New Arrivals / Last 2 weeks
Spirits Known and Unknown
New York, 21 and 22 October 1969. Leon Thomas's first album under his own name, made months after Karma, with Pharoah Sanders credited as Little Rock, Lonnie Liston Smith, James Spaulding, Cecil McBee, Richard Davis and Roy Haynes. A shorter Creator Has a Master Plan, Echoes, and the Malcolm X elegy Malcolm's Gone.
Moon Child
Paris, Studio Davout, 12 and 23 October 1989. Pharoah Sanders with William Henderson on piano, Stafford James on bass, Eddie Moore on drums and Cheikh Tidiane Fall on percussion. Produced by Wim Wigt for Timeless, released in 1990.
The Penguin Guide called it the straightest jazz album Sanders had made for years, and heard what he was after: a hypnotic groove that lets the horn float almost at will. Steve Loewy at AllMusic writes that the results may have disappointed some fans at the time, but …
Total Space
Cologne, Cornet Studios, January 1975. Rolf Kühn on clarinet with a band that reads like a German jazz roll call: his brother Joachim Kühn on piano and electric piano, Philip Catherine on guitar, Gerd Dudek on tenor and soprano, Albert Mangelsdorff on trombone, Bo Stief on bass, and two drummers, Daniel Humair and Kasper Winding.
Kühn chose not to record in the MPS studio in the Black Forest and brought in the engineer Wolfgang Hirschmann instead. In his own account, quoted in MPS's reissue note…
Katcharpari
Milan, January 1973. Enrico Rava's second record as a leader, with John Abercrombie on guitar, Bruce Johnson on bass and Chip White on drums, released by MPS/BASF. Rava has called it his breakthrough: the album that got Manfred Eicher's attention. Seven tracks, from Trial N. 5 to the Don Cherry tribute Cheerin' Cherry.
Sunshine Man
Two days in May 1971, produced by Bob Thiele for Flying Dutchman. Harold Alexander on flute and soprano over Neal Creque's electric piano, Richard Davis's bass, Pretty Purdie's drums and Richard Landrum's congas. Contains Mama Soul, the scat-flute track that got him into DJ sets decades later.
Eternal Rhythm
CD eissue of Don Cherry's classic Eternal Rhythm Group, recorded at the Berlin Jazz Festival, 1968. An amazing line up of: Cherry (cornet, gender and saron [gamelan], flutes), Albert Mangelsdorff (trombone), Eje Thelin (trombone), Bernt Rosengren (tenor sax, oboe, clarinet, flute), Sonny Sharrock (guitar), Karl Berger (vibes, piano, gender), Joachim Kühn (piano, prepared piano), Arild Andersen (bass), & Jacques Thollot (drums, saron, gong, bells, voice). Two "side-long" pieces with gamelan under…
Africa
Studio 44, Monster, Holland, 11 March 1987. One day. Pharoah Sanders with John Hicks on piano, Curtis Lundy on bass and Idris Muhammad on drums, a band he kept for years. Produced by Wim Wigt for Timeless.
The record is built around Coltrane. Loewy at AllMusic writes that most listeners will prefer the originals to Sanders's imitations, but calls Africa a joyous and worthy tribute. AllMusic's survey of the Timeless years is warmer: it hears the title track's highlife melody undercut by Hicks's p…
Live At The Donaueschingen Music Festival
Donaueschingen, 21 October 1967. Archie Shepp with Roswell Rudd and Grachan Moncur III on trombones, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Beaver Harris on drums. One piece, One for the Trane, forty-three minutes, three months after Coltrane's death, opening with a seven-minute Garrison solo and ending in The Shadow of Your Smile.
Djanger Bali
1967, SABA. Tony Scott, the clarinettist of Music for Zen Meditation, with Bubi Chen's Indonesian All Stars: Jack Lesmana on guitar, Marjono on saxophone, gamelan gongs under the rhythm section. Jazz standards and Indonesian songs, with Summertime and Djanger Bali. One of the first Jazz Meets records.
Globe Unity
December 1966, a month after the premiere at the Berlin Philharmonie: Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity, fourteen players, Brötzmann, Schoof, Hampel, Mangelsdorff, Dudek, Breuker, Kowald, Niebergall, Liebezeit, Neumeier. Two pieces, Globe Unity and Sun. European free jazz declaring itself.
Free Action
Wolfgang Dauner's 1967 SABA septet: Jean-Luc Ponty on violin, Gerd Dudek on tenor and clarinet, Eberhard Weber on cello, Jürgen Karg on bass, and two drummers, Mani Neumeier and Fred Braceful. Mingus-like themes that dissolve into free playing, Neumeier on tabla for the Spanish disguise. Out of print for forty years.
The Oimels
Two years after Free Action, a different record. The Oimels, MPS 1969, is the Wolfgang Dauner Quintet playing pop: Dauner on piano, organ and voice, Eberhard Weber on bass, cello and voice, Siegfried Schwab on guitar and sitar, Pierre Cavalli on guitar, and Roland Wittich on drums and voice, who also did the cover art with Dauner.
The programme mixes Dauner originals with a Gershwin tune, a traditional, and a Lennon-McCartney song. A RateYourMusic listener puts it plainly: a different kind of ja…
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.
Romance
The Portuguese percussionist turns drums and cymbals into generative sources: seven tracks of spectral tones, sub-bass rumble and warbly VHS tones, shaped by electronic manipulation and by the chromatic dissonance of Carlo Gesualdo.
Amorce De Champ
Tip! Vincent Grimaldi’s "Amorce De Champ" is a sonic exploration of studio and field recording. Driven by a particular focus on the technical modalities of sound recording and reproduction, the work delves into recurring motifs across various electroacoustic setups: exaggerated artefacts of analog media, reel-to-reel manipulations, "hors-champ" studio takes, reverberant spaces, feedback, fidelity, phonography, and cut-ups from dusty sound effects records. Sounds are either reworked using analog …
CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories
Cults have always had their own soundtracks: songs written to win over, to bind, to manipulate, repeated until they settle beneath thought, becoming core belief and identity. In the disquieting afterlife of such music, CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories begins. The new album from Zürich-based experimental electronic duo Perverts in White Shirts (Nathalie Dreier and Dave Phillips) is a two-hour cringe-pop journey of disarming, catchy tunes. A post-fringe hauntology for those sha…
Occam XIII, Occam River XI, Occam V
Three late acoustic works from Éliane Radigue's Occam cycle, written with and performed by bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval and cellist Charles Curtis: solos and a duo built on minute shifts of tone and resonance.
Plays For Trane Vol. 2
Follow up to 2020's Plays For Trane, this is Plays For Trane Vol. 2. The band dives further into John Coltrane's catalog, turning it inside out, bending it, holding it with care. Forkelid, together with Mattias Ståhl, David Stackenäs, Vilhelm Bromander and Jon Fält, revisit the jazz giant in a celebrated transformation, reimagining the sounds of John Coltrane.
Will to Love
Ylang Ylang’s Will to Love suggests both a challenge and a determination simultaneously. What does it actually take to love? Amidst the inherent contradictions of the self and the world around us, how do we come back to the foundation of love? The songs on this album sit in that place of friction: stillness and action, fear and desire, poison and medicine, reluctance and momentum, the pull to protect and the pull to stay open. You can look at the process Catherine Debard undertook in recording W…
