★ezz-thetics
Blase and Yasmina Revisited
The sessions Archie Shepp led for BYG over five days in August 1969 is a body of work that merits revisiting outside the context of the entire Actuel series and the well-trodden trope of the African American avant-garde in radical Paris. The resulting albums were not ad hoc firestorms: rather, they were considered statements mirroring the pan-stylistic of his Impulse! albums. Shepp's BYG are occasionally framed as somewhat anomalous items on his discography, but their subject is the same as that…
Mixed to Unit Structures Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! Cecil Taylor was quickly saddled with a reputation for being unswinging. He often danced before a recital to prove that you could indeed express the music physically. Indeed, almost the only way to appreciate this music is to dance to it, as I invariably do. It isn't a spectacle that needs to be shared with others, but in Taylor's absence can I invite you to find his remarkable essay and let it enter your head before you take the floor. Don't think about this music. Feel i…
Bebop Live
Temporary Super Offer! This release can be seen, informed by the 100th anniversary of Charlie Parker’s birth, as an occasion for not only celebration, but reexamination and rediscovery, based upon the special qualities these particular performances provide. Parker is the focal point, the vortex of energy and ingenuity. The effect of hearing him in this arena of spontaneity and inventiveness is like watching Edison at work in his laboratory. It is Parker at his most audacious and prophetic. - Art…
Prismo
Temporary Super Offer! The Quartet Prismo is the continuation of the collaboration of Sergio Armaroli and Fritz Hauser with an extended circle of musicians. Sergio has proposed his wife Francesca Gemmo, I proposed my esteemed colleague Martina Brodbeck. Around the two recorded versions of Structuring the silence, we recorded combinations of instruments put together by lot. Without time limit, without formal requirements, without rules. Pure improvisation. Together we selected the tracks to be i…
Tetratne
Temporary Super Offer! It is surely significant that both Lovens and Stoffner use all four limbs to control their instrument. Lower limbs used principally to play bass drum and hi-hat in the case of Lovens, volume control and effects pedal for Stoffner. Right and left limbs, right and left brain hemispheres It is not surprising that there is plenty going on in their music. “Whatever happened to the Art of the Individual?!” Han Bennink once asked rhetorically to a crowded backstage. Well here i…
Spirits Rejoice & Bells - Revisited
Together, ‘Spirits Rejoice’ and ‘Bell’s encapsulate a four month period where long-gestating ideas of Ayler’s were birthed, helping to usher in a conception of music unlike virtually anything else extant, paving the way for his own adventures of the next several years and, perhaps more importantly, providing an extremely fertile bed for a generation or two of musicians to come. – Brian Olewnick
Albert Ayler’s recording career was a short one, spanning only the years 1962 – 1970, yet he went thro…
European Recordings Autumn 1964 - Revisited
"Albert Ayler With Don Cherry European Recordings Autumn 1964 Revisited” in this context will inevitably make some people think of Revenant, the label that in 2004 issued a nine-CD box of Albert Ayler materials, almost all of them rare and unissued. The release prompted some revisionist thinking about Ayler, who has remained a controversial figure in modern jazz, hailed as a genius, dismissed as a hoax or a man in the grip of an autism, an avant-gardist who suddenly decided to be a populist inst…
She Knows...
Temporary Super Offer! The Thing started as a recording project in 2000, for the newly formed label Crazy Wisdom, run by Christian Falk, Conny Charles Lindström and me. I wanted to put together a trio, to record some Don Cherry pieces and since I had recently played with Paal in Stockholm and heard Ingebrigt playing live, I knew they were tight. So, things went where they went.
