Jazz /
Scylla
This fourth record by the long-standing improvising ensemble Rempis/Abrams/Ra, and the third featuring now-regular band member Jim Baker, was recorded in a watershed moment for these musicians during a pandemic that had gutted lives across the planet. After 15 months of being closed to the public, the band's home base Elastic Arts had re-opened for live events. And Rempis decided to relaunch his weekly Thursday-night concert series, a hub of the Chicago scene since 2002, with a performance by th…
Apparitions
Patrick Shiroishi returns with his second Notice album, a duo with double bassist Kyle Motl. “Apparitions” opens this album of the same name, and we are greeted with wispy and amorphous trails of wind-blown textures, as if the very first layer of an abstract painting fell to the floor of an old house and followed the contours of the walls and door frames, under shafts of light and in-between the fine cracks of floors. This is an album full of expressive and poetic phrasings, jittery movements an…
Some Time
Tip! *In process of stocking.* Adrianne Munden-Dixon and Leo Chang’s “Some Time” presents stuttering physical exchanges between Munden-Dixon’s violin and electronics and Chang’s amplified piri. These pieces are tense and tightly-woven, yet constantly unraveling and reforming. Chang’s “ampiri” is a Korean double reed instrument running through electronics and played in unconventional and non-traditional ways. Recontextualising the instrument “quasi-autodidactically” aligns with Chang’s approach t…
Negro Humor
Running counter to the monopoly of white representation in music, Radio Diaspora translates the African diaspora through free jazz experimentalism and free improvisation. The musicians in the duo, Romulo Alexis and Wagner Ramos, reverberate the signs of blackness through zones of sonorous intensity, giving new meanings to the Afro-descendant musical experience. In ‘Negro Humor’, their tenth album, the duo investigates the dichotomy of humor to again reverberate their struggle through music again…
Karma
Acoustic Sounds Series edition Karma is a jazz recording by the American tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, released in May 1969 on the Impulse! label. A pioneering work of the "spiritual jazz" style, it has become Sanders' most popular and critically acclaimed album. It is among a number of spiritually-themed albums released on the Impulse! label in the late 1960s/early 1970s. The album's main piece is the 32-minute-long "The Creator Has a Master Plan," co-composed by Sanders with vocalist Leo…
Motions Vol. 1
*In process of stocking* In Motions, Vol. 1, Francisco Mela and Shinya Lin create an album of improvised textures and thrilling exploratory sounds. Using drum sets and prepared piano, they create a lush soundscape of textures, imagining a scene reminiscent of a jungle, full of life, resources, and possibility. “It was a huge pleasure to have Mela’s presence and his mentorship was amazing, free of selves, the music came out just naturally from our souls,” says Shinya about their first collaborati…
Volume 1
*In process of stocking* Super groups are not a riskless endeavor—but when they’re made up of longtime friends and master improvisers, they tend to work. On their collaboration, simply titled Volume 1, up-and-coming American saxophonist John Dikeman (When The Time Is Right, 577 Records, 2021) is accompanied by a group of UK-based music masters: pianist Pat Thomas, a 577 Records mainstay (Shifa Live at Cafe Oto 2019, BleySchool 2019, Shifa Live in Oslo 2020, Educated Guess 2021), bassist John Edw…
Welcome Adventure! Vol. 2
*In process of stocking* How do you welcome adventure? Longtime comrades, legendary Daniel Carter, Matthew Shipp, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver investigated this in their first album, Welcome Adventure, Vol. 1, resulting in 577 Records’ best-selling release in the 20 years we’ve been operating. Now, the group is trying the question again with their second astonishing volume, taken from the same historical recording session. Daniel Carter (Saxophone, Clarinet) has been collaborating with Will…
LeAutoRoiOgraphy
'Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) spoke the truth (and the truth under his tongue was sometimes a hammer, sometimes an anvil, sometimes a sickle, sometimes just a breath or a blast). Baraka had no tongue in cheek. Sometimes he drew his language (his thought) and in the barrel of his language (his thought), there was the cartridge of criticism, the cartridge of ranting, the cartridge of analysis, the cartridge of sedition, the cartridge of poetry, the cartridge of music. Heroes Are Gang Leaders have th…
Telepatica
If 577 Records had a house-band, this would be it—a group of longtime friends, collaborators and established jazz musicians who are mainstays of the 577 Records’ catalog, here playing together. The Telepathic Band named themselves after the sort of improvisational style that can only be accomplished with a decade or two of collaboration, playing a signature, boundary-pushing music between friends. Now, with their fifth album, Daniel Carter (Saxophone, Clarinet, Trumpet), Patrick Holmes (Clarinet…
