Reissues
The Tapscott Sessions Vol. 10
Drawn from two different recording sessions at the Lobero Theatre, The Tapscott Sessions Vol. 10 showcases Horace Tapscott in an especially exploratory mode. Nearly all original compositions here - "Miguel," "Roses In Bloom," "First Love," "Searching," "Upside Down," "Maya & Me" - hauntingly introspective pieces performed with a sense of creative searching that's incredibly powerful despite the absence of other instrumentation. The album runs seventy-five minutes. That's a significant amount of …
The Tapscott Sessions Vol. 9
Between 1982 and 1985, whenever Horace Tapscott felt ready, Tom Albach would hire an engineer, a crew, and a mobile sound truck to record him at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara. Sessions typically ran between 2 and 4 a.m., when auto traffic fell quiet and the room's natural acoustic could breathe. Albach believed these solo recordings represented his greatest accomplishment as a producer - a conviction some found puzzling given its commercial futility. Solo piano albums by unknown pianists p…
Dial ‘B’ For Barbra
Recorded on February 26, 1980 at United-Western Studios in Hollywood, Dial B For Barbra stands as one of the absolute peaks of Horace Tapscott's output for Nimbus West. Following his monumental orchestral sessions with the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, Tapscott here condenses his vision into a sextet of extraordinary cohesion, achieving with just six musicians the same sonic vastness of his larger ensembles.
The album opens with "Lately's Solo," where Tapscott weaves Miles Davis's "Milestones" t…
Live at Lobero
The Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara, built in 1872 by local composer José Lobero, has witnessed over a century of California cultural history. On the night of November 12, 1981, it became the site of one of the most powerful trio recordings in the Horace Tapscott discography. Tom Albach captured it all for Nimbus West.
The group is a study in complementary forces. Roberto Miranda, born in New York to Puerto Rican parents but raised in Los Angeles since the mid-1950s, had been a member of UGMAA a…
Live in Santa Barbara
"Yeah, I'm Nate Morgan. I'm going to play with you all." That's how a teenage Nate Morgan introduced himself to Horace Tapscott after hearing The Giant Is Awakened on the radio and tracking down the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. Not "I want to" - "I'm going to." He'd already been studying with Joe Sample and Hampton Hawes, but Arthur Blythe's wailing saxophone on that Flying Dutchman LP had gone straight to his heart. A spiritual experience, he called it. Over the next decades, Morgan became a c…
Journey Into Nigritia
Journey Into Nigritia, released in 1983 on Tom Albach's Nimbus West, was a declaration of arrival. Morgan assembled a quartet built for spiritual exploration: firebreathing reedsman Dadisi Komolafe on alto saxophone, Jeff Littleton on bass, Fritz Wise on drums. The rhythm section would become Morgan's anchor - Littleton and Wise appear on all three of his Nimbus recordings.
Six compositions. The album opens with "Mrafu," John Coltrane's influence immediately apparent - Komolafe gets right to wor…
Retribution, Reparation
One year after his debut Journey Into Nigritia, Nate Morgan returned to Tom Albach's Nimbus West studio with a statement so direct it left no room for ambiguity. The album's title alone - Retribution, Reparation - announced its politics. Where the first record had been a declaration of arrival, channeling Cecil Taylor's angularity and John Coltrane's spiritual seeking, this 1984 session was something else: a confident distillation of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra's communal fire into a surgin…
The Day Of The Jackal (Music From The Motion Picture)
In the centenary year of his birth, Quartet Records unveils for the first time the complete score that Georges Delerue composed for Fred Zinnemann's masterful 1973 thriller The Day of the Jackal - a work largely unheard until now, buried beneath the weight of editorial decisions that stripped the film's second half of any musical accompaniment.
Based on Frederick Forsyth's bestselling novel, the film follows a professional assassin hired by disgruntled military veterans to eliminate President Ch…
Patterns
Hidden in a remote, forgotten corner of German library music, Peter Patzer stands as a unique figure in the landscape of 1980s functional music production. A self-taught artist and musician, Patzer founded his own personal label, Crea Music, operating in complete autonomy from his base in Bremen, northern Germany. Between 1983 and 1989 he produced eight white vinyl LPs, all featuring the same austere tricolor sleeve - red, white and blue - with title and catalog number typewritten. A minimalist …
One Step Out
2412 South Western Avenue, Los Angeles. A mansion the Arkestra members had taken over for communal living. They called it the Great House. In the late 1970s, Michael Session - the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra's tenorist - brought a young pianist named Kaeef Ruzadun Ali through the front door. "When I walked in there," Kaeef recalled, "it was like this whole rush came over me, just from going in the front door. It was like a very, very warm feeling of love. I went and I came out with 'Flashback o…
I Want Some Water
Twenty years in a vault. That's how long I Want Some Water waited before anyone outside of a Los Angeles studio could hear it. Recorded on April 29 and May 3, 1980, at United Western in Hollywood, it wasn't released until 1999 - a small CD run that most collectors never saw. The vinyl pressing came forty years after the tapes were made.
