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Live At The Hungry Brain
2024 stock. Trumpeter Russ Johnson is a recent Midwest transplant after spending 23 years as an important member of New York City’s jazz community. He has seven recordings as a leader or co-leader and performed on more than 75 recordings as a sideman. Russ has worked alongside many of the legendary figures in jazz including Lee Konitz, Steve Swallow, Bill Frisell, and Joe Lovano. In addition, he has recorded and/or performed with a long list of the most prominent musicians currently on the inter…
Welcome To The Troposphere
2024 stock. Three years ago, the eminent pianist Elisabeth Harnik and the great trombone master Steve Swell released for the first time their joint album Tonotopic Organisation, which is highly regarded by both critics and fans of both musicians. Three years have passed and the duo is now launching the second instalment of their improvisatory explorations. Listen to how the musicians have changed over this time, and how their art has changed. We are happy to give you the Welcome To The Stratosph…
Travelogue
Legendary pianist Matthew Shipp, one of the greatest improvisers Joe Morris and fantastic drummer Jerome Deupree known from iconic band MORPHINE together!
Raging Bulgakov
Simon Nabatov has undertaken one of the most unusual projects in contemporary music, an intense scrutiny and setting to music of modernist Russian literature, much of it taken from the years of Stalinist censorship, repression and imprisonment. For 25 years, beginning with Josef Brodsky’s Nature Morte, he has set text in partially improvised settings, including excerpts from Isaac Babel’s grim Red Cavalry and poems by Daniil Kharms and the Gileya group. Along with that largely poetic enterprise,…
Six Hands Open As One
In 2019, a year before the onset of the pandemic and three years before the full-scale war in Ukraine broke out, we released Illuminated Silence. This was the first album of a new trio consisting of the young Japanese-born, Irish-based pianist and composer Izumi Kimura and the greats of the improvised music world Barry Guy and Gerry Hemingway. The album was very much liked by listeners and I heard from many of them the question whether there is a chance that this formation will survive, because …
The President
Kamil Piotrowicz - one of the brightest and most acclaimed for his creativity pianists on the artistic map of Poland, an artist associated with the new Scandinavian (Danish) improvised music scene accompanied by equally talented two musicians from Norway, trumpeter Erik Kimestad and drummer Simon Albertsen. The President is their first album recording. The material was created at DKDM studios in Copenhagen and mastered by another Polish artist highly regarded for his directorial efforts, Albert …
Truth Seeker
You all know Ivo Perelman, one of the world's most ardent and lyrical improvisers. The famous New Yorker in the company of artists he has never recorded with before, the legendary double bassist Mark Helias and the great leader and percussionist at the same time Tom Rainey.The album Truth Seeker is an item that shows Ivo Perelman's playing in a completely unprecedented context. Such fascinating recording sessions are worth waiting years for!
From The Source
2024 stock. This performance is a second coming together of a rather unusual but wonderful pair; Dame Evelyn Glennie, a household name in percussion, and Szilárd Mezei, a prolific free improviser, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. In 2018, these two artists came together in the Core-tet Project, one of Dame Evelyn’s significant forays into free improvisation. Since then, she also worked with TRIO HLK, but this live performance with Mezei and his quartet is a much different kind of performing…
Ballads & Blues
Patryk Zakrocki - one of the most important improvisers, composers, and sound artists in Poland, and last time also guitarist as well as bassist Maciej Garbowski and drummer Krzysztof Gradziuk, known as the pillars of the best piano trio RGG on the Polish scene, are musicians representing completely different musical worlds. Their first studio meeting is an intimate oneiric improvisation framed by the conventions of ballad and blues. An astonishing encounter bringing music that is not made every…
Wildlife
Legendary saxophonist and one of the most important musicians on the British improvised scene. Member of great bands led by Keith Tippet and Barry Guy including the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, Paul Dunmall on one hand. On the other hand double bass virtuoso, known in the past as a musical companion of legendary trombonist Paul Rutherford and a crucial on the European free improv scene band Mujician, Paul Rogers. On drums Mark Sanders, for sure a key person in the British and European free m…
Scratching Fork II
