Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

Tip! Tip! Tip! *300 copies limited edition* We are about to release the debut LP from Secular Music Group, emerged from the home workshop of Christian Ruggiero, a renowned composer for film and television with a passion for classic recordings and legacy studio technology. He teamed up with long-time collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Yannis Panos to make a record in the old way; as a group of musicians in a room playing live to magnetic tape. This record would channel their shared interests …

Peter Brötzmann collaborated with many artists in his career, regularly adding new compatriots into the fold, and Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love became one of his staunchest allies after the percussionist joined the Chicago Tentet in 2004. They worked in various contexts, including this inexhaustible, hard-hitting duo. Most of the albums they’ve issued have captured live performances, but in 2015 they made this stunning studio recording. As Nilssen-Love says in the liner notes, “Peter had a…

1995 release ** Quinzaine de MontrealThe Spectrum, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; April 11, 1992Tristan Honsinger, cello; Martin Schütz, cello; Eric Longsworth, cello; Michelle Kinney, broom-cello; Ken Butler, broom-cello; Helmut Lipsky, violin; J. A. Deane, trombone, live sampling; Guillaume Dostaler, piano; Mike Milligan, bass; Pierre Dubé, vibesConducting is no longer a mere method for an interpretation, but an actual part of the process of composition. Conduction is a means by which a conductor m…

1995 release ** The Akbank Conduction, Akbank IIIstanbul, Turkey; October 16 & 17, 1992The Süleyman Erguner Ensemble: Hasan Esen, kemence; Mehmet Emin Bitmez, ud; Göksel Baktagir, kanun; Süleyman Erguner, ney; Lê Quan Ninh, percussion; Bryan Carrott, vibraphone; J.A.Deane, trombone, electronics, drum machine; Elizabeth Panzer, harp; Brandon Ross, acoustic guitar; Steve Colson, piano; Hugh Ragin, pocket trumpetConducting is no longer a mere method for an interpretation, but an actual part of the …

1995 release ** Conduction #31: Angelica Festival of International Music: Bologna, Italy; May 16, 1993 Dietmar Diesner, soprano sax; Peter Kowald, bass; Wolter Wierbos, trombone; Steve Beresford, piano; Hans Reichel, guitar; Tom Cora, cello; Han Bennink, drums; Catherine Jauniaux, voice; Ikue Mori, drum machinesConduction #35: American Connection 4: Antwerp, Belgium; May 26, 1993Conduction #36: American Connection 4: Amsterdam, Holland; May 27, 1993The Maarten Altena Ensemble: Maarten Altena, ba…

1995 release **Conduction #38: in Freud's Garden: Muffathalle, Germany; December 11, 1993Myra Melford, piano; Zeena Parkins, harp; Bryan Carrott, vibes; Brandon Ross, acoustic guitar; J. A. Deane, trombone; live sampling; Motoharu Yoshizawa, electric bass; Lê Quan Ninh, percussion; Martin Schütz, electric cello; Tristan Honsinger, cello; Martine Altenburger, cello; Edgar Laubscher, electric viola; Hans Koch, clarinet, bass & contrabass clarinet, soprano & tenor saxConduction #39 & #40: Threadwax…

1995 release ** New World, New World - Opperman Music Hall, Florida State University School of Music; February 4, 1994Jesse Canterbury, clarinet; Mimi Patterson, clarinet; Scott Deeter, sax; Philip Gelb, shakuhachi; Gregor Harvey, guitar; Ethan Schaffner, electric guitar; Elisabeth King, voice; Daniel Raney, trombone; David Tatro, trombone; Michael Titlebaum, alto saxConducting is no longer a mere method for an interpretation, but an actual part of the process of composition. Conduction is a mea…

"A standard takes on a new shape when it is realized through Trio New York’s methods. Their improvised preludes promote refreshed readings studded with bright accents and pungent embellishments, reinforcing the qualities that have enabled these tunes to endure, be it the sweet sentimentality of “Memories of You” or the devil-may-care of “Just One of Those Things.” By embracing the tenets of free improvisation – experimentation, discovery, and, on a good night, elucidation – Trio New York has tra…

Joe Maneri’s last Microtonal recordings from the year 2002. These are not typically arranged songs, but asymmetrical, asynchronous constructs that develop from simultaneous, complimentary but peripheral gestures of the mind and heart. The harmonic contrasts that result from Joe Maneri’s breathy microtones; the fixed pitches, inclining towards atonality, of Tyson Rogers’ piano; and Jacob Braverman’s ambiguously scored percussion color their contrapuntal angles and parallel lines. Layers of energy…

First visit to the audio equivalent of a graphic novel.

