Jazz & Improvisation / Avant-Garde Jazz

CD version. On Buck Curran's second solo album, Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas, the emphasis switches to acoustic guitar, as compared to his first solo album, Immortal Light (ESPDISK 5014CD/LP, 2016). Side A, all solo acoustic instrumentals, seems to have fallen out of a wormhole emanating from Takoma Records in the 1970s. There's some of that on side B as well, but there are also vocals and other instruments, sometimes overdubbed, and the dedication of "Taurus" to Peter Green, guitarist extrao…

Through the wood, sinew, skins, metal, and fingers, one hears the years of experiential exploration, responsive nuances, and overwhelming power in the trio's joyfully intense playing. They cover a lot of territory in this recording, conjuring epochs and eras, terrains and cultures. This is improvised music composed spontaneously out of the breadth of experiences. André Stjames is a cornerstone of the rich, thriving Pacific Northwest jazz scene and works regularly with his own ensemble, Mel Brown…

Gabriel Zucker's first ESP-Disk' album, Evergreen (Canceled World) (ESPDISK 5017CD, 2016), was made with his big band, The Delegation. His second, Weighting is a quartet, with Delegation members Adam O'Farrill and Eric Trudel joined by acclaimed drummer Tyshawn Sorey. A suite inspired by Rachel Kushner's novel The Flamethrowers (2013), Weighting is a spacious mix of composition and improvisation, frequently intimate - sometimes consisting of just intertwined sax and trumpet lines - but occasiona…

CD version. Chicago power-jazz trio Tiger Hatchery proudly comes out of the ESP-Disk' free jazz tradition, as Mike Forbes's playing makes clear, but there's an added noise-rock edge, especially in Ben Billington's aggressive drumming, that keeps the sound modern. Andrew Scott Young does much more than lay down the bottom, emerging as an equal member of their glorious cacophony. Their 2013 ESP release, Sun Worship (ESPDISK 5003CD/LP), earned huzzahs from press and free-jazz aficionados. Personnel…

Matthew Shipp has established himself as the premier jazz pianist of his generation over the course of a three-decade career including many acclaimed albums under his own name plus his prominent tenure in the David S. Ware Quartet and a vast array of collaborations with the likes of Spring Heel Jack, Ivo Perelman, Sabir Mateen, Darius Jones, Joe Morris, Jemeel Moondoc, Mat Walerian, and many more. ESP-Disk' in its four-years-and-counting association with him has already presented Shipp in solo, …

CD version. Saxophonist/guitarist/composer/music historian/ provocateur Allen Lowe spans the history of jazz in his music in a way that few besides Jaki Byard, Beaver Harris, Steven Bernstein, and Air have ever done, intertwining blues, early jazz, bebop, and the avant-garde. A prolific composer who was incorporating American roots music into his jazz decades before it was hip, he has led project bands featuring a broad array of jazz greats ranging from Doc Cheatham, Randy Sandke, Joe Albany, Do…

LP version. This album was recorded during Thollem McDonas's 2017 residency at Brooklyn-based multi-discipline mecca Pioneer Works. It's the second by Radical Empathy, which combines three uncategorizable improvisors. Michael Wimberly has been astonishing folks since his days in Charles Gayle bands and Steve Coleman & Five Elements in the early '90s, and has gone on become a composer and educator of note. Nels Cline has spent decades changing people's ideas about the role of the electric guitar …

Gowanus Session II was seven years in the planning. Thollem McDonas, Nels Cline, and William Parker convened at Peter Karl Studios in Brooklyn on January 3rd, 2012 and recorded two complete albums. The first was Gowanus Session I, released by Porter Records in April of 2012. GS II was put aside to eventually complete the five-album palindromic cycle of trio albums Nels and Thollem ambitiously set out to realize. The albums in between include Radical Empathy with Michael Wimberly (Relative Pitch,…

