Jazz /
On Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds
2025 stock ** "The innovative, boundary-smashing work of Nicole Mitchell, whom Chicago Reader music critic Peter Margasak has hailed as the “greatest living flutist in jazz”, has contributed new life to Afrofuturism in the 21st Century. A voracious reader of science fiction since her youth (Afrofuturist author Octavia E. Butler in particular has exerted a heavy influence on her music), the musician, composer and educator has released a string of albums that fold themes centered around technology…
Urban Magic
2003 release ** "A lesser-known set from the Art Ensemble Of Chicago – a CD originally packaged with an Italian magazine, now presented here on its own! The performance is from 1997 – and the group features Lester Bowie on trumpet, Roscoe Mitchell on reeds, Malachi Favors on bass and percussion, and Don Moye on assorted percussion – all in a style that shows all the relaxed, confident modes of the group in their mature years. The ensemble's almost more compelling here than on some of their bette…
Four Compositions (Quartet) 1983
1993 release ** "Before getting to the music of this Anthony Braxton recording, the listener is confronted with a highly calculated methodology. The album bears the stark title Four Compositions (Quartet) 1983, and each song (itself merely a cataloged number) is accompanied by its own highly cryptic diagram. This sets up a struggle, whereby musical/emotional ends must be achieved through Braxton's analytical compositional means. For this 1983 session, Braxton selected materials from his collecti…
A Sea of Faces
2025 stock ** Recorded in Milan (Italy) and originally released in 1975, Sea of Faces stands as one of Archie Shepp's strongest recordings of the Seventies. A highly varied program, covering Shepp's entire spectrum and performed by an all-star line-up featuring Archie Shepp - tenor & soprano sax, piano, vocals, Charles Greenlee - trombone, tambourine, vocals, Dave Burrell - piano, Cameron Brown - bass, Beaver Harris - drums, tambourine, vocals, Rafi Taha - vocals, Bunny Foy - vocals, maracas, pe…
The Hilversum Session
A legendary recording by tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler with his amazing working band, recorded in Holland for radio play, here digitally remastered with new artwork.
Personnel
Albert Ayler: tenor saxophoneDon Cherry: cornetGary Peacock: bassSunny Murray: drums
The Penelope Album Live
This album captures the debut performance of Billy's 12-piece chamber-jazz ensemble Grande Família, recorded live at London’s Pizza Express Jazz Club. The concert, which sold out two months in advance and received a full standing ovation, features expanded arrangements of music from his critically acclaimed debut album 'Penelope'. The original studio album was created as a surprise for Billy’s mother Penny during her struggle with pancreatic cancer in summer 2023. Released in her memory in Janua…
Split
2025 stock "The jazz single is a weird bird. The history of the forma lies in commercial functions such as juke boxes and radio promotion tools, the attempts to deliver those few minute emotional bursts between our air waves of attention. So unfitting was the format back in its hay days of the 1960’s that many jazz workouts were deemed to be split in half to those dreaded pt. 1’s and 2’s, fading out the fun just when cooking got cooking and swingin singing. Ultraääni have fortunately spared us f…
Four Compositions (Wesleyan) 2013
*2025 stock* PMP is proud to release Anthony Braxton’s “Four Compositions (Wesleyan) 2013”, a limited deluxe 4-CD box set documenting the one-time meeting of an all-star trio featuring the legendary saxophonist and composer alongside Roland Dahinden (trombone), and Hildegard Kleeb (piano). This is the first album of the Czech label PMP.Art Lange describes the impetus for the session in the liner notes: The 4 CD set box Four Compositions (Wesleyan) 2013 is built on the latest evolutionary stage o…
Adieu Leonardo!
1992 release ** "Robert Marcel Lepage, clarinettist, pays tribute to scientists, to today’s musicians and to this Renaissance man, little-known as a musician, Leonardo Da Vinci. Inspired by the personal history of this ingenious artist/inventor, Lepage has composed a remarkably eloquent music: a hydro-mechanic alliance of accurate writing, improvised music and sound machine. Musicians Michel F Côté, Jean Derome, Bernard Gagnon, Mario Légaré and René Lussier back him on this record. Adieu Leonar…
Angel Rodeo
1993 release ** “Lisa Sokolov displays incredible vocal range, versatility and creativity on her wild interpretations. This album is like a ticket to an avant-garde vocal extravaganza. It will make you sit up and listen until curtain-fall.”