The Uproar in Bursts of Sound and Silence
'The Uproar in Bursts of Sound and Silence is a sort of emergent collage that came together over four years of composition, improvisation, and production. The foundations for this album were initially recorded in 2018 by producer/engineer Jack Endino (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Skinyard) at Soundhouse in Seattle, WA with myself (Evan Strauss, electric bass and upright bass), 5-Track (Guitar) and Sheridan Riley (Drums). The initial foundations of this music consisted of my long-form graphica…
O Life, O Light Vol. 1
Originally from Kingsport, Tennessee, New York-based Zoh Amba is a notable rising star in the avant-garde music scene. Growing up in the Appalachian mountains, Amba practiced saxophone to the forest that surrounded her home before she later traveled to study with David Murray in New York, and also at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music & New England Conservatory in Boston. Today, her music is full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, repeated incantations and powerfully executed Free Jazz…
In Flower, In Song
In Flower, In Song is the debut album from Trio Xolo, an improvising group composed of Mexican-American bassist Zachary Swanson, Baltimore-based saxophonist Derrick Michaels, and Lithuanian percussionist Dalius Naujo. With a telepathic ear toward musical interplay, Trio Xolo performs free-flowing stream of consciousness improvisations. The result is true, in the moment composition. The trio moves together dynamically as their voices simultaneously overlap and converge into one. In Flower, In Son…
Distil
*2022 stock. In process of stocking.* 'The bands Atomic and School Days share the same rhythm section : Ingebrigt Haker Flaten on bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums. Atomic further consists of Magnus Broo on trumpet, Fredrik Ljungkvist on tenor sax and Bb clarinet, and Havard Wiik on piano. School Days has Chicagoans Jeb Bishop on trombone and Ken Vandermark on baritone sax, Bb and bass clarinet and Norwegian Kjell Nordeson on vibraphone. After "Nuclear Assembly Hall" this is the second release…
Nuclear Assembly Hall
*2022 stock. In process of stocking.* "The 3rd release by Ken Vandermark's School Days is a double CD of studio material recorded with the Oslo quintet Atomic. Both bands have the same rhythm section of Paal Nilssen-Love on drums and Ingebrigt Haker Flaten on bass. The group includes Magnus Broo: trumpet, Jeb Bishop: trombone, Fredrik Liungkvist: reeds, Ken Vandermark: reeds, Hevard Wiik: piano & Kjell Nordeson: vibraphone. 9 new compositions 1 each by all the members (2 by Mr. Liungkvist)." - S…
Birdhouse
*2022 stock. In process of stocking* 'Fred Anderson is from Chicago, a city like Detroit known for the strength of its music scene. High time that he was shown in the light of this great quartet session, Birdhouse. Anderson’s association with Hamid Drake has germinated here with Anderson’s quartet giving a searching performance of his [Anderson’s] compositions. Birdhouse reflects that kind of powerful play where the roots are so strong, the music can evolve farther without losing the thread of i…
Destiny
*2022 stock. In process of stocking* 'Recorded live during the “Women of New Music” festival in Chicago, [this] OkkaDisk set is marred — Crispell-wise — only by having the piano mixed down too low and occasionally swamped by saxophone and percussion. Otherwise it finds her in thoroughly sympathetic company. Anderson’s diction is Coltrane-influenced but generously... This seems like a relationship written in the stars, and it allows them to build up whole areas of interaction in which the exchang…
Fred Anderson / DKV Trio
*2022 stock. In process of stocking* Fred Anderson & DKV Trio is an excellent jazz album that captures the high level of musicianship possessed by these top Chicago players. Heard here are saxophonist Fred Anderson (founding member of the AACM), percussionist Hamid Drake, bassist Kent Kessler, and reeds man Ken Vandermark. With this group, there is no "warming up"; they're hot from the opening notes. "Planet E" is the first cut, and within no time the fire is stoked and the musicians move, wail,…
Double Or Nothing
*2022 stock. In process of stocking* AALY Trio (Gustafsson, Nordeson, Flaten) on left channel; DKV Trio (Vandermark, Kessler, Drake) on right channel.Recorded September 23, 1999 at Airwave Studios, Chicago.Track 2 is a long performance with an index point at the start of the Awake Nu theme.
Envoi
*2022 stock* 'American trumpeter Bill Dixon began composing his moody, darkly abstract music in the mid-60s, fusing free jazz with modernist chamber music elements touching on Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Envoi is the last of these works, recorded at the FIMAV festival in Victoriaville just three weeks prior to Dixon’s death in June 2010. Dixon’s failing health required that his unaccompanied trumpet solo with echoing multiplex be played on tape during the concert, but nothing feels unfulfilled or…