Jazz /
Jazz Harpist
*Back in print by popular demand! In process of stocking* This is Dorothy Ashby's debut album, originally released in 1957 by the Regent label. Recognized as the woman who gave the harp a Jazz Voice, here Ashby is at the head of a highly distinctive combo featuring Frank Wess on flute, Eddie Jones or Wendell Marshall on bass and master Ed Thigpen on drums. The Jazz Harpist is an unprecedented mix of evocative classic sounds and jazz soul, awarded by Allmusic as her first and best album, period!
The Loneliest Flower in the Village
For the past 20 years Nostalgia 77 has become a catch all for the musical life of Benedic Lamdin. His schizophrenic offerings range from songwriting sessions, soundtracks, excursions into Soul and in this case Jazz. The Loneliest Flower in the Village is an album that sees Lamdin reunited with longtime collaborator and arranger Riaan Vosloo and experienced veterans from a host of Nostalgia 77 projects. 'It had been a long time since we'd gigged or recorded so the idea was as much a little reunio…
Thelonious Monk Quartet: Live Five Spot 1958, Revisited
'Johnny Griffin came to 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 – intensi- fied by Roy Haynes’ forceful divisions of the beat, generate a tension unlike any of Monk’s subsequent groups' – Art Lange
STRG + X
Temporary Super Offer! 'The CD’s title is borrowed from computer language: STRG + X is the key combination for “cut to the clipboard” to be temporarily stored and pasted somewhere else at a later time. Perhaps the most important quality of this carefully thought-out yet anything but cerebral music: it is aware of its means and can twist and turn and rearrange them as it pleases, in which case improvised contexts create their own forms and play with original material in a fresh, new way. This is …
Supergolden
** Ltd. 100 copies ** "Supergolden" is the name of Petter Asbjørnsen’s debut album featuring Kjetil Møster on saxophone and bass clarinet, and Øyvind Skarbø on drums. Møster and Skarbø are prominent figures in the Norwegian jazz community, known from ensembles such as Zanussi 5, 1982, Skarbø Skulekorps, Møster! and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. Stints living in Bergen, Copenhagen, Berlin and New York informed Asbjørnsen’s work as a composer and performer in projects with Molecules and Erlend Sko…
Nation Time
2022 Repress. "Joe McPhee's solo album, Tenor literally changed my life. The recording (one of his first for Hat Hut, in September 1976) displayed his unique ability to integrate unconventional sounds and extended techniques with pure melodicism, and it permanently altered my perspective on what the saxophone could do and what music could be. Nation Time was recorded six years earlier, but ideas regarding the integration of means and methods were already at the forefront of McPhee's approach to …
Monolog
Renowned Swedish musician Tomas Hallonsten’s debut solo recording started out as a Mark Hollis-influenced project featuring Hallonsten’s instrumental compositions sparsly performed with acoustic guitar,piano, bass and drums at its core. Gradually the music morphed and
eventually it turned out as a solo album where the compositions came to life mainly via Hallonsten’s unique treatment of drum machine and synths.
One For The Soul
By the time poet, singer-songwriter, and artist Lizzy Mercier Descloux recorded 1984’s Zulu Rock, she’d marked herself out as both a globe trotter with more passport stamps than Tintin and a musical innovator whose loose, arty spirit could be applied to styles as varied as no wave, Bavarian oompa and Soweto jive. She’d also established a tight-knit threesome with muse/former lover Michel Esteban and producer/on-off lover Adam Kidron, who all reunited to follow Zulu Rock – a surprise hit in her n…
(Music From The Film) Lucky Man
'When he performed in Germany, they called him the "black devil violinist," his frenetic playing wrapped in a gyrating, trance-like state. For Billy Bang, who believed he had schizophrenia, the epithet bore a resemblance to his inner turmoil. He was born William Walker in Mobile, Alabama but grew up in the South Bronx. He studied violin and classical music, and his talent earned him a hardship scholarship to the Stockbridge School in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Bang felt out of place in the pred…
Umakhulu
Born in 1981 in Mdantsane in the Eastern Cape, Ayanda Sikade is one of South African jazz’s most in-demand and respected drummers, a familiar face on the scene for years and a driving force behind its growing prominence on the world stage.
