★ezz-thetics
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus To Pre Bird „Revisited“
"Heard together, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and Pre Bird suggest the enormity of
Charles Mingus’ artistic vision. No one album encompasses it in its entirety, and perhaps not even
two or three. However, these recordings, made six months apart in 1960, vividly summarized his
work to date, as he headed towards to jazz’s pantheon." – Bill Shoemaker
Live At Cafe Oto London
"I've been listening to Christoph Gallio and the various incarnations of Day & Taxi for over three decades – almost since its inception. On this album, however, the Swiss saxophonist makes a debut with a different trio, featuring British improvisers Dominic Lash and Mark Sanders. The result is pungent, powerful music on the cusp of free jazz and free improv – a dichotomy that helps define Gallio's work, though he also composes. Listening to this wonderful album invites re-consideration of the rh…
Satoko Inoue Presents Jo Kondo's New Works For Piano 2015-2020
Temporary Super Offer! "This CD, the third album of my piano works played by Satoko Inoue, presents all the pieces written for piano between 2015 and 2020, along with an introductory miniature piece." – Jo Kondo
The Legendary Trio At Birdland 1960 „Revisited"
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
Dialog
"Dialog: Two Rooms One Vibraphone 1 to 6 & Five Interludes differs, however, from the classical Greek idea of dialectics, that of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, in one respect. There is thesis, from Armaroli, and antithesis, from Parker, but it is a third party, the listener, who provides the synthesis. And there will be as many syntheses, and as much diversity among them, as there are those of us tuning in." -Chris May
Mephistopheles To Orgasm (Revisited)
“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
Let Freedom Ring To Destination...Out! (Revisited)
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
Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane 1957 (Revisited)
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
Eric Dolphy At The Five Spot To Iron Man (Revisited)
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…
Extended II - For Strings & Piano
Temporary Super Offer! "Extended II seems to me to illustrate the same point as its predecessor. These are men at work. The work is sound, as projected in three dimensions and across time. The composition is the realization of that process of work. Old philosophers used to refer to reality – the solid bricks-and-mortar and fellow-beings that surrounded us – as “the extended world” or as “extensions”, and that applies to the music you are holding. It extends because it exists in space and time, a…
More Lost Performances (Revisited)
"The almost five year span bookended in this particular Ayler revisitation marks, in a certain sense,
the beginning and end points of the most lasting and creative portion of his remarkable, though
sadly brief, career." – Brian Olewnick
Bill Evans Duos With Jim Hall & Trios ‘64 & ‘65 (Revisited)
"The emerging credo of western society’s post-Beat counterculture was egalitarian and
anti-hierarchical, be the hierarchy social, political or on the bandstand. Evans and Ayler shared
the belief; only their lexicons were different. If hearing Spiritual Unity was akin, as Ted Joans
wrote, to someone shouting “Fuck!” in St. Patrick’s" – Chris May
At The Golden Circle Stockholm (Revisited)
Temporary Super Offer! "For the followers of Ornette Coleman’s music, 1963 and 1964 were the lost years. His final session for Atlantic Records, Ornette on Tenor, was in March 1961, and though he played sporadic club dates in ’62, his self-produced Town Hall concert in December was to be his last significant appearance until he accepted a Village Vanguard gig in January 1965. The reasons for this hiatus, apparently, were personal, economic, philosophical, pragmatic, and artistic, all at the same…
One Step Beyond To New And Old Gospel (Revisited)
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…
At Antibes 1960, Revisited
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…
FFlair III
"Basically, we witness an intimate dialogue between two improvisers. If there had not been a special circumstance leading to this result. Christine Abdelnour and Hans Koch could not hear each other. In fact, "FFlair" is based on two separately recorded solo improvisations, which were superimposed at the end. Mind you, without any subsequent editing." - Rudolf Amstutz
Braids
"Here, then, are three men who have, if you will, won the argument already. They don’t need excess volume or headline soloing to get their message across. Their message is inscribed in elegant lower-case and rarely used aural fonts. You will find yourself leaning forward because not a note or whisper should be missed ..." - Brian Morton
Meta Zero
Temporary Super Offer! The music on this CD is an impressive document of such a search for meaning and artistic legitimacy. It doesn’t want to add something even louder to the supposedly spectacular. On the contrary: Here, it is about the subtle intimacy and emotionality of human relationships, about breathing as one. It is about being interested in each other beyond ever new superlatives. This is where the unobtrusive authenticity of this music comes from, what makes it special and thoughtful. …
At The Village Vanguard 1961, Revisited
'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 …
John Cage Variations + Four6
Temporary Super Offer! "I ask how CALATO's use of graphic scores help them break down the divisions between contemporary composition and improvisation? “We started as a noise improvisation band,” they respond. “We spent several years playing together without any kind of parts or scores, just working deeply on listening to each other, reacting and generating a kind of togetherness that made it possible to create live music in a very fast and intuitive way.” Then they started investigating diffe…