Reissues
Transfiguration
"Recorded live at a UCLA concert hall in April 1978 and released on Warner Bros, Coltrane plays piano and organ accompanied by Roy Haynes on drums and Reggie Workman on bass. The trio conjures both a universe and a universal consciousness; Coltrane has no qualms with the commingling of exhilaration and asceticism it demands of listeners. In fact, she demands that you come closer, to its tone and to your natural self. What this feels like in one aspect is Black music's Bonnie and Clyde fantasy re…
Own Affairs
"This is an album made during a crucial period in South Africa’s history during which there was a palpable feeling of a slow turning towards the collapse of the apartheid state side by side with an increasingly well-organised culture of resistance through the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and various affiliated bodies. However, as a result, there was increased pushback from the state security establishment, a turning to dirty tricks and the formation of hit squads Whose members …
Recording A Tape The Colour Of The Light
*2025 stock* Erased Tapes are proud to announce the first in a series of Bell Orchestre reissues. The band’s landmark debut album Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light has been repressed on vinyl using the original masters for the first time since its original release in 2005. Formed in 1999 whilst studying in Montreal, the first music Bell Orchestre made was live scores for contemporary dance performances and puppet shows. Looking back at the band’s early years two decades later, drummer Ste…
Live
Recorded live April 12, 1980 at Gaskessel in Grauzone's hometown of Bern, Switzerland.
Good Bye
Their sophomore release, after their supreme 1972 psychedelic debut, is a proto-hard rock affair. The Japanese power trio is in a more enthusiastic jammin' mode, with deep heavy blues notation. Ensure this lost classic now and forever!
Rainbow Band
The Danish prog band was nothing short of a supergroup, established in early 1970 by local leading rock and jazz artists. Their self-titled debut was released in December, before lead vocalist Lars Bisgaard was suddenly replaced by Alan Mortesen. This magnificent opus is a must have for any jazz-rock and psych-folk aficionados.
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…
Western Culture
*2025 warehouse found* On vinyl, this is a reissue of the final Henry Cow record, originally released in 1979 after the group had officially disbanded. The LP features guest appearances by Irene Schweitzer and Anne-Marie Roeloffs. Following their split with Virgin, the group's history became complicated; bass player John Greaves left, and after a dispute in the recording studio, what was intended as the next Henry Cow album mutated into the Art Bears' much respected Hopes and Fears. In 1978 the …
The Redness of Blood
Jerome Kitzke (b. 1955) has described himself as being as much a storyteller as a composer, and that description makes sense. Throughout his music there is a strong dramatic, narrative, theatrical component. Performers shout, sing, move and dance, often as though possessed by the music. An obvious ancestor here is Harry Partch, and though Kitzke’s music does not use just intonation, it projects that “corporeal“ quality that this predecessor valued as essential.The pieces on this disc make for in…
Doppio Concertino / Flamenco Cyclothymia / Concerto For String Orchestra / Piano Quartet
Carlos Surinach (b 1915) is an American composer whose Spanish heritage, together with the rigors of German musical training, has enabled him to produce an oeuvre that "achieves an effect of novelty by exploiting all the familiar clichés of the `Spanish idiom' with new technical resources and with a completely non-impressionistic sensibility," as Gilbert Chase wrote in Music of Spain.
Like Manuel de Falla's Harpsichord Concerto, the Doppio Concertino (Double Concerto) of 1954 is basically neocla…
Piano Works
Apart from musical considerations, it is entirely appropriate that the work of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) stands beside the compositions of three younger Americans on this program of recorded premieres. By example and deed, Bernstein served like no other major American artist as a true role model for at least a couple of generations of aspiring musicians in this country. Moreover, his eclecticism as a composer and performer exemplified the polyglot nature of the arts in America.