Big Tip! As poets from Shakespeare to Heine have recognised, “the forest” is not just about grandeur and most expansive of gestures; it is also about intimacy and there is a remarkable intimacy to Christopher Kunz’s and Florian Fischer’s music. The forest is both inhuman, wild, and, because it houses us and to a degree depends on us, profoundly humane. You’ll find these qualities here as well. Focus, breathe and listen. (Brian Morton)

"No music making can be entirely non-idiomatic. Removing the metaphor, the claim is that it is characterless, without personality. But despite his best intentions, perhaps, one can hear a range of influences in Bailey’s own work – even if jazz isn't one of them. And the present album shows that "non-idiomatic" is the wrong description for much free improvisation. The common description "abstract" is also misleading. All music is abstract in form, humane in utterance."  – Andy Hamilton

"A long life can contain a certain amount of waste. Live long enough and posterity doesn’t notice the  occasional unproductive gap. A short life adds value to every moment and every creative act. This new  issue of Albert Ayler’s brief association with Don Cherry includes further material from their time in  Copenhagen, a period when the saxophonist daily reinvented the themes that were coursing through  his mind, breath and fingers. These are not a collector’s fetishes. These are fresh document…

"Kontakte makes contacts between acoustic instrumental sounds and electronic music, its multidimensionality and its invitation to time travel, all promised a future in which humanity might transcend the limitations of material reality. In Spiegelung and Geschichte der Gewalt the electronic sounds emerge as transformations of this reality." – Christopher Fox

“We are in the business of transformation, applying our knowledge of improvising together for twenty-five years, interwoven with our resonance with these melodies and forms. We have found our collective way with honouring what these pieces express to us, through our personal language, comments Gerry Hemingway.” He agrees that there's a concept of authenticity”. “The feeling of swing is our own, but shaped by the pieces we are playing”. Authenticity is acquired through assimilating traditions, an…

Joe Henderson Our Thing To In ’N Out Revisited notes: The Blue Note label in the early and mid 1960s was a haven for musicians engaged in the process of expanding the jazz vocabulary with unconventional harmonic strategies and new compositional infrastructures that elicited equally exploratory improvisational responses. And it was an ongoing process, benefiting from the sporadic, albeit calculated, interaction of different perspectives and methods of creative inspiration. Established or working g…

"Tadd Dameron remains better known and more widely admired among fellow musicians than with the record-buying public, and yet most will know at least some of his sophisticated compositions: “Lady Bird”, “On A  Misty Night”,  “If You Could See Me Now”. A thoughtful manner and an early death conspired to keep his  reputation somewhat subdued. Here is an opportunity to hear two of Dameron's best recordings in modern  sound. An intelligent rather than dramatic player himself, he nonetheless deserves…

"Marion Brown was already defying categorisation in 1966 when he recorded Three For Shepp, whose six tracks open Three For Shepp To Gespächsfetzen Revisited. Brown’s opening “New Blues” and Archie Shepp’s closing “Delicado,” though compelling,are relatively orthodox expressions of mid 1960s NewThing. The four tracks they bookend, however, are distinctive even today. Brown’s exquisite “Fortunato,” though it sounds like nothing Pharoah Sanders ever wrote, inhabits similarly pretty terrain as Sand…

“He was nomadic. The strongest and most lasting thing you can say about Alan is that he was an original, as original as you can get. He didn’t want any academic guidelines to equip him to reinvent the wheel. If he saw something like that, he’d go the other way.” – Wayne Shorter