This is Mr. Mat Walerian's fourth album as a leader, all on ESP-Disk'. He also appears in the Matthew Shipp Quartet on the album Sonic Fiction (ESPDISK 5018CD, 2018). Credits: Mat Walerian - alto saxophone, bass clarinet, soprano clarinet, flute; Matthew Shipp - piano; William Parker - double bass, shakuhachi; Hamid Drake - drums, percussion. Recorded May 21, 2018 at Parkwest Studios, Brooklyn, New York. Produced by Steve Holtje. "Walerian is alternately introspective and fiery, and the passion …

Downbeat calls Matthew Shipp "an elder statesman on the free-jazz scene." Perhaps it is odd in a way to think of someone so energetic and prolific as "elder," or so outspoken as "statesman," yet Downbeat (Bill Milkowski) is right. Shipp turns 60 this December. When he speaks, people listen (the old E.F. Hutton commercials come to mind). With Andrew Hill, Mal Waldron, Cecil Taylor, Horace Tapscott, Randy Weston, and McCoy Tyner now gone, who are the elder jazz piano giants now living? Dave Burrel…

Recorded direct to lathe cut, this pair of spontaneous creations teams two Berlin-based horn players with two New Yorkers of broad-ranging vision. Talibam! (Matt Mottel and Kevin Shea) is a 14-year working unit based in New York City that can be described in various ways - as a classic keyboards/drums expanded-jazz duo, as Dadaist provocateurs with an innate love for the history of music, as a Fluxus-informed theater troupe, as an electronic ensemble inspired by Stockhausen, or as a rhythm secti…

The second album by this all-star quartet Far Victor's SoundNoiseFunk - both on ESP-Disk' - was recorded over two sets mixing planned and freely improvised music. It is a cry of frustration, but also determination and celebration. Frustration with the state of our country, determination to do something about it, and celebration of the power and joy of spontaneous creativity. There are so many things contributing to this album's joyousness in the face of adversity: the funky grooves that Joe Morr…

CD version. No Love Is Sorrow is the third solo album by American singer-songwriter-guitarist Buck Curran. The album's primary influence draws upon personal experience, along with an idiosyncratic musical style developed over many years as a solo artist and member of the psych-folk duo Arborea. The album presents a body of soundscapes... acoustic and electric instrumentals, psychedelic poetic folk songs... compositions inspired by visions of the surreal landscapes of life: love, hope, loss, fear…

In his five-decade career, finger-style acoustic guitarist Duck Baker has played in lots of styles, from folk (real folk, such as Scottish and Irish fiddle tunes) to blues to jazz, in the latter genre particularly focusing on bebop greats, with whole albums devoted to the music of Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. But he has flashed an avant-garde side as well, and of course ESP-Disk' was interested in exposing more of the latter work. This album of duos and trios with an all-star roster of pl…

This music is inspired by Robert Henri (June 24, 1865 - July 12, 1929) artist, teacher, writer and an organizer of the group known as The Eight, a loose association of artists who protested the restrictive exhibition practices of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design. Personnel: Michael Bisio - bass; Kirk Knuffke - cornet and soprano cornet; Fred Lonberg-Holm - cello/electronics. Recorded September 24, 2018 by Eli Winograd at Lone Pine Road, Kingston NY. On the trio's last record…

Larry Ochs and Donald Robinson's second and definitive recording will be released on legendary free jazz label ESP-Disk'. Ochs is a founding member of the great ROVA Saxophone Quartet, one of the Bay Area's avant-garde treasures since 1978. Robinson - "a percussive dervish", according to Coda - was the drummer of choice for ROVA's revivification of John Coltrane's Ascension. The East Bay Express has said of the saxophonist's sound, "Ochs' full-bodied tenor is out of the John Coltrane/Albert Ayle…

Allen Lowe says: "To me, free improvisation is another form of narrative, just as linear in terms of the consciousness of moving from one place to another, as any kind of storytelling. Yes, anyone can do it, you might say (and this is an old argument in jazz circles) but not everyone can do it with purpose and form and like they really mean it. This group is the epitome of all that has changed for the better in jazz in the past 50 years, and I am thrilled to be in it." Kevin Ray says: "This band…

