★ezz-thetics
The Way Ahead - Kwanza - The Magic of Ju-Ju, revisited
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…
2nd Session 1956 Revisited
Here is a chance to hear Miles Davis in something close to real time. Small matter that most collectors of hard bop will have these sides already and will be familiar with a particular running order. Perhaps those who have invested in the complete sessions will have a clearer sense of the continuity of these remarkable sessions, but that now familiar obsession with the burrs and snarf of the studio process may win out over musical appreciation. What happened at Van Gelder’s on October 26 1956 is…
Play Annette Peacock, Revisited
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
Celebrating 75 Years Of His First Recordings
Temporary Super Offer! Thelonious Monk devised a new theoretical basis for his compositional aesthetic, an unorthodox, deconstructed and reinvented pianistic approach that defined his music’s unique rhythmic and melodic parameters. The piano was the vehicle of expression for his compositional mindset. - Art Lange
Point Of Departure to Compulsion!!!!! revisited
Point of Departure was an inflection point in Hill’s output for Blue Note, his penchant for formal complexity and compacted materials – which he revisited beginning in 1969 with a nonet date, tracks with a string quartet-augmented ensemble, and an album with voices – giving way to what proved to be a short-lived foray into the minimally scored pieces that distinguished Compulsion!!!!!. The two recording sessions were separated by only eighteen months, but they were among the most convulsive in j…
The Mess Is Here 1958, Revisited
Recorded live 1958 in Stuttgaert. First time on CD. Performed by: Eddie Williams, Art Hoyle, Eddie Mullens, Dave Gonzales, Macky Kasper trumpets; Louis Blackburn, Wade Marcus, Larry Wilson, trombones; Leon Zachary, Bobby Plater, alto saxophones; Andy McGhee, Gerald Weinkopf, tenor saxophones; Lonnie Shaw, Werner Baumgart, baritone saxophones; Lionel Hampton, vibraphone & piano; Oscar Dennard, piano; Billy Mackel, guitar; Julius Browne, fender bass; Wilbert Hogan drums; Cornelius "Pinocchio" Jame…
Live New York, Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! Recorded 1964, 1965 & 1966 live New York. 7 Tracks, 2 tracks never on CD available. "This fabulous album, recorded during three New York club engagements in 1964, 1965 and 1966, ranks among the finest in the pianist/composer's illustrious catalogue. There are several things going for it: the quality and shared intentionality of the two, slightly different, lineups; the choice of material and its careful sequencing; the vibrancy of the performances, which is enough to pract…
Fire Music To Mama Too Tight, Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! 'Jost may have had Fire Music and Mama Too Tight in mind when he suggested that by 1965 Archie Shepp spoke “basically two musical languages whose grammar and syntax had hardly anything in common.” This reflected the commentaries’s insistence that a chasm existed between free jazz and mainstream jazz practices, and, implicitly, between the New Wave in Jazz and the New Breed led by James Brown. What was revolutionary about Shepp’s music is that it rejected the underlying bin…
Live Europe 1960 revisited
Temporary Super Offer! 'The Miles Davis Quintet of early 1960 was an endangered, embattled entity. Davis and his frontline foil John Coltrane had been drifting apart stylistically and temperamentally for months. United in the embrace and exploration of modal devices on the trumpeter’s seminal Kind of Blue album released the previous summer, bandleader and sideman were increasingly at odds as to where to go next with the celebrated innovations.' - Derek Taylor
Unison Polyphony
Temporary Super Offer! Christoph Gallio and Markus Eichenberger, both born in 1957, have known each other since the early eighties and have played together a lot during this time, listening to music, visiting bars and occasionally taking a dip in the Rhine. At some point, their paths got lost until they crossed again in 2018 to regularly sound out their musical languages and create something new. Their performance at the "40 Years of WIM Zurich" festival remained unforgotten for many.
