The Future as it used to Be!
Vertigo
After more than 25 years of confusing the heck out of anyone who dares turn up to a concert expecting to hear a run-of-the-mill jazz trio, Sydney mavericks The Necks are set to continue to push the trajectory of jazz out of the stratosphere of convention with their new, incredible album. The Necks 18th album Vertigo is an eventful, kaleidoscopic tone poem set against a darkly shimmering background. Slowly but inexorably moving forward, it crosses many frontiers yet remains true to the mission an…
Toverbal Sweet
Big Tip! *Limited edition of 500 copies.* The cultish London-based Mushroom label - already known for releasing some of the most uncompromising British improvised music - brought together three musicians whose approaches seemed fundamentally incompatible. Lol Coxhill, the anarchic genius of British free saxophone, meeting the pure magic of a Dutch rhythm section: Pierre Courbois on drums and Jasper Van't Hof on keyboards. The result was Toverbal Sweet - a clash of titans that somehow worked pre…
Unaccompanied Barre
Recorded in St. James Norlands church in London in November 1968 and first released in the following year, this work stands as the first solo bass album in the history of Jazz and improvised music. Born in 1934 in San Francisco, Barre Phillips is one the most influential bassists of his generation. In his long career Phillips has played and recorded with almost everyone in the world of Jazz and beyond, a long list of forward thinking music icons including Don Ellis, Bobby Hutcherson, Dave Hollan…
Water Messages On Desert Sand
The extraordinary 1987 debut album from the Italian legendary duo. Water Messages on Desert Sand was the very first sound creation from the Italian avantgarde duo of Roberto Musci and Giovanni Venosta. A classic work in the genre, released by Chris Cutler's Recommended Records in 1987. Back in the mid Eighties, Musci & Venosta, both on sampler, synthesizer, guitar, piano, effects and tapes were masters in overlaying and constructing rhythmic and harmonic pictures of transparent sound from electr…
Kaleidoscope of Rainbows
Neil Ardley's visionary bridge: 1976's Kaleidoscope of Rainbows fuses British jazz-rock with Balinese gamelan scales. Seven Rainbow compositions built on pelog and slendro patterns, featuring Ian Carr, Paul Buckmaster, Tony Coe. Final part of Ardley's trilogy, pointing toward 1979's Harmony of the Spheres. Minimalist counterpoint meets exotic structures.
Leg End
2025 Stock. "Their first, 1973, release by Britain's most enigmatic and unclassifiable band. Formed in 1968 by two Cambridge students, Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson, Henry Cow's original influences included the likes of Soft Machine and Frank Zappa. However, in their undying quest to push the boundaries of conventional music, members soon took out their machetes and began hacking a new trail into an unmapped wilderness of sound. The band was thereby also staunchly anti-commercial, never compromi…
Earth Passage - Density
Super Tip! An outstanding yet obscure 1981 release by two Art Ensemble of Chicago members, multi reeds player Joseph Jarman and drummer Don Moye along with legendary bassist Rafael Garret (mostly remembered for his presence on John Coltrane's masterpiece "Kulu se Mama") and young lion Craig Harris on trombone. Four great individuals digging deep between ancient African rituals and modern urban multidimensional grooves. A tribal ecstatic sound based on a multitude of instruments: reeds, bamboo fl…
Maraccaba
German ambient musician.He was briefly a member of the krautrock band Popol Vuh in the early 1970s where he played on the albums Hosianna Mantra and Seligpreisung. Comes in jewel case with slipcase.
