Jazz /
Thirty Years From Monday
*2023 stock* Rare duo performance by Andrea Centazzo and Alvin Curran in 1977 between minimalism and blues.
Alvin Curran Gran Piano, Trumpet, Synthesizer, VocalsAndrea Centazzo percussion, tape effects
Back To The Future
*2023 stock* "The story behind this CD is really singular and date back to a couple of years ago. One day I got an e-mail from Marco Cappelli a young Italian guitarist, living in New York and making quickly a reputation in the avant-garde and improvised music scene. Marco was trying to establish a contact, claiming similarities between my and his experience. I was intrigued by the letter and, even if my recent music was totally on another planet, I decided to write him and establish a relationsh…
Scraps
*2023 stock* "Sometime an old box of tapes, overlooked for decades, could reserve nice surprises. This album is a collection of those surprises. In the years of my collaboration with Steve Lacy, we did a lot of recording and we selected what was the best for the short length of the vinyl LPs. So some tracks were edited leaving part of the improvisations out or discarded for a similarity with something already included in the albums. Thanks to the digital editing, I had the chance to reorganize t…
Bridges
*2023 stock* "On a summer-like evening of May 2012 in Milan, Italy, three master improvisers played together for the first time, and created music full of spontaneity and ethereal beauty at JapzItaly – Jazz Aid for Japanese Children. At a superficial level, Andrea Centazzo – the idiosyncratic composer and percussionist renowned for refined finesse – and Akira Sakata – the iconoclastic reedman famed with volcanic emotional display – would make an ‘odd’ musical team. Despite this presumption, guid…
Latecomers
*2023 stock* "This is quite an attention-catching band, with its two very clever trombones styles, a piano fully explored both inside and outside, and a truly stunning multi-effects percussions set. As a quartet, the musicians had never played together until that particular evening of the Ictus’ 35th anniversary Festival. Yet what we hear from the very first bars is a band in the communion of the moment, painting together greatly textured music with many surprising turns. Their creative energies…
Bang!
*2023 stock* "In a morning of 2 years ago, I got a surprising email from somebody from my past: guitarist Roberto Zorzi. I think to remember that we met briefly in 1975 only and then our paths diverged until that email out of the blue. Roberto was in Los Angeles visiting, so we had the opportunity to reconnect and meet. I had the chance to listen to his past works and I was very impressed. Very versatile and innovative guitarist who deserves much greater recognition, Roberto Zorzi is one of the …
September Impressions
*2023 stock* "On September 23, 2010, the day following Andrea's Kennedy Center appearance, two of my colleagues in the Twenty-first Century Chamber Ensemble, Janel Leppin (cello) and Mike Sebastian (reeds), came over to my home to jam. It was the anniversary of Coltrane's birth -- thus, "impressions" in this work's title to honor the master's legacy. I set up my recording rig to capture what I could. It was, in Andrea's words, "battlefield conditions": his expansive percussion rig in the living …
Infinity Squared
*2023 stock* "What happens when you multiply limitlessness by infinity? You absolutely do not know. Which is why it's such a great idea to toss Henry Kaiser and Andrea Centazzo into the same reaction chamber. As one of the West Coast's premier freakers for some three decades, Kaiser has made a career of sticking his guitar in unpredictable places. Dude's also an experimental-film-&-lit buff and an ace scuba diver, and grows radioactive coral on Neptune.Meanwhile Centazzo has crashed regularly ou…
Tao
*2023 stock* "When I had asked Steve Lacy how he should intervene with the percussion behind Lacy’s thematic statements and subsequent improvisations; the enigmatic Lacy replied: “Play what you feel.” Since then, this has been the guiding principle behind each work of art and everyday action of my artistic life. Here you can hear what Steve Lacy did mean saying that. This CD is dedicated to his memory. Even if we spent just short periods together I always kept a great memory of him in my heart: …
Rebels, Travelers & Improvisers
*2023 stock* "This is a compilation of music performed with some of the groups I was collaborating from the Ictus beginning to the end. Actually here you’ll hear the very first group, a quartet with Evan Parker, Eugenio Colombo and Marting Joseph, recorded in Pistoia in 1977 and the last one the combo with John Fisher, Theo Jorgesmann, Melvin Poore recorded at the Breghenz Jazz Festival in Austria…Evan Parker came for a workshop and some duo concerts and while there, Martin and Eugenio joined i…
Gemini II
The first album by Marcus Belgrave, featuring two of the founders of the legendary Tribe label, Wendell Harrison and Phil Ranelin, as well as Harold McKinney and Roy Brooks, all legends of the Detroit jazz scene in the 70's. This is the world's first LP reissue in the original jacket of this masterpiece full of spirituality and strong blackness, led by the spacey jazz funk "Space Odyssey," which was later covered by Carl Craig, a major figure in Detroit techno!