Among the com…
Paula Robison, Ransom Wilson, Carol Wincenc, Solisti New York, Alasdair Neale, Brian Zeger, Douglas Webster, Robert Beaser, Paul Schoenfield, Joseph Schwantner
FlutesIn 1986, three composers and three flutists met in a novel commissioning project supported by a National Endowment Consortium Commissioning Grant. Flutists Ransom Wilson, Carol Wincenc, and Paula Robison, each a longtime supporter and performer of new music, asked Joseph Schwantner, Paul Schoenfield, and Robert Beaser to write new works for flute and orchestra. On this recording, each solo artist presents the orchestral work composed for him or her, as well as a flute and piano "encore" by the s…
Works By Irving Fine, Gian Carlo Menotii, Carl Ruggles, Harold Shapero
At the outset of his career, Harold Shapero (b in 1920) was widely recognized as one of his generation's most promising composers. While in his twenties, he undertook to study closely the musical phraseology and rhetoric Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as a discipline to help him sharpen melodic contours and better manipulate larger musical forms. When the brief piano sonata he set out to compose based on classical principles took only a few days to finish, he decided to write two more. Although t…
The New York Composers Orchestra
The New York Composers Orchestra is a big band formed in 1986 by its artistic directors Wayne Horvitz and Robin Holcomb with the idea of giving new life to a classic format and to further the tradition of new music bridging the worlds of notated and improvised music.
... the music evokes Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky as much as Count Basie and Charles Mingus; the playing is not just precise but committed to making the music jump. －The New York Times
The Flight Into Egypt ·The Natural World · Double Brass Concerto
A few years ago a German presenter asked me for my "artistic Credo," which seemed a characteristically European request, but in the spirit of international cooperation I furnished the following: "to make each piece different from the others, to find clear, fresh large designs, to reinvent traditions." Grand and general though it is, the statement seems a good place to begin describing the music on this record.
Sketches for all the pieces preceded their commissions, but the institutions and frie…
A Miriam Gideon Retrospective
There is in American painting a dynamic movement known as abstract expressionism, led by such well-known artists as Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning.
In Music there is an equivalent--and equally important--development, which we call atonal expressionism. Its lineage stretches from Carl Ruggles and Roger Sessions to Stefan Wolpe and Elliott Carter. The work of Miriam Gideon stands out as a major and individualistic realization of this style.
One of the characteristics of abstra…
Violin Works
Modern music－especially American music, with its tendency to invite various traditions to share the same compositional space－can be a generous art, an art which welcomes inclusivity. Here are works by John Cage (b 1912), Yehudi Wyner (b 1929), John Harbison (b 1938), and Stephen Hartke (b 1952)－four American composers from different generations with different sensibilities, representing very different approaches to writing for the violin. Yet however much these works represent various facets of …
Babes in Arms
This is the first recording of the original score from one of Broadway's gems. “My Funny Valentine”, “The Lady Is A Tramp”, “Johnny One Note”, and “I Wish I Were In Love Again” all came from this show (when was the last time you saw a Broadway show with four hit tunes!), an affectionate and mildly satiric look at a fictional town's adolescent population, abandoned by their parents, who are forced to fend for themselves. More than financial and amorous matters concerned them: These kids wrestled…
Divertimento, Sym No. 2, Night Scenes
Mario Davidovsky was a founding member of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. His compositions apply classical compositional form to electronically generated sounds. His Divertimento is rich and subtle, and might even be described as impressionistic.
Maurice Wright’s Night Scenes, although not program music per se, is loosely inspired by nocturnal imagery, from the fantastical turn the imagination takes in the late hours. It is alternately agitated and full of dreamy string harmonic…
Aftertones of Infinity, Chiaroscuro, Into Eclipse
Of the three composers recorded here, it is Jacob Druckman (b 1928) who has changed the most in his approach to composition. After years of involvement with serial techniques, it was in Windows (1972) that he began to readmit elements of the musical past into his work.
The titles of Druckman's works—Incenters, Windows, Aureole, Prism—often display an interest in visual or spatial concepts. In Chiaroscuro, scored for a fairly large orchestra, including electric piano and electric organ, he set o…