Jazz /
From Union Pool
This adventurous set catches lightning in a bottle. They hit the ground running and never let up. Susan Alcorn's pedal steel soloing is phenomenal while Ryan Sawyer drives the trio forward as Patrick Holmes' clarinet keeps pace with both of them. A breathless set of high energy free improvisation at its best.
Goodbye Ground
Sakina Abdou has expressed herself in many contexts, in musical fields both broad and eclectic. With this solo album, she invites herself within, focus and anchors herself for the first time in her own language, where she summons the many influences which have nurtured her. Through «homemade» recording, naked, raw, without effects or tricks, we meet her on her own, at home. Grab a chair or settle on the floor next to her, on the edge of the bell, almost touching, and find yourself captured in a …
Mutable
The music on Mutable is a totally acoustic sonic exploration. It is an investigation that has led to the development of certain extended techniques in order to discover the ultimate limits of the sound of the saxophone and to try to create new sounds on the instrument.
Time Sound Shape
"At first glance this new CD on PNL looks like familiar territory - a trio recording with two known collaborators of Nilssen-Love: Accordionist Kalle Moberg have become a steady and important voice of the Large Unit sound over the last ten years, and Frode Gjerstad truly needs no introduction - him and Nilssen-Love have played together for 30+ years.
And while this trio is a new constellation, a combination that is good news in itself, "Time Sound Shape" offers another, bigger surprise: this is …
Children of the Forest
Black Editions Archive is ecstatic to announce the next chapter in the Milford Graves Archive series, the double LP Children of the Forest, previously unreleased 1976 sessions with Hugh Glover and Arthur Doyle that re-write the book on Milford Graves' ensemble music of the 1970s. Graves recorded these sessions himself in his legendary Queens basement laboratory and workshop in the months immediately leading up to the March 1976 session that produced what many consider his most iconic album, Bäbi…
Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! Summertime from the LP My Name Is Albert Ayler made me discover Albert Ayler. His unique interpretation of Summertime motivated me to go to Lörrach crossing the border from Switzerland to Germany to listen to the concert of the Albert Ayler Quintet in Lörrach on November 7, 1966. This experience has indoctrinated me forever for the music of Albert Ayler. In 1975 I created the label Hat Hut Records and in 1978 I had the chance, thanks to the support of Joachim Ernst Berendt…
Four For Trane To Live Newport 1965
Temporary Super Offer! Four For Trane became one of the classic, iconic albums of the post-bop era. The explanation is three-fold. First, the material. Rather than follow Coltrane’s lead into the most extreme of his free-blowing anthems, Shepp selected three songs from the Giant Steps album, and one from Coltrane Plays The Blues (although “Cousin Mary,” from the former release, is also a twelve-bar blues). This is significant because it illuminates the two sides of Archie Shepp’s conceptual persp…
Obeah
Recorded directly to two-track digital Mitsubishi X-80 tape recorder at Rudy Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ on June 4th & 5th, 1987.
True Or False
A great live Cd by drummer giant Roy Haynes. Roy Haynes's very active and his different approach to drumming comes out very well - hard swinging and with a lot of joy and very spontaneous.
Tesserae
Drummer Tilo Weber joins forces with bassist Petter Eldh (Koma Saxo) and Elias Stemeseder, who plays harpsichord and keys here on Weber's We Jazz debut, "Tesserae". The three musicians plus guests present a unique jazz trio sound for all times, without boundaries. Weber, based in Berlin, came to the attention of We Jazz Records with his his highly inspired drum work on Otis Sandsjö's Y-OTIS, and has since then also been awarded with the prestigious Deutscher Jazz Preis for the arrangement of the…
Stumps
* 75 copies limited edition * In times of vinyl shortage and production backlog, resourcefulness is key. In keeping with his well-established practice of replacing original materials with surrogates to generate new sonic experiences, Sven-Åke Johansson has devised a digital reinterpretation of the historic flexidisc in the shape of a 10inch rubber disc with engraved QR codes that let buyers access the music online.
