Jazz /
Solo Orchestra In Real Time
A singular, radical entry in the Nimbus West catalogue from one of the true pioneers of the free jazz piano. Burton Greene was there at the very beginning - co-founding the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble with bassist Alan Silva in early-60s New York, recording for ESP-Disk and Columbia, playing the legendary loft sessions at Slugs'. After relocating to Amsterdam in 1969, Greene spent decades exploring the intersections of free jazz, Indian music, klezmer and electronic composition. Solo Orches…
East 101
A beautiful, dreamlike expression of spiritual jazz recorded in 1981 at City Recorders - a time when this kind of music was considered completely out of vogue. Yet here is Gary Bias, unspooling a suite of deeply soulful and profoundly far-reaching original compositions that vividly evoke the blue skies of the record's Los Angeles origins. Bias plays alto and soprano saxophone and flute with a tone and sensibility that sits somewhere between the lyricism of early Pharoah Sanders and the bold atta…
L'Enfant Samba
Very first version of the first single by Cortex, reissued as 7 inch for the 1st time. “I remember that I and Alain Gandolfi wanted to put ‘Mary & Jeff’ on the A side, but the producer decided to set ‘L’Enfant Samba’ instead because he thought that the voice of Mireille would be more selling than my piano… 6 months after, at the beginning of 1976, ‘Mary & Jeff’ was a hit in a lot of Disco clubs and radios!”
Morgenmusiken
On Morgenmusiken, Green Cosmos expand their small‑town German jazz into a quietly epic, Coltrane‑lit cosmos, braiding modal vamps, Indian classical colour and spacious free improvisation into seven meditative journeys where silence and a single note carry as much weight as any crescendo.
Dogon A.D.
One of the most important jazz albums of the 1970s - finally on vinyl in its definitive edition. Julius Hemphill's Dogon A.D. is the missing link between the avant-garde and the blues, between the cotton fields and outer space. Recorded on a freezing February day in 1972 at Oliver Sain's Archway Studios in St. Louis - no heat, malfunctioning equipment, some musicians didn't even show up - and yet what emerged was nothing short of a masterpiece. An "almost accidental classic" that has haunted col…
Habibi Funk Print 001 (Magazine)
Tip! Tip! Tip! After carrying the idea around for a while, the team at Habibi Funk finally brings their vision of a print music magazine to life. Spotlights gathers research from their own releases alongside stories that reach beyond the label's catalog - 88 pages, A4 format.
The cover features the inimitable Sun Ra performing in Cairo in 1971, at the apartment of Cairo Jazz Band co-founder Hartmut Geerken. Inside, a comprehensive final conversation with the late Geerken, recorded at his home in…
The Tapscott Sessions Vol. 7
Geography lesson: "Riding the San Andreas" - living on a fault line, waiting for the shake. "Southwester Avenue Shuffle" - street-level LA, the neighborhood Tapscott never left. "On the Nile" - Africa, always Africa, even from a piano bench in South Central. Then the portraits: "Amanda's Tone Poem," "Sonnet of Butterfly McQueen" - dedicated to the actress who refused to play maids after Gone with the Wind, who said no when no was dangerous. "Yesterday's Dream" looks back. Thelonious Monk's "'Rou…
The Tapscott Sessions Vol. 6
October in Los Angeles. Horace Tapscott sits down, plays for 38 minutes, gets up. No audience, no applause. Just Tom Albach and his tape machine. This is how monuments get built - one session at a time, one composition at a time, nobody watching. "Ancestral Echoes" opens - nearly thirteen minutes tracing lineages back through time, the piano as time machine. Then Roy Porter's "Jessica," a beautiful detour into someone else's melody, proof that Tapscott could interpret as powerfully as he compose…
The Tapscott Sessions Vol. 4
Solo (Steinway) piano. Los Angeles, September 1982. Just read the titles: "A Dress for Renee" - infectious melody, keeps coming back like a persistent thought. "Shades of Soweto" - South Africa seen from South Central. "The Hero's Last Dance" - whoever that hero was. "First Call of the Humming Bird" - nature breaking through concrete. And then "Forgiving" - as a closing statement, as a breath.
Horace Tapscott was a fierce critic of racial bigotry, and his music never hid it. But here there's als…
The Tapscott Sessions Vol. 3
Solo piano. Recorded March 1983, Los Angeles. Five pieces, forty-one minutes. Where Sun Ra meets Erik Satie. This is the third volume in what would become Tapscott's monumental series of solo recordings - over thirty hours captured between 1982 and 1985, documenting his own compositions alongside works by unknown Black composers in the Los Angeles area. Producer Tom Albach considered these the most important music Horace Tapscott ever made.