Stockholm & Göteborg
Temporary super offer! Originally released on CD as part of the 40th anniversary Henry Cow Box and reissued here for the first time on vinyl, these high quality Swedish Radio live recording, made in 1977, include previously unreleased material including Tim Hodgkinson's "Erk Gah", a long, epic, large scale composition considered as one of Cow peaks, a breathtaking rendition of Phil Ochs' "No More Songs"- in fact the only real song ever played by Henry Cow - and Fred Frith's "The March", plus the…
Live In Amsterdam
May 1961. The Concertgebouw - Amsterdam's cathedral of classical music, where symphonies and string quartets had held court for decades - opens its doors to something entirely different. Thelonious Monk, the high priest of bebop, one of the most important and enigmatic figures in modern jazz, walks onto that hallowed stage with his quartet. The audience is packed, expectant. They have no idea what's about to happen. What happened was magic. Pure, uncut, Monkian magic. This isn't Monk as studio p…
Unrest
*2025 warehouse found* Dating from 1974, and following on from the re-release of Legend, this is the second in our series of vinyl reissues of the original Virgin albums. Geoff Leigh had left the group and Lindsay Cooper joined on bassoon, oboe, flute, soprano sax. The mix was more 'live' than Legend, with the drums much more up front. The first half is highly composed material, with some of the Henry Cow's best loved tunes, like 'Half Asleep Half Awake' and 'Bittern Storm Over Ulm'. For the sec…
Cry! Tender
Although his main instruments were the tenor saxophone and the flute, Yusef Lateef was known for his innovative blending of jazz with Asian music. In addition to the oboe and bassoon (which are both unusual in jazz), he played various instruments. Lateef began recording as a leader in 1957 for Savoy Records, a non-exclusive association that continued until 1959. The earliest ofhis albums for the Prestige subsidiary New Jazz overlap his Savoy Recordings. Cry!-Tender was one of these early albums …
In a Minor Groove
'Dorothy Ashby was the very best and most swinging performer on the multi-stringed instrument associated with the gates of heaven. Here on Earth, Ashby adeptly plucked and strummed the harp like nobody else, as evidenced on a single reissue containing her two best LPs for the Prestige and Prestige/New Jazz labels from 1958 -- Hip Harp and In a Minor Groove. Alongside her prior efforts for the Savoy label, they collectively represent a small but substantive discography for the Detroit native in s…
Cymbalism
A legendary album by one of the masters of modern jazz drumming! Recorded by Rudy Van Gelder in 1963, Cymbalism is among the albums Roy Haynes provided for Prestige's New Jazz series. This session features the drummer leading an acoustic quartet with Frank Strozier (alto sax, flute) Ronnie Mathews (piano) and Larry Ridley (bass). An unpredictable Hard Bop-Post Bop transitional album with different colors and moods. From the primary influence of Charlie Parker through a kind of expanded sound ins…
Tomorrow Is the Question!
This was definitely a perfect title for Ornette Coleman's second and last album for Contemporary before switching on Ertegun's Atlantic label. Originally released in 1959 "Tomorrow is the Question" was an early evident step towards the revolution to come. An adventurous yet accessible, bluesy album with Coleman and Don Cherry tasting for the first time the freedom of a pianoless rhythm section featuring Percy Heath or Red Mitchell on bass and the great Shelly Manne on drums.
East Coasting
Recorded in 1957 this is one of Charles Mingus's lesser known sessions. Here the master was at the head of an awesome band including some of his regular sidemen. Jimmy Knepper - trombone, Shafi Hadi - alto saxophone, tenor saxophone and Dannie Richmond - drums, along with nothing but Bill Evans on piano! This is dense, lyrical and very stimulating music deeply rooted in the bop tradition yet with an open ear to other sound territories.
Jazz Frontier
Reissue, originally released in 1963. Lou Blackburn's debut Imperial session has to be considered mostly a bop album, even though traces of contemporary pop culture and soul are clearly an influence. The trombone player is joined by Freddie Hill (trumpet), Horace Tapscott (piano), John Duke (bass), and Leroy Henderson (drums). Blackburn was born in Rankin, Pennsylvania, during the 1950s, he played swing music with Lionel Hampton. In the early 1960s, he began performing with musicians like Cat An…
Looking Ahead
Looking Ahead is the debut album by American jazz musician Ken McIntyre, recorded with fellow alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy in 1960 and released on the New Jazz label in January 1961. From the beginning Mr. McIntyre considered himself part of the avant-garde or ''new thing'' movement in jazz, as spearheaded by musicians like Ornette Coleman, Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor, although his own music was considerably more traditionally melodic than theirs. He played a whole fleet of reed instruments, inc…
The Sounds of Yusef
Yusef Lateef walks into Rudy Van Gelder's studio with a vision that won't have a proper name for another two decades. What to call music that swings hard as any bebop session but incorporates sounds from beyond the American jazz tradition? "Ethnic materials," they'd say awkwardly. "World music," they'd say later. Lateef just called it music - his music - and got to work. Sounds of Yusef, recorded for Prestige, captures Lateef at a pivotal moment. This is before the radical experiments of the 196…
Chamber Music of the New Jazz
Before Miles Davis obsessed over his sense of space. Before Gil Evans studied his orchestral approach to the trio format. Before "less is more" became a jazz cliché. There was this - Ahmad Jamal's early trio, captured on the short-lived Parrot label, playing music so sophisticated, so elegant, so precisely constructed that it would redefine what a jazz piano trio could be. Chamber Music of the New Jazz isn't just a great album title - it's a manifesto. Jamal, Ray Crawford (guitar), and Israel Cr…