This is the first album by Marcus …
Healing Suite
On November 8, 2015 Jesse Sharps, one of the great composers to emerge out of the Los Angeles progressive jazz scene and an early bandleader in Horace Tapscott’s Pan Afrikan Peoples Akrestra, brought together a select group of musicians at the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum in Culver City, California for special concert to celebrate The Gathering, a historic recording summit that had occurred a decade earlier at Cal Arts in Valencia. This album is a select representation from that concert in 2…
Wooden Music II
Tip! The discovery of Tomasz Stańko's archive recordings from 50 years ago at Radio Bremen demonstrated the dynamic development of this shrouded in mystery quintet, which was a blank spot in the history of Polish jazz. Released by Astigmatic Records, the album turned out to be a surprise and a huge musical treat for many fans who no longer remember such a fiery period in the career of the outstanding trumpeter. The record received much critical acclaim and sold out in a blink, and Jazz Forum mag…
Wooden Music I
Tip! It would appear that Polish jazz is a well-known subject through and through. Dozens of outstanding albums, biographies of the masters, hundreds of journal articles. As it turns out, it is still possible to find music that has been waiting for years to be discovered. On the 80th birthday of Tomasz Stańko, Astigmatic Records presents the first part of Wooden Music, a conceptual project created by the maestro and his legendary quintet, which has been stored in the archives of Radio Bremen fo…
A Story Like Fire
For their first release, Uroboro play nakedly romantic, passionate music which can also travel strange and disturbing territories. Keith Jafrate's compositions are designed to be completed through improvisation, so in a way they are never finished. But they are far from random, creating focused, narrative music that is lyrical, beautiful and fierce, passing through a range of moods, from balladry to abstraction, via sinuous, funky rhythms and outstanding solo work.
Uroboro is Italian for ourobor…
Bright Light A Joyous Celebration
For his third Discus Music, towering free jazz saxophonist Paul Dunmall has brought together an absolutely incredible group of musicians, including saxophonists Soweto Kinch and Xhosa Cole, vibraphonist Corey Mwamba and drummer Hamid Drake. Four punchy compositions and one group improvisation allow everyone maximum space for expression and exciting interaction.
Recording session sponsor Tony Dudley-Evans writes: "The music was magnificent, full of energy and the name of the session, Bright Light…
Rustiques
A study of contrasts as French improvising synth player Jean-Marc Foussat joins with legendary saxophonist & bass clarinetist Sylvain Guerineau, whose work in both jazz tradition and free playing finds him a lyrical and expressive player, bringing flexibility in combination with a seemingly disparate foil in Foussat, heard in six succint dialogs of unconventional compatibility.
"Recorded at home in November 2022 in the Loiret, this curious little regional river which gives its name to the depart…
Ecstatic Jazz (Crypte Des Franciscains Béziers 12 Février 1982)
"A newly discovered, enthusiastically received 1982 concert from three avatars of French Free Jazz captures the triumphs and the trajectories of improvised music at the time. Veterans, even at that time, saxophonist Daunik Lazro, now 78, and known for this work with Michel Doneda and many others; bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel (1948-2014), a Steve Lacy associate for years; and pianist Siegfried Kessler (1935-2007) who had a similar relationship with Archie Shepp; are as usual expressive and explora…
Libres (Festival de Massy 26 Octobre 1975)
"Armonicord. In 1977 an album was released under the name of Armonicord, of which I have just found a copy through a mutual friend: Esprits de Sel. Having heard of the album's release at that time, the memory of the presence of harpsichordist Odile Bailleux and drummer Christian Lete undoubtedly made me imagine a possible sort of chamber music. In the cover, we can admire the graphic scores of baritone saxophonist Jouk Minor, all in curves and ellipses with instrument and timing indications. A m…
At The Golden Circle Stockholm (Revisited)
"For the followers of Ornette Coleman’s music, 1963 and 1964 were the lost years. His final session for Atlantic Records, Ornette on Tenor, was in March 1961, and though he played sporadic club dates in ’62, his self-produced Town Hall concert in December was to be his last significant appearance until he accepted a Village Vanguard gig in January 1965. The reasons for this hiatus, apparently, were personal, economic, philosophical, pragmatic, and artistic, all at the same time to varying degree…