Temporary Super Offer! "This Revisited disc chronicles the trio in transition. Formed in autumn 1959, the group recorded its debut album in December. Following a coast-to-coast tour, it opened at Birdland in March 1960, when the first five tracks here were recorded on two separate dates. Already cooking, by the time of the April and May recordings the trio was touching on the interactive magic heard on ezz-thetics’ At The Village."  – Chis May

Temporary Super Offer! “Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order. I felt I learned from him in every way – through the senses, theoretically, technically. I would talk to Monk about musical problems and he would sit at the piano and show me the answers just by playing them.“ – John Coltrane

Reflecting both early experiences and recent developments with jazz’s avant-garde, these two albums are the most adventurous, and Let Freedom Ring quite possibly the most personal, music Jackie McLean ever recorded. – Art Lange

Temporary Super Offer! "Eric Dolphy’s legacy is well represented by these performances from The Five Spot and the sessions supervised by Alan Douglas. They confirm him to be an artist who  straddled the divide then so deep in jazz, drawing sustenance from the music’s past  as he cleared a path to its future. Dolphy’s was a sensibility that could celebrate  Fats Waller and honor Jomo Kenyatta, its inclusiveness rare in the polarized early 1960s. Fortunately, his example has not simply endured, bu…

Temporary Super Offer! "One Step Beyond is rightly seen as a pivot point in Jackie McLean’s evolution, but its adventurousness was not without precedent. As A.B. Spellman noted in Four Lives in the Bebop Business, “Quadrangle” – the opening track for 1959’s Jackie’s Bag; it was first recorded as “Inding” for Lights Out!, a 1956 Prestige date – “involved an elaborate group construction that [McLean] was afraid was too far-out,” so he used “I Got Rhythm” changes to mainstream it, which he later re…

'Mention of Motian and LaFaro brings us to this disc, perhaps belatedly. But other  than observing that the music is presented here following immaculate and unprecedented  sound restoration, what more needs to be said about it? What more, usefully, can be said? The performances are as close to perfection as makes no difference, and as close to  immortality, too, and if you are still reading thesenotes, you will not need to be told why.' – Chris May Executive producer’s notes: 'Once you start to …

Temporary Super Offer! "Mingus the visionary composer. Mingus the virtuoso bassist. Mingus the volcanic bandleader. As the 1960s began, with the new decade bringing a radically expansive new view of the possibilities of jazz expression, Charles Mingus, by virtue of his brilliantly nonconformist creative imagination, willingness to take risks along experimental paths, and (because of, or in spite of) an oft-times confrontational rebellious nature, had established himself among those in the forefr…

While his recordings with Archie Shepp and 7-Tette established Bill Dixon as a distinctive jazz modernist, ahead of the curve, creating a niche within a crowded field of emerging artists, it is Intents and Purposes (Orchestra) that established his singularity. Together, they constitute the first chapter of a recorded legacy that continues to grow in status and influence.  – Bill Shoemaker

Temporary Super Offer! When Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie went into the recording studio together on 28 February 1945, they had already served a shared apprenticeship in the big bands of Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine, had jammed informally exploring their common interest in adventurous extensions of swing harmonies and reconfigured rhythms, and were, individually and collaboratively, prepared to redirect the course of modern jazz. That session shouldn’t in any way be considered the public “…

Temporary Super Offer!  "This one was working. This one always had been working. This one was always having something that was coming out of this one that was a solid thing, a charming thing, a lovely thing, a perplexing thing, a disconcerting thing, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, an interesting thing, a disturbing thing, a repellant thing, a very pretty thing. This one was one whom some were follow-ing. This one was the one who was working.” Gertrude Stein’s 1910–11 descrip…

“The word ‘jazz,’ to me, only means I dare you.” - Wayne Shorter

Temporary Super Offer! Summertime from the LP My Name Is Albert Ayler made me discover Albert Ayler. His unique interpretation of Summertime motivated me to go to Lörrach crossing the border from Switzerland to Germany to listen to the concert of the Albert Ayler Quintet in Lörrach on November 7, 1966. This experience has indoctrinated me forever for the music of Albert Ayler. In 1975 I created the label Hat Hut Records and in 1978 I had the chance, thanks to the support of Joachim Ernst Berendt…