The titles read like chapters from a life: "The Tuus," …
The Tapscott Sessions Vol. 2
Solo piano. Recorded November 15, 1982 at the Lobero Theater, Santa Barbara. A Steinway piano and one man's soul, nothing else. Producer Tom Albach believed the solo sessions were the most important music Tapscott ever made. Between 1982 and 1985, over thirty hours of solo piano were captured - Albach made it his life's mission to release them all. This is volume two, and it cuts deep.
The centerpiece: "Struggle X, An Afro-American Dream" - nearly twenty minutes of Tapscott wrestling with the un…
Kids Mysteries
Recorded live at the Bimhuis, Amsterdam. The debut album of M.O.B. - "My Own Band" - the project that would become the main vehicle for this South African giant in exile. Eight tracks, almost an hour of music, with titles that tell you everything you need to know: "Purtles," "Ice Cream Man," "Tea and Scones," "Monkey Woman," "Beach Balls," "Kids-Trainride."
Sean Bergin (1948-2012) left Durban for Amsterdam in 1976, escaping apartheid, carrying South African jazz in his blood. Half Irish, half So…
TA
Live at the Music Academy of the West, Santa Barbara, April 12, 1987. Cello and percussion. Two Europeans conquering California with nothing but strings, drums, bones, bodhran and squeaky toys. This is the duo that gave us Cellotape & Scotchtape in 1982 - now captured live on American soil, over an hour of pure duo improvisation.
Reijseger needs no introduction: Dutch cellist extraordinaire, ICP Orchestra veteran, Clusone Trio with Han Bennink and Michael Moore, later Werner Herzog's go-to compo…
L.A.'s Unsung
Nine rare tracks from the Nimbus West archive, a map of Los Angeles underground jazz the world never heard enough of. Horace Tapscott, Nate Morgan, Jesse Sharps, Dadisi Komolafe, Roberto Miranda - the names that built UGMAA and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, the movement that kept spiritual jazz alive in South Central for decades while the music industry looked elsewhere.
"Desert Fairy Princess," "U.G.M.A.A Ger," "Prayer Of Happiness," "Mrafu," "Calvary" - titles evoking the Pan-African consc…
Swarm Patterns
Three creative cells of Austrian avantgarde music form a playfull trio of piano and drums/percussion -pianist and composer Elisabeth Harnik has various improvisation projects, for instance with Joelle Leandre, Ken Vandermark, Zlatko Kaucic, Tony Buck, etc. She is backed by Martin Brandlmayr of Radian-fame, who works fluently in jazz, electronics and acoustic music, and Didi Kern who, coming from Bulbul guitar underground and Noiserock, lately found his place in the international improv scene.
Wild West
The Amsterdam String Trio emerges from Europe's most vibrant improvised music scene: Maurice Horsthuis on viola, Ernst Reijseger on cello, Ernst Glerum on double bass. No violin. An unusual configuration that delivers, as Glerum puts it, "a dark sound, a kind of obscurity, and we like that very much." Three instruments exploring music's lower registers, without the violin's brightness to lead. Recorded live at the Academy of Music of the West in Santa Barbara on December 2, 1988, Wild West captu…
Lingua Franca
Lingua Franca: the language that allows different peoples to understand one another. And what better instrument than the clarinet - voice of klezmer, Alpine folk, New Orleans jazz - to speak across borders? Daniele D'Agaro was born in 1958 in Spilimbergo, Friuli, at the foot of the eastern Alps, where Italy, Austria, and Slovenia merge at a cultural crossroads. In 1979 he debuted with Andrea Centazzo's Mittel Europa Orchestra, then Berlin, then Amsterdam from 1983 - where the Dutch improvised sc…
Ourang-Outang
In August 1971, the white wizards of South Africa's psychedelic rock underground shared the stage with the black witchdoctors of the Afro-jazz avant-garde. The event was the Tribal Blues concerts at Wits Great Hall, an unprecedented cross-cultural showcase of independent music hosted by the maverick 3rd Ear Music label. Ourang-Outang (2020) presents rehearsals and jams recorded by 3rd Ear director, producer and engineer David Marks in rural KwaZulu-Natal as this unlikely alliance of musical drui…
Quintessence
A remarkable document finally surfaces after nearly 40 years in the NDR archives. John Taylor - the piano master of dense, orchestral voicings and skittish melodic invention - captured here in 1987 with the full NDR Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dieter Glawischnig. All music written and orchestrated by Taylor himself. This is the logical conclusion of everything the man stood for musically - from Azimuth to Johnny Griffin's band to this luxurious symphonic setting. Stan Sulzmann on sopra…
Dreams Deferred
The title comes from Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" For a pianist who traversed Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Amsterdam chasing a musical vision few could grasp, the question is anything but rhetorical. Curtis Clark was born in Chicago in 1950, studied at the California Institute of Arts in Valencia, then moved to New York where he crossed paths with David Murray. But it was Europe where he found home - Amsterdam, where American…