Tecniche Arcaiche (Live At Angelica)
2025 stock ** "The beauty of this music lies precisely in the capability of transmitting echoes of the pianistic music research happened in the last 50 years, filtered by Nicola Guazzaloca's personal and unmistakeable gaze.Prepared piano, improvisation, but also lyricism and the delicacy of the touch are the ingredients of his musical landscape. The ability of reinventing and being at ease with the "piano solo", aim and test for every pianist appears to us as one of the most precious elements of…
Five Chord Stud
1994 release ** "Although altoist Julius Hemphill gets top billing on this CD, his heart surgery in 1993 forced him to stop playing. However, this saxophone sextet was his regular group; he contributed six of the eight compositions (the other two are free improvisations) and the chancetaking heard throughout this adventurous music definitely makes most of the performances sound like they came from a Julius Hemphill recording even if his alto is missed. The sextet has a very strong lineup (altois…
Some Other Place
*2025 stock* "“We are the place in which we dwell.” In a universe such as improvised music where, particularly in an ensemble, chance plays some kind of role, Agustí Fernández and Barry Guy did not by chance name this opus Some Other Place, paradoxical as it may seem at first sight. Much rather, it is a deliberate plight to give to this composition a title that brings up the notion of otherness, which is markedly present in both their careers. Many areas were scoured, at times under the command …
The Bagatelles vol. 3
Volume three of the recording of John Zorn's renowned Bagatelles, chosen from the more than 300 works that the American conductor and composer created in a span of three months at the beginning of 2015 and later compiled into a book. In this performance, the experimental band Trigger tear through fifteen of the collection's most wackiest and chaotic pieces.
Evil Season
2025 repress The bass, that metronome that marks the time for musicians of every style, of every era, that secluded, silent, but essential character for a band. Without the bass, the music would be deflated, the heart notes would leave a wasteland of rowdy high frequencies without any rules. But bass players who have character can elevate those low frequencies and even make them loud at times. Who knows if free jazz, if we want to call it that, is exalted by the Arabic background, those semitone…
Polygamy
*2025 repress* On the course of our deep research, we sometimes discover a hidden thread that unites musicians, songwriters, artists, and poets linked by music. Mustafa's 'Polygamy' is no exception. Apart from the music - the main reason we decided to work on this first ever re-press, a jewel at the crossroads between jazz funk, spiritual jazz and proto rap - are the many other things that make Mustafa an intriguing and fascinating character. For starters, he was a childhood friend of the Ayler …
Babs Robert & The Love Planet
*2025 repress* Despite its modest role on the world stage, Belgium has produced a number of internationally renowned musicians and composers. There is the iconic gypsy jazz guitar maestro Django Reindhart, whose position remains unassailable, and guitarist/harmonica player Toots Thielemans, who became an internationally renowned artist performing and recording with Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Shirley Horn and Quincy Jones. The other key Belgian figure is composer/arra…
The Music of Anthony Braxton
Steve Lehman – whom The New York Times has hailed as a “virtuoso alto saxophonist” and a “state-of-the-art musical thinker” – returns with a highly-anticipated new release with his long-running trio featuring bassist Matt Brewerand drummer Damion Reid, joined by special guest tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, one of the most influential jazz musicians of the past 30 years. On the self-evidently entitled The Music of Anthony Braxton, Lehman pays homage to one of his earliest mentors with a hard-swin…
Issue 74 (Magazine)
*2025 repress. 50 copies limited edition* This issue of Audion magazine was first published in pdf format and then later also as a limited printed edition. The pdf version is available as two Bandcamp downloads: a pdf/multimedia edition and as a pdf only version. The pdf is viewable on all devices that support pdf files and can easily be printed. This multimedia download also comes with extra files and the audio samples shown on this page.
Audion is copyright registered with the British Library,…