Temporary Super Offer! Four For Trane became one of the classic, iconic albums of the post-bop era. The explanation is three-fold. First, the material. Rather than follow Coltrane’s lead into the most extreme of his free-blowing anthems, Shepp selected three songs from the Giant Steps album, and one from Coltrane Plays The Blues (although “Cousin Mary,” from the former release, is also a twelve-bar blues). This is significant because it illuminates the two sides of Archie Shepp’s conceptual persp…

Temporary Super Offer! "If we just could have hung on for another year,” Rudd said of both NYAQ and the Jazz Composers Guild, “things could have turned out much differently. Things were about to flip, in a good way. A lot of government programs were starting up that we could have gotten  grants from. There was a change in perception about the music that was happening. People were starting to consider it as art. The music was moving out of the bars and coffee houses  and into museums and concert …

Temporary Super Offer! "The title Ornette at 12 is something of a misnomer. Although Ornette is Denardo’s middle name, why wasn’t the album called Denardo at 12, his age at the time of the concert? Is there a hidden meaning related to Ornette’s own childhood? According to John Litweiler’s book A Harmolodic Life, he was either 13 or 14 when he received his first horn. If the year 1956 is meant to represent a significant event in Ornette’s musical life, it does mark his meeting with Don Cherry and B…

Temporary Super Offer! Johnny Griffin came to Thelonius Monk with a reputation as a speed demon – double-timing the tempo was his default mechanism, elaborating melodies with a mixture of mellow swing and complex bop phrasing. Their contrasting nature – Griffin’s fluid extravagance and Monk’s percussive dissections – intensified by Roy Haynes’ forceful divisions of the beat, generate a tension unlike any of Monk’s subsequent groups' – Art Lange

Temporary Super Offer! "Rare performances and concerts. The Sound of the Munich Filmprodction and the concert of Helsinki are first releases. The Rotterdam concert was available in the Holy Ghost bootleg box." – Werner X. Uehlinger. "Albert Ayler’s late 1966 tour of northern Europe was, happily, well documented in one way or another, though not always with the best sound quality, something this reissue series is attempting to address (and doing very well). The recording at hand includes 3 tracks…

Temporary Super Offer! Allow me to expand on a much restated quote from Albert Ayler: "Coltrane was The Father, Pharoah was The Son, and I was...The Holy Ghost.” If we remain with the Christian iconography, that makes Archie Shepp, Simon Peter, or the Apostle Peter whom Jesus called the rock upon which he built his church. Christened by his tenure in the early 1960s with Cecil Taylor, Shepp was baptized into what we now call a modernist approach. In meeting Coltrane, a man always searching for a…

"In the spring of 1949, the music was ready to undergo a transformation. Both Miles Davis and Tadd Dameron were experimenting with their larger groups, but they were also presented with the opportunity to travel to Paris, to present a programme of new music at an international jazz festival there." - Brian Morton

Temporary Super Offer! In his comprehensive 1966 Jazz Monthly article, “Eric Dolphy,” Jack Cooke reported that the advance buzz aboutduet passages for bass clarinet and bass, “Something Sweet, Something Tender” approximated the hinge-like ballads that were a perennial feature on Blue Note A sides. Given its dedicatee – the flutist renowned for recording works like Varèse’s “Density 21.5,” which Dolphy performed at the Ojai Festival in 1962 – “Gazzelloni” is surprisingly boppish, ending the side w…

Temporary Super Offer! By 1965, Paul Bley had settled on the trio format, and touring Europe revealed a warmer reception for music that employed chordless improvisations, three-way rhythmic counterpoint, unfamiliar melodic constructs, and malleable song form. But there was an equally momentous conceptual change in the group’s material, as the adventurous pieces by Carla Bley were gradually being replaced by those of Paul’s new partner, Annette Peacock. - Art Lange