On a perfectly smooth surface of silence, three hurled stones create their patterns of waves. The lines intersect, unite, cancel out, or reinforce each other. Sometimes, they form together a harmonious pattern. At other times, they express the beauty of chaos and entropy. But they always remain in relation to each other - no movement goes unanswered. No energy escapes into nothingness. These three stones are Scratching Fork. Three musicians with different characters, histories, and registers. Ma…
A Vol D'Oiseau
"There are many illusive or ephemeral descriptions that are often part of how words seek to elucidate the listening experience. In the music we have on this recording from Florestan and the trio he has formed to venture his musical initiatives, words such as space, transparency, suspension, stasis, momentum, tension, multiplicity, flow, cohesion, dimension, release are some of the ingredients that come to mind to articulate the musical experience this recording offers. To me, Florestan’s musical…
Earth's Frequencies
Time to start the new year. Legendary trumpeter and jazz great, runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize, winner, Guggenheim Fellowship winner, NEA Jazz Masters recipient, Wadada Leo Smith and one of the greatest authorities on improvised music, educator, our friend, guitarist, and double bassist Joe Morris together! The album is a recording of a concert the two artists gave earlier this past year, on 12 February, during the famous ImprovisatioNOW concert series at Real Art Ways in Hartford, where audie…
Capt's Look
2024 stock. This performance is a second coming together of a rather unusual but wonderful pair; Dame Evelyn Glennie, a household name in percussion, and Szilárd Mezei, a prolific free improviser, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. In 2018, these two artists came together in the Core-tet Project, one of Dame Evelyn’s significant forays into free improvisation. Since then, she also worked with TRIO HLK, but this live performance with Mezei and his quartet is a much different kind of performing…
Remedy II
"Voted “Best of 2021” by the critics of “The New York City Jazz Record,” the reaction to Remedy’s debut on the FSR label was not only a welcome boost to our morale but also confirmed the musical strategies we have been developing as a band: three equal partners, sharing an artistic vision where structure, collective interplay and individual free expression are evenly matched. While the ingredients will and have to change with each new piece, an instantly identifiable ensemble sound holds it all …
What Else Is There
In late winter of 2021, four improvisers convened in a Chicago studio. This rare event united UK pianist Alexander Hawkins, midwestern bassist Tatsu Aoki, stalwart drummer Michael Zerang, and me, sleepless Oakland guitarist Karl Evangelista (who had arrived in O'Hare mere hours before downbeat). During breaks, the conversation turned to music and family, two threads that seemed to dominate the waking lives of the musicians involved. Pondering this notion, Aoki asked, "What else is there?". "What…
All This This Here
The title of this new work for the Blue Shroud Band comes from Samuel Beckett’s “what is the word“, his last poem and an elegiac meditation on language. Additionally to “what is the word”, I have also used one of Beckett’s late poems “Brief Dream” which refers to the theme of transiting life and the acceptance of ending - “go end there / one fine day” and Barra Ó Seaghdha’s (Irish writer and poet) evocative poem “Waiting”. Two 18th century Edo Haiku complete the texts featured in this piece that…
For The People Of The Open Heart
Three masters in their respective instrumental fields. Wybithy trombonist Steve Swell, one of Germany's most active percussionists Klaus Kugel and Mark Tokar, a Ukrainian double bassist who swapped his double bass for a rifle for the duration of the war with Russia. They are not a working band, but when they stand on stage together you get the feeling that they have been playing together forever and understand each other in half a word and create music of great power and momentum. All the music …
Kairos
Do you remember the first musical meeting between Japanese-born, Irish-based pianist Izumi Kimura and legendary drum master Gerry Hemingway? It was the album Illuminated Silence recorded with Barry Guy. Today it's the two of them, Kimura and Hemingway, in the second installment of their artistic collaboration. In front of you is the album Kairos, containing five signature compositions by the two artists, one track each of their own, and the traditional song Over The Tide. And for poetry lovers, …
Openness
Let's move to Montreal in 2006, when Francois Carrier's ensemble performed on the La Chapelle festival stage with an unusual and astonishing line-up.
The leader recalls that time: "In late 2005, I was putting together my annual series of concerts with both local and international artists and musicians. Two of these nights were dedicated to special guests. At the time, I had just heard of Tomasz Stanko from his beautiful album, Matka Joanna. Instantly, I knew I had to do something with him. I lis…