Dedicated to his grandmother who raised him, Sikade’s long-awaited sophomore album as a bandleader, Umakhulu, follows his 2018 debut Movements. Recorded in Johannesburg in early 2021, it features the talents of frequent collaborator Nduduzo Makhathini on piano…
Seven Wisdoms of Plutonia
*300 copies limited edition* Alpacas Collective takes you on a trip from Lagos to Addis Ababa, from Augusta, Georgia to New Orleans, and from Delhi to sci-fi worlds, bringing it all back home in a unique set of original songs featured on its debut album Seven Wisdoms of Plutonia. During the covid 19 pandemic, when everyone was in lockdown the group retreated underground for a quest to soul saving creativeness, to come out again as Alpacas Collective with a first release. 'Seven Wisdoms of Pluton…
Never Never Land
'The British trumpeter and composer Henry Lowther, who first made an impact in the 1960s and released the well received album Can't Believe, Won't Believe (Village Life) in 2018, came to jazz via a circuitous route. After playing cornet in a provincial Salvation Army band, he moved to London around 1960 to study violin at the Royal Academy of Music. While a student, he encountered improvised Indian music and albums by Sonny Rollins, discoveries which encouraged him to commit to jazz, playing tru…
Kraków 2018
Not Two Records proudly present a 5 CD boxset by different constellations led by Barry Guy; recorded in Krakow in 2018 .
Kraków 2020
Fifty years and counting. One of the most important larger bands in European jazz, The London Jazz Composers Orchestra celebrated its golden anniversary over three days in Krakow which culminated in a triumphant performance of "Harmos." Long a staple of the LJCO repertoire, with its beautiful melody, it's one of leader Barry Guy's most approachable works. This rendition was powerful and moving, studded throughout with absolute dynamite individual contributions, and furnished a fitting conclusion…
BeingFive
"A project called ‘BeingFive’ might be motivated by a search to know the nature of being and, by extension, what it means to be together. In this way Montreal clarinettist Lori Freedman set up at once an atelier and a laboratory where both a group music could be made of practically nothing and a social organism could uncover both its organising principles and, perhaps, their limits. Here are exceptionally gifted improvising musicians –– hand-picked by Freedman for a Berlin residency project, a "…
Live (Cookin' with Blue Note at Montreaux)
*Blue vinyl limited edition* In 1973 the Blue Note Records label landed at the Montreux Jazz Festival, showcasing some of the showcasing some of the top artists of those years under the banner of the soulful and muscular jazz of which the blue label was then the standard-bearer. Muscular jazz of which the blue label was then the standard-bearer. This resulted in several albums entitled Live: Cookin' with Blue Note at Montreux (by Bobby Hutcherson, Ronnie Foster, Bobbi Humphrey, Marlena Shaw), bu…
Sleepy
*2022 stock* "Hidehiko Matsumoto Quartet – Sleepy released by Three Blind Mice. Album recorded in 1976 and it was DSD mastering from the original analogue master tapes. This record, made in 1976 in a one-horn quartet setting, showcases Matsumoto’s brilliant playing on both tenor saxophone and flute. He is a true master of both instruments and it is a great pleasure to hear him beautifully recorded by the people of Three Blind Mice. A masterpiece, with great sound." - Audiophile Music
Summertime
*2022 stock* "This is a live recording of "5 Days in Jazz 1976". The album features the seventh release of TBM's "5 Days in Jazz 1976," which concentrates the charm of Tsuyoshi Yamamoto, including his signature tune "Misty," "Summertime," featuring Oyui, and "Cookin' the Blues", which shows off his signature blues feeling to the fullest." - Koki Hanawa
Black Orpheus
*2022 stock* "A beautifully spare session from the mid 70s – one that features bass and cello from Isao Suzuki – stretching out here in a sound that's totally unique! The trio's a great one – with Donald Bailey on drums and Tsuyoshi Yamamoto on both acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes – the latter of which sounds amazing next to Suzuki mellow-stepping lines. If you've heard any of Suzuki's other albums from the period, the style is somewhat similar – quite soulful throughout, but with an easygoing,…
Cool Jojo +4
*2022 stock* Masayuki Takayanagi, who has a free jazz pioneer, gives his answer to the turbulent 1970s. His homage to Tristano-Konitz, a return to his roots, is a ritual to reach new heights for a new era." - Koki Hanawa