Piano
All records with piano · Solo piano only
L'Ou'L
André Duchesne's large ensemble live at the 1989 Victoriaville festival: three electric guitars, saxophones, cello, piano and drums, with Yannick Rieu and Claude Lamothe, in composed Montreal musique actuelle.
Labyrinths
Marilyn Crispell alone at the piano, live at the Victoriaville festival on 2 October 1987: dense, Taylor-inspired clusters and open lyrical passages, with a Coltrane piece. The CD reissue of the 1988 LP adds Threads in the Ozone.
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.
Nous Autres
Fred Frith and René Lussier's duo, recorded at the 1986 Victoriaville festival and finished at Studio Victor: guitars, bass, violin, voices and tape in short, playful pieces. The CD adds four tracks recorded in New York in 1992.
Reference: Miles Davis’ 2nd Quintet Live 1967 in Europe
The Second Quintet with Shorter, Hancock, Carter and Williams on its autumn 1967 European tour: Antwerp, Copenhagen, Paris and Karlsruhe on three CDs, restored by Michael Brändli, with an essay by Art Lange.
Once Upon a Time
Alan Skidmore's 1970 Deram Nova album with Kenny Wheeler, John Taylor, Harry Miller and Tony Oxley, fresh from their Montreux triumph: a jazz waltz, long suites and free passages, back on vinyl from the stereo masters.
High Spirits
Joe Harriott's 1964 quintet with Shake Keane, Pat Smythe, Coleridge Goode and Bobby Orr turns songs from the Broadway musical High Spirits into lyrical, swinging jazz, now on vinyl in stereo for the first time.
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.
Feldman Edition 15: Morton Feldman Plays Feldman
Morton Feldman plays piano in a 1978 Deutschlandfunk concert recorded in Cologne, with flutist Eberhard Blum and percussionist Jan Williams: Why Patterns?, Extensions 3, Intermission 5 and The King of Denmark.
Compressed Happiness
Compressed Happiness pairs Eiko Ishibashi with the Japanese noise project K2 across two pieces, Cold Pastoral and Sweet Paranoia's Heaven Version 3. Limited edition CD on Phage Tapes, 2014.
Destiada (Banda Sonora Original)
The 1984 soundtrack for dance-theater performance Destiada marked Pep Llopis’ debut score for avant-garde Valencian company Ananda Dansa, and initiated a creative partnership that would continue throughout the ensuing decades.The dance is structured as a lyrical fable about the struggle between life and death as seen through the crimson-tinted lens of the Spanish bullfighting tradition. Llopis and Vicent Alonso, a fellow Spanish composer, instrumentalist, and longtime collaborator, were inspired…
Ascending the Depths
Ithaca trio of Sarah Hennies, Willie B. and Keir Neuringer, three percussionists reaching into vibraphone, saxophone and piano. Eight studio improvisations, playful and energetic, held against a meditative core.
Renascent
The twenty-eighth Durutti Column album and the first in sixteen years, produced by Keir Stewart: Vini Reilly's guitar among warm ambient washes, piano and quiet beats, with guest vocals from Caoilfhionn Rose. Deluxe gatefold on transparent bottle green vinyl.
Le Api dell’Invisibile
Four decades after Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo, Francesco Messina returns to his hundred-year-old Schimmel piano for seven pieces of hazy drone and ambient minimalism, written with no deadlines after playing that 1979 album live in Milan.
The Calling
Hamiet Bluiett's baritone, D.D. Jackson's piano and organ, Kahil El'Zabar's drums, kalimba and voice. Recorded live in the studio in Montreal in October 2000 with no overdubs, The Calling runs on call-and-response, church organ and blues, with Bluiett switching to wooden flute and contra-alto clarinet.
Speaking In Tongues
One day in a Paris studio, December 1997. David Murray goes back to the gospel church of his Berkeley childhood with Fontella Bass, the voice of Rescue Me and the Art Ensemble's Theme de Yoyo, over Hammond B3, electric bass and guitar. Amazing Grace, How I Got Over, and Murray's own twelve-minute Missionary.
Know Time
Paul Bley and trumpeter Herbie Spanier played free duets in Los Angeles in 1958, around the time Ornette Coleman passed through Bley's band. That music was never documented. In Montreal in August 1993 they tried again, with Geordie McDonald's rack of gongs, shakers and temple blocks. Thirteen short improvisations.
Solo
Paul Bley was born in Montreal in 1932 and left for New York at the start of the 1950s. He had already taken over Oscar Peterson's chair at the Alberta Lounge as a teenager. In December 1987 he came home, sat down at Studio Tempo, and recorded ten improvisations for a local label that was then four years old.
Solo was the first of the dozen or so records Bley made for Jim West's Justin Time over the next twenty years, a run that ended with About Time in 2008. It is also a digital recording from …
Plays Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus died in January 1979. Nineteen months later, on 18 August 1980, his drummer of more than twenty years took what was left of the last Mingus band into Fonoprint Studio in Bologna and recorded six tunes for the Dutch label Timeless.
Dannie Richmond had rarely led a date. Here he heads the quintet that had backed Mingus at the end: Ricky Ford on tenor, Jack Walrath on trumpet, Bob Neloms on piano, and Cameron Brown in the bass chair the leader had vacated. The record was co-produced …
I Didn't Know About You
Munich, Studio Meilhaus, 6 November 1990. Archie Shepp on tenor and alto, singing on three tracks, with Horace Parlan on piano, Wayne Dockery on bass and George Brown on drums. One day of work for the Dutch label Timeless, released the following year.
Shepp and Parlan had recorded the spirituals of Goin' Home and the blues of Trouble in Mind as a duo for SteepleChase in the late 1970s. This quartet session comes out of the same relationship, a decade on, and the material tells you where Shepp wa…