Clarinet
All records with clarinet · Solo clarinet only
Confitures de Gagaku
Jean Derome's written music for a Montreal ensemble of flutes, clarinets and saxophones with bass, drums and percussion, recorded at Studio Victor in 1988. Composed jazz with a nod, in the title, to Japanese court music.
At Takutaku
Akira Sakata x Triple Edge live at Takutaku, Kyoto, February 2024: 65 minutes with Tsuboguchi, Hayakawa and Fujikake, plus Takayuki Kato on guitar and Hiroshi Funato on contrabass, built around the two-part Takutaku Suite.
Steppenwolf
Chicago, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1 March 1999. The World Saxophone Quartet plays a full concert and the tape stays in a drawer for three years. Justin Time released it in 2002 as Steppenwolf, and it turned out to be the last record John Purcell made with the group.
The WSQ mostly recorded in studios. A live album from this period is a different animal: the pieces stretch out, the four players introduce their own tunes at the microphone, and Oliver Lake reads a spoken narrative. Jim Santella at All …
Vintage Dolphy
Eric Dolphy live in 1962-63, in Gunther Schuller's Twentieth-Century Innovations series at Carnegie Hall and in Syracuse: his own quartet with Richard Davis and J.C. Moses, three Schuller third-stream pieces with strings and Jim Hall, and a Donna Lee jam with Phil Woods, Benny Golson and Don Ellis.
Total Space
Cologne, Cornet Studios, January 1975. Rolf Kühn on clarinet with a band that reads like a German jazz roll call: his brother Joachim Kühn on piano and electric piano, Philip Catherine on guitar, Gerd Dudek on tenor and soprano, Albert Mangelsdorff on trombone, Bo Stief on bass, and two drummers, Daniel Humair and Kasper Winding.
Kühn chose not to record in the MPS studio in the Black Forest and brought in the engineer Wolfgang Hirschmann instead. In his own account, quoted in MPS's reissue note…
The Day After
Rolf Kühn and Phil Woods had worked together in New York in the late 1950s, when Kühn was there with Benny Goodman and the Tommy Dorsey orchestra. The Day After, released by MPS in 1972, is their reunion: Woods on alto, Kühn on clarinet, Joachim Kühn on piano, Peter Warren on bass, Oliver Johnson (Steve Lacy's drummer for a decade) on drums, and Naná Vasconcelos on percussion and berimbau.
Five pieces, forty-one minutes. Ca. 1-9-5-2 looks back to the bop era but is played modally. The title trac…
Flight For Four
Los Angeles, 1969. The first record of the John Carter - Bobby Bradford Quartet, the West Coast free jazz band Ornette Coleman had brought together in 1965, with Tom Williamson on bass and Bruz Freeman on drums. Five Carter pieces for Bob Thiele's new Flying Dutchman, from Call to the Festival to Domino.
Hill Country Suite
Bobby Jones played tenor in the last Mingus bands of 1970-72, toured Europe and Japan with them, and then, with emphysema closing in, moved to Germany, where he died in 1980. Hill Country Suite is one of two records under his name, made at Trixi Studio in Munich on 30 August 1974 for Enja, in trio with George Mraz on bass and Freddie Waits on drums.
Six pieces, all his, and the titles say where he came from: Bringin' in the Sheep, Old Jack Daniels, Halleluja! Y'uns All Come to the Weddin' Dance,…
Transfiguration
1967. Joachim Kühn had left the GDR the year before and settled in Hamburg; Rolf Kühn, his elder brother, had come back from six years in New York (Benny Goodman, the Tommy Dorsey band) to run the NDR television orchestra. They had already played Newport together. Transfiguration, on SABA, is the Rolf + Joachim Kühn Quintet with Karl Berger as guest on vibraphone, made in the months before Joachim moved to Paris for good.
It sits between two records the brothers made the same year: Re-Union in B…
Live At The Donaueschingen Music Festival
Donaueschingen, October 1979. Karl Berger brought the orchestra of his Creative Music Studio from Woodstock to the German contemporary music festival, and Südwestfunk and MPS recorded it. The roster reads like the CMS guest book: Don Cherry on trumpet and bamboo flute, Lee Konitz on alto, Oliver Lake on alto, soprano and flute, George Lewis on trombone, Leroy Jenkins on violin, Trilok Gurtu on tabla and congas, Peter Apfelbaum on drums and baritone, Ingrid Sertso singing, Berger on vibes and pia…
Free Action
Wolfgang Dauner's 1967 SABA septet: Jean-Luc Ponty on violin, Gerd Dudek on tenor and clarinet, Eberhard Weber on cello, Jürgen Karg on bass, and two drummers, Mani Neumeier and Fred Braceful. Mingus-like themes that dissolve into free playing, Neumeier on tabla for the Spanish disguise. Out of print for forty years.
Djanger Bali
1967, SABA. Tony Scott, the clarinettist of Music for Zen Meditation, with Bubi Chen's Indonesian All Stars: Jack Lesmana on guitar, Marjono on saxophone, gamelan gongs under the rhythm section. Jazz standards and Indonesian songs, with Summertime and Djanger Bali. One of the first Jazz Meets records.
It's After The End Of The World
Donaueschingen, 17 October 1970, and Berlin, 7 November: Sun Ra's first German concerts, commissioned by Joachim-Ernst Berendt, with the Black Forest Myth written for the astrological moment and never played again. Berendt cut five hours of tape into forty minutes. Der Spiegel called it cosmic chaos.
Eternal Rhythm
CD eissue of Don Cherry's classic Eternal Rhythm Group, recorded at the Berlin Jazz Festival, 1968. An amazing line up of: Cherry (cornet, gender and saron [gamelan], flutes), Albert Mangelsdorff (trombone), Eje Thelin (trombone), Bernt Rosengren (tenor sax, oboe, clarinet, flute), Sonny Sharrock (guitar), Karl Berger (vibes, piano, gender), Joachim Kühn (piano, prepared piano), Arild Andersen (bass), & Jacques Thollot (drums, saron, gong, bells, voice). Two "side-long" pieces with gamelan under…
The Ice Moons
Five minimalist pieces by Al Margolis' If, Bwana, built from baritone saxophone, alto clarinet, hammered dulcimer, cello, violin and voice, modulated and looped into cosmic soundscapes and drones. Limited to 400 copies.
Dyads
Father and son duo: Michael Formanek on double bass and Peter Formanek on tenor saxophone and clarinet, recorded in December 2019 after their first tour together, with pieces by each of them and by both.
Fatrasies
François Houle, Kate Gentile and Alexander Hawkins live at Victoriaville on 21 May 2023: clarinets and electronics, drums and piano, in a set named after the medieval nonsense poem where sound leads meaning.
Revolutions
A long-form drone piece by David First built on the 16th to 32nd harmonics of G, performed by the twelve-member ensemble The Western Enisphere, with liner notes by Sarah Hennies.
The Weather Pieces
Three world premiere recordings by Carol Robinson that pair a live soloist (basset horn, double bass, electric guitar) with computer music, each inspired by weather: a winter thaw, a green sky over South Dakota and a hurricane.
Plasmatic Music, Vol. 1
Three works from Horatiu Radulescu's Sound Plasma period, played by Sam Dunscombe and Rebecca Lane: Capricorn's Nostalgic Crickets, Small Infinities' Togetherness and Opus 42, Inner Time / Outer Time. Volume 4 of Mode's Radulescu Edition.