Billie Harris was born in Laurel, Mississippi, on February 15, 1937. He picked up the saxophone at fourteen, served four years in the Air Force, and landed in Lo…
Lullaby For Linda
She kept notebooks. Spiral-bound, lined, 8x10 inches. In her beautiful flowing cursive, Linda Hill documented every rehearsal, every concert, every recording session of the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. The names of three hundred musicians passed through those pages. When she died, the notebooks vanished - a treasure of information, lost. But the music survives. Lullaby For Linda, recorded on April 25, 1980 and released the following year on Nimbus West, is the only album Hill made as a leader. …
Flight 17
Seventeen years. That's how long it took the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra to make their first record. Founded in 1961 by Horace Tapscott as the Underground Musicians Association, the orchestra had weathered the Watts uprising, the ferment of the Black Arts Movement, a decade-long residency at the Immanuel United Church of Christ - all without committing a single note to vinyl. Not for lack of industry interest, but by choice: Tapscott wanted to build a community, not a recording career.
It was T…
The Call
For nearly two decades, Horace Tapscott and his Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra made music without making records. They played in parks, on street corners, at fundraisers, churches, community centers - anywhere the people needed them. While the rest of the jazz world chased contracts and critics, Tapscott was building something else entirely: an ark for the Black arts in the heart of Los Angeles.
The story of The Call is inseparable from this larger project. When long-time jazz devotee Tom Albach f…
Desert Fairy Princess
There's a particular light in the music of Los Angeles's spiritual jazz community of the late 1970s - something warm, searching, unpretentious. Adele Sebastian's sole album as a leader catches that light perfectly. Recorded in 1981 and released on the legendary Nimbus West imprint, Desert Fairy Princess stands among the finest documents of West Coast creative music from the period.
Sebastian was born in Riverside, California in 1956 into a musical family - her mother played piano with the Albert…
Maximizing The Audience
Venice, 1984. Teatro Carlo Goldoni. Jan Fabre's legendary play The Power of Theatrical Madness premieres - and with it, a defining document of Pop Minimalism. This primarily European phenomenon - rooted in first-generation British minimalists Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman - took the tunefulness of Reich and Glass and gave it a pop base rather than jazz/African or western classical foundations. Mertens wrote the first full-length study of the genre, American Minimal Music (1983), before becoming…
Dialoghi del Presente
Naples, 1977. Luciano Cilio's sole recorded work is pure magic - four "quadri" where strings, woodwinds, wordless voices and solitary guitar trace the edges of silence. Closer to Arvo Pärt and Morton Feldman than to any Italian prog, yet entirely its own universe. Music that breathes, suspends time, breaks your heart without raising its voice. Decades ahead of its time. First ever remaster from the original tapes.
Live - Hhaï
Remastered and pressed on translucent blue vinyl. 2LP deluxe edition. One of the greatest live albums ever recorded is back on vinyl in deluxe form. Christian Vander and his cosmic warriors captured at the absolute peak of their powers - Taverne de l'Olympia, Paris, June 1-5, 1975. The Island Mobile studio rolling tape. Five nights of pure Zeuhl fury. This is the lineup. After the departure of Jannick Top and most of the original formation in late '74, Magma rose from the ashes with a rejuvenate…
Félicité Thösz
The masters of Zeuhl return on vinyl! Christian Vander's cosmic vision at its most luminous and transcendent. Originally released in 2012, Félicité Thösz was Magma's first album of new material in 27 YEARS after their 1996 reformation. Think about that for a second. Twenty-seven years!
And what a comeback this is. Gone are the martial thunderstorms of Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh - here we get celestial vocal tapestries, Stella Vander's voice soaring like a messenger from another dimension, pian…
Compass Rises
On Compass Rises, Compass condense the grit and openness of early‑’70s upstate jazz into one privately pressed statement, an acoustic‑electric set that threads post‑Coltrane toughness, modal burn and soulful swing into a clear, straight‑ahead identity.