Eichenber…
With(Exit) To Student Studies, Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! 'Cecil Taylor’s whole career was a wave-front of exploration. The analogy with light is apposite enough. He evolved so fast most of us never quite caught up and relied instead on a few safe generalisations that momentarily applied around 1962 and only occasionally thereafter. Taylor rarely referenced the space programme, and admitted towards the end of his life that he had found the moon landings “banal”. Like Sun Ra, he was a cosmonaut of sound, breaking free of gravity a…
At Slugs’ Saloon 1966, Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! 'Among the jazz innovators, Albert Ayler is still considered a solitary figure to this day. From 1964 on he pursued his vision with firm determination. Like no other artist he used well-known melodies from military, marching, blues, gospel and minstrel show music as a starting point, and from these biographical earworm references he set out with the greatest expressiveness into an unconditionality that caused productive disturbance, which his music still does. On the one h…
Ezz-thetics & The Stratus Seekers Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! On Ezz-thetics: Eric Dolphy alto saxophone, bass clarinet, Don Ellis trumpet, David Baker trombone, George Russell piano, Steve Swallow double bass & Joe Hunt drums. On The Stratus Seekers: Paul Plummer tenor saxophone , John Peirce alto saxophone, Don Ellis trumpet, David Baker trombone, George Russell piano, Steve Swallow double bass & Joe Hunt drums. The six albums that George Russell recorded in just two years – starting with Sextet at the Five Spot in September 1960 …
Favorites Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! 'The studio side of Coltrane’s catalog has greater consistency in terms of caliber of aural presentation, but fewer occasions for extended improvisation and creation. This is particularly evident in an analysis of the recordings made of his Classic Quartet comprising pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones. An ensemble that was a work in progress well before it was a finished cohort, Coltrane’s most fertile band was also best suited to the hot h…
Make That Flight
Temporary Super Offer! 'Even a cursory revisiting of Houle and von Orelli’s previous recordings confirms that the stark forum afforded by a horn duo strips their music to its essentials, their shared ability to make unorthodox forms and materials sing and dance being the most salient. Fresh, distanced, and potentially transformative perspectives abound on this album, and not just about the music of any other artist; but, more importantly, the tug and pull between the continuity represented by tr…
Miles Davis Quintets Stockholm Live 1967 & 1969 Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! 'Was there more than one Miles Davis? Could he be both the Prince of Darkness and the purveyor of cool? A drug addict and an athletic boxer? A hip bebopper and a protohippie? A flamboyant dresser and a shy vulnerable soul? A brutal misogynist and an insecure romantic? The answer is yes, and yes. Miles Davis was both a creator and a destroyer. His chameleon-like nature can be explained by the times in which he lived and created his art. These live recordings in Stockholm, S…
Where Is Brooklyn? & Eternal Rhythm
Temporary Super Offer! These sessions were recorded exactly two years apart, in early November 1966 and 1968 (both were released in 1969). While they can’t be called “bookends” by any means, they do bracket a remarkable period in Don Cherry’s musical evolution, on his journey from the more strictly jazz environments, as adventurous as they were, of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and others, to a philosophy that embraced many non-Western traditions. While these included various African forms, espe…
Hieroglyphs
Temporary Super Offer! "‘Hieroglyph’ is a word that history has gradually prised away from its linguistic roots as the Greek term for sacred carvings. Over time it came to be associated principally with the enigmatic symbols found in Egyptian burial sites and because these symbols resisted translation for so many centuries the word hieroglyph became a synonym for incomprehensibility. It was the discovery of an artefact – the socalled ‚Rosetta Stone‘, containing both hieroglyphs and parallel text…
Song Of Praise, Live New York 1965
Temporary Super Offer! "These Half Note recordings from March 26 and May 7, 1965, two dates from an extended stay at the club, were captured as a radio broadcast. ezz-thetics has re-sequenced the music here to demonstrate Coltrane’s approach to incorporating all his inventions into a performance, while also mapping a future to his music." – Mark Corroto
Producers note: "We have re-sequenced these tracks to allow the listener to become part of the development of the music and to follow J…
Nothing Is...
Temporary Super Offer! "Attempts to dismiss Sun Ra as an “outsider” artist, an eccentric who made strange claims, are always own goals. Of course he was an outsider. That was precisely his point. And not just an outsider. He came from so far away we could not imagine it. But he also came from right inside American culture and was deeply shaped by it. There is perhaps no more representative an American artist of the modern period. If the Saturn V rocket was the symbol one kind of hegemony, govern…