) but certainly in the category of IYKYK, multi-instrumentalist Aaron Shaw is one of Los Angeles’s brightest young Composers, Producers, Arrangers, Band Leaders, and Music Directors. In his Home Studio that he shares with his older Brother, Lawrence (together making up the group Black Nile), Shaw can be found playing Saxophones, Clarinets, Flutes, Keyboards, Drum Machines, and also Engineering Sessions. A frequent fixture at The World Stage in Leimert …