About the music: "The six compositions titled ‘stumps’ are based on a potential f…
Eric Dolphy Outward Bound To Out To Lunch Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! In his comprehensive 1966 Jazz Monthly article, “Eric Dolphy,” Jack Cooke reported that the advance buzz aboutduet passages for bass clarinet and bass, “Something Sweet, Something Tender” approximated the hinge-like ballads that were a perennial feature on Blue Note A sides. Given its dedicatee – the flutist renowned for recording works like Varèse’s “Density 21.5,” which Dolphy performed at the Ojai Festival in 1962 – “Gazzelloni” is surprisingly boppish, ending the side w…
Ornette At 12 Crisis To Man On The Moon Revisited
Temporary Super Offer! "The title Ornette at 12 is something of a misnomer. Although Ornette is Denardo’s middle name, why wasn’t the album called Denardo at 12, his age at the time of the concert? Is there a hidden meaning related to Ornette’s own childhood? According to John Litweiler’s book A Harmolodic Life, he was either 13 or 14 when he received his first horn. If the year 1956 is meant to represent a significant event in Ornette’s musical life, it does mark his meeting with Don Cherry and B…
Outward Bound
*In process of stocking* Avant-garde pioneer Eric Dolphy achieved incredible things with the bass clarinet, establishing it as a vehicle for solo improvisation, and was equally adept on alto and flute, gaining kudos from peers such as John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. Outward Bound holds a special place in jazz as Dolphy’s first LP fronting his dynamite quintet, leaving conventions behind from the get-go. With the entire group on tremendous form throughout and Dolphy reaching the heights of his …
I Dream I Was An Earopean
Temporary Super Offer! "Only ghosts don’t make footfalls (another Beckett title!) that we can hear, don’t need to open and close doors to effect passage. These men together are enacting over a longer duration a strong sense of life- as-lived. They are conspiring, not in the political or legal sense, but simply breathing-together. It isn’t forbiddingly abstract music. It simply enacts our various ways of living together. Take a deep breath and enjoy." - Brian Morton
One-Eyed Daruma
Swiss artist Lukas Traxel releases his powerful debut album One-Eyed Daruma on We Jazz Records, March 10. The trio features Traxel on double bass, Otis Sandsjö on sax and Moritz Baumgärtner on drums. Compact, deep, and organic to the bone, Traxel & co's sound echoes the innovations of rhythmically driven avantgarde jazz while keeping things moving at all times. There's both drive and freedom to this sound.
One-Eyed Daruma features eight new compositions by Traxel, who crafted the outline for the…
Off Course !
"There is a landscape of sonic ideas, of banging, of entity, of new forms of stimulating the body and of prehension moved by our human, urban, maybe even cubist surroundings, or by the big wild country where, we say, music does what it wants. Unless, we misread and “music knows what it wants.” Both! With one stroke, knowing and doing unanimously converge into one. A point of intersection - there are so many - between the desiredl iberties and sublime agitation provoked by the embrasure of paths …
Ripples
*In process of stocking* "Ostensibly ‘jazz’, but you’d be hard-pressed to adopt that term here, as the duo stretch the definition of such pat categorizations to the point where genre effectively becomes meaningless. Just gorgeous, pure music. Softly, as in a morning sunrise." - Darren Bergstein
Music the listener can sink into, immersing themselves in lush textures, and bathing in the richly varied harmonies and sonorities. Ripples began life with an experimental session designed to explore the …
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
"I imagined the four ensemble pieces that begin this album as belonging to the repertoire of a speculative musical culture — one potentially not so far removed from my own — whose sonic and lyrical affinities reflect chronic, hazardous inundation, and mystifying betrayal. Without my realizing it at first, they became, in their own way, more-or-less oblique renditions of the Jerome Kern / Otto Harbach standard “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” an object lesson in the transmutation of weather and grief i…
Unwalled
You know everyone, Canadian saxophone giant Francois Carrier his long-distance musical friend also from Canada, Michel Lambert, probably the best free improvised sideman John Edwards and the legend of the European free music world Alexander von Schlippenbach. New quartet, in the studio recording made at the beginning of this year!