I invited the two young Norwegians to Stockholm for a recording date at Atlantic Studios. One day of recording for the …
The Unasked Answer
Temporary Super Offer! In 1908, Charles Ives wrote a work called “The Unanswered Question”. It was for the unusual instrumentation of offstage string ensemble, woodwind quartet and, most significant for our purposes here, solo trumpet. Though it was inspired, we think, by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “The Sphinx”, Ives provided his own explanatory text. The trumpet asks “The Perennial Question of Existence” seven times, to which the woodwinds provide only six increasingly disordered answers, while…
Triadic Memories
Perhaps more than any of Feldman other piano music Triadic Memories is about that reality, the acoustic space created bythe piano’s strings and soundboard, and in Judith Wegmann’s recording that space is withina magnificent Bösendorfer 280VC piano
The Birth of BeBop - Celebrating Bird at 100 vol 2
Temporary Super Offer! The incomparable life and extraordinary, trailblazing career of jazz titan and influential composer Charlie Parker will be honored throughout 2020 with a worldwide celebration commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth (August 29, 1920). Lovingly dubbed Bird 100 after the nickname of the preeminent alto saxophonist who was one of the fathers of bebop and progenitors of modern jazz, the centennial will include a host of major initiatives including exciting new music r…
The Birth of BeBop - Celebrating Bird at 100 vol 1
The incomparable life and extraordinary, trailblazing career of jazz titan and influential composer Charlie Parker will be honored throughout 2020 with a worldwide celebration commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth (August 29, 1920). Lovingly dubbed Bird 100 after the nickname of the preeminent alto saxophonist who was one of the fathers of bebop and progenitors of modern jazz, the centennial will include a host of major initiatives including exciting new music releases, a tribute tour…
My Favorite Things - Graz 1962
What these performances then, and those in Impression Graz 1962, reveal is a great artist in a period of continued exploration and uncertainties, committed to integrating the exactness of order and the abandon of ecstasy, and reconfirming his improvisational quest as a spiritual discipline. But there were profound changes still to come. - Art Longe
The four tracks on this release have been selected from the 1962 concert tape which Hat Hut Records has licensed from ORF Stelemark, Graz, Austria. I…
Breaking News - Studio Dan
Temporary Super Offer! Founded in 2005, Studio Dan is a flexible ensemble, operating on the borders between diverse subgenres of contemporary music: improvisation, new music, jazz, art-rock, and others. The ensemble tours internationally. Appearances include concerts at Wien Modern and Ostava Music Days, and venuse such as Kampnagel Hamburg, Kimmel Center Philadelphia, and the legendary Roulette in Brooklyn/NYC. Past guest soloist and collaborations with Studio Dan include also Vinko Globokar, E…
Extended for Strings and Piano
A live album at Kunstraum Walcheturm from Swiss double bassist Daniel Studer's quintet of strings and piano, with Harald Kimmig on violin, Frantz Loriot on viola, Alfred Zimmerlin on violoncello, and Philip Zoubek on piano, performing an inventive set of Studer compositions extending string improvisation to extremes through unorthodox structures and techniques.
Kimmig-Studer-Zimmerlin and George Lewis
The innovative string trio of Daniel Studer on double bass, Harald Kimmig on violin, and Alfred Zimmerlin on cello, develop focused environments of timbre, texture, dynamic and space, seemingly abstract yet incredibly concentrative and virtuosic interaction, here joined by Chicago trombonist and electronics artist George Lewis adding a 4th profound layer to their incredible conversation.
Works For Guitar & Percussion
Active since 2010, the German/Swiss duo of classical guitarist Christian Buck and improviser Christian Wolfarth occupies a space between music and sound art, as they perform two works each by Ed Haubensak and Tomas Korber, pieces that make use of time, microharmonies, multiphonics, unusual tuning systems, interference patterns, and other conceptual approaches to music.
Le Souffle Du Temps II - Reflexion
Through preparations, computers, contact microphones, gongs, feedback and other tools, Swiss pianist, composer & improviser Judith Wegmann's work transform the sound of the piano into an otherworldly instrument, set against more traditional acoustic pieces of a reflective nature, together creating a conceptual set of ten pieces in a uniquely flexible approach.
Works For Travelled Pianos
As part of her Colonial Piano Project, Australian pianist Gabriella Smart commissioned and performs "Kaps Freed" by Cat Hope, a contemplation of composer Percy Grainger's Free Music ideals, with Stuart James on electronics; and the alliterative "Two New Proposals for an Overland Telegraph Line ..." by Erkki Veltheim, inspired by the 1st piano to arrive in Alice Springs, AU.
Music For Piano
Six compositions for solo piano written by English composerb Christopher Fox between 1991 and 2015, performed by Netherlands pianist John Snijders at Abbey Road Studios in London, each work uniquely approached in both writing and performance, each a concept or style that brings something unique to Fox's music while still retaining his voice and character in composition.