New Arrivals / Last 4 weeks
Destination Unknown
Moonwalker, Aarburg, Switzerland, 29 March 1992. Sun Ra, fourteen months from the end, at synthesizer and piano with a ten-piece Arkestra: Marshall Allen, Michael Ray, Ahmed Abdullah, Tyrone Hill, Buster Smith. Ten pieces in fifty-six minutes, mostly repertoire, groove over improvisation. Released by Enja.
It's After The End Of The World
Donaueschingen, 17 October 1970, and Berlin, 7 November: Sun Ra's first German concerts, commissioned by Joachim-Ernst Berendt, with the Black Forest Myth written for the astrological moment and never played again. Berendt cut five hours of tape into forty minutes. Der Spiegel called it cosmic chaos.
Noon In Tunisia
Another of Berendt's meetings, SABA 1967. George Gruntz, the Basel pianist who would later run the Berlin Jazz Festival for twenty years, with Sahib Shihab on saxophones and Jean-Luc Ponty on violin, and a group of Tunisian musicians: a bendir and darbuka drum ensemble and Salah El Mahdi on ney flute. The title turns Dizzy Gillespie's tune on its head.
UK Vibe, reviewing the Nicola Conte compilation that includes Djerbi, points out that the famous names are not the point: it is the lesser-known …
Gittin' To Know Y'All
Baden-Baden, Südwestfunk studio, 12 to 14 December 1969, the annual Free Jazz Meeting. Steve McCall had persuaded the organisers to invite the Chicago musicians living in Paris: Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, and the pianist Dave Burrell. They met sixteen Europeans: Albert Mangelsdorff, Kenny Wheeler, John Surman, Willem Breuker, Terje Rypdal, Tony Oxley, Alan Skidmore, Heinz Sauer, Gerd Dudek, Eje Thelin, Bernt Rosengren, Hugh Steinmetz, Leo Cuypers, Claude Delcloo and Karin Krog…
Jazz Meets India
Villingen, 23 October 1967. Irène Schweizer's trio with Mani Neumeier and Uli Trepte, a year before Guru Guru, meets Dewan Motihar's sitar, tabla and tambura, with Manfred Schoof and Barney Wilen. Three pieces, two of them long, and the seventeen-minute Sun Love. All About Jazz calls it an unqualified success.
Ascending the Depths
Ithaca trio of Sarah Hennies, Willie B. and Keir Neuringer, three percussionists reaching into vibraphone, saxophone and piano. Eight studio improvisations, playful and energetic, held against a meditative core.
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.