Korean pianist Eunhye Jeong is a game-changer. She's jazz from a different perspective. She's a pianist who doesn't sound like anyone else on the scene. In her liner notes for the release, Jeong writes, "I made my first solo piano recording under the name Chi-Da. Chi-Da and Nolda can both be translated as 'play.' While Chi-Da refers to physical motions that produce sounds by crashing together two objects, Nolda is more associated with playful activities. One may interpret this word as a fun, fre…

Despite the obvious obstacles, this singular San Francisco Bay Area band is staying on mission, moving forward. Over its four-plus decades the quartet has defined itself by applying an array of improvisational strategies to an ever-expanding body of new music. The Circumference of Reason includes six tracks composed or, in the case of "NC17", designed between 2011 and 2016; then - in typical ROVA fashion - the pieces were worked over and performed by the quartet in rehearsals and concerts until …

The latest release from polymath and musical maximalist Gabriel Zucker is a sprawling and ambitious achievement that defies categorization, featuring complex mixed-meter jazz, virtuosic chamber music, electronic soundscapes, and indie art rock - performed with emotion and urgency by Zucker's virtuoso large ensemble The Delegation. Written primarily between 2015 and 2018, during several stints Zucker spent living and performing in England and throughout Europe, the record reckons with time, and w…

ESP-Disk's drive to revive weird rock begun in 2019 with Painted Faces' Tales from the Skinny Apartment (ESPDISK 5032LP) and continued in 2020 with the OPTO S LP Human Indictive / Live (ESPDISK 5055LP), is furthered with the new studio album by this Massachusetts quartet, recorded in mid-2020. Formed in 2016, it has an LP on the great Feeding Tube imprint and a handful of cassettes and CD-Rs, most self-released. Although, yes, there's a distinct Velvet Underground influence to be heard, there's …

Extraordinary NYC trio Attitude! combine free jazz and post-punk with pointed commentary about issues of race, gender, the pandemic, and political autonomy. Rose Tang, a Mongol from Sichuan, sings/recites and plays guitar, piano, and percussion. Her album with Roses & Roaches, And Yet We Ain't Alone, was released by 577 earlier in 2021. Mentored by free jazz legend Daniel Carter, Tang plays in about 30 bands and ensembles in New York and Seattle. Her music, which she hates to be labeled, may be …

In a two-decade career, Raymond Byron Magic Raposa has recorded six albums as Castanets, another as Raymond Byron and the White Freighter, and has worked with musicians ranging from Annie Clark (St. Vincent), Matthew Houck (Phosphorescent), and Sufjan Stevens, to Liz Janes, Jana Hunter, Nathan Hubbard (Trummerflora, Cosmologic), and John McCauley (Deer Tick). Over the course of that time, his music has been called part of the new weird America movement, freak-folk, psychedelic folk, and indie fo…

After paying his dues with bluesmen Albert King and Bobby "Blue" Bland and jazzman Jaki Byard, Michael Marcus had his first album released in 1991, when he was 39. He's been much more prolific since then, co-leading Cosmosamatics with Sonny Simmons, SaxEmble with Frank Lowe and James Carter, Blue Reality Quartet with Joe McPhee, Warren Smith, and Jay Rosen, and Duology with Ted Daniel as well as Marcus's many albums as sole leader. Frank Lacy moved to New York in 1981 and soon established himsel…

Allen Lowe writes: "America: The Rough Cut is my statement not only on American music and American song, but also my commentary on the way American musicians of all styles handle that old-time music and those old song forms . . . The old things - not just the blues, but gospel music and pre-blues shouts and language, plus hillbilly/minstrel song and medicine show irony - reflect a disinterest in the polite trappings of (primarily but not only white) society, an implicit rejection of basic tonal,…

Allen Lowe writes: "In the Dark is a commemoration (sic) of the worst time of my life - a period during which, having been operated on to remove a cancerous tumor in my sinus, I slept for only brief periods of time. Sometimes I made it as long as two hours continuously, but most often I dozed off for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe an hour - encamped as I was on my couch, trying not to wake my wife as I wandered in the dark contemplating the long night ahead. Sometimes I turned the television set …

The most well-informed aficionados of NYC's jazz avant-garde speak of pianist John Blum with reverential respect, yet his discography is shockingly small for someone with a three-decade career: five albums as a leader, four as a sideman. Blum studied piano with seminal avant-gardist Cecil Taylor and ambidextrous master Borah Bergman, and it shows, yet his style at its most intense is more thickly textured than even theirs, and fully individualistic. Blum's left hand recalls James P. Johnson: ene…

ESP-Disk presents They Tried To Kill Me Yesterday. Frequently lyrical, sometimes hard-hitting, nostalgic for jazz and R&B, proud of African-American heroes, Paul r. Harding has been around, has seen and heard things he reflects on and refracts to us with vivid words. Based in upstate New York, he's joined by bassist Michael Bisio (Matthew Shipp Trio) and, on half the tracks, by percussionist Juma Sultan (who played with Jimi Hendrix).

Look at those players Alon Nechushtan brought together for this gig! The late, great Roy Campbell; reed masters Daniel Carter and Sabir Mateen; mayor of the NYC avant-jazz scene William Parker; versatile drummer Federico Ughi. Then listen: they all live up to their reputations. And then there's Nechushtan himself, born in Tel Aviv and long a thriving presence in New York as both composer and improviser. This concert happened at a time of considerable ferment on the NYC scene, with established vi…

Guillermo Gregorio has been exploring space and form and gesture in music for a very long time. In 1969, with composers Norberto Chavarri and Roque de Pedro, he cofounded the collective Movimiento Música Más, which for a while staged public interventions, performances, and happenings even as the political skies were darkening again. He finally left Argentina in 1985, living in Vienna, L.A., and Cologne through the end of that decade, before settling in Chicago for the next 25 years. Already in V…

Frank London writes in his liner notes: "Spirit Stronger Than Blood pays homage to some of the recordings that shaped my musical-spiritual aesthetic: Charles Mingus's Changes 1&2, Booker Little's Strength and Sanity, Pharaoh Sanders's Peace and Love, Clifford Thornton's Gardens of Harlem, Alice Coltrane's Ptah, The El Daoud. Each of these artists, as different as they are from each other, shared a commonality of intention that set me on my life and career path. Their music is spiritual, politica…

Volume 1. One might think that an album titled Louis Armstrong's America is a tribute to the famed trumpeter, and certainly he's a focus here, but a normal tribute would feature compositions by him, or at least associated with him. Allen Lowe doesn't operate in the realm of the predictable, though; instead, the concept - powered entirely by Lowe compositions - takes in not just Armstrong's influence but also the evolution of jazz starting with influences (not all jazz) on Armstrong and continuin…

When Michael Bisio heard Korean pianist Eunhye Jeong's ESP-Disk 2021 album NOLDA, he expressed interest in working with her. After a successful and riveting duo concert in Kingston, NY showed what a good match they were, ESP was eager to document their musical affinity. One of the concert attendees was avant-jazz sax icon Joe McPhee, who guested with the duo at their subsequent studio session along with one of ESP's favorite drummers, Jay Rosen. Magical moments abounded, as you can hear on this …

Written, produced, recorded, and mixed by Buck Curran at Via Paleocapa, Bergamo, Italy between April 2024 and January 2025. Mastered by Harris Newman, Grey Market Mastering, Montreal, Canada. Curran's ninth solo album finds an elemental, full-form return to his musical roots: a deep love for the ambient and resonant nature of the acoustic steel-string guitar in alternate tunings. In company and reunited (after an 18-year separation) with a rare "Butterfly" Model 1 acoustic guitar made by Stefan …

Entropic Hop's sophomore studio album, their first on ESP-Disk', is a covert extraterrestrial mind control program utilizing controversial sonic hypnosis techniques; a prurient hyperreal triad unraveling in sonic flux while rupturing auditory expectations; an inter-dimensional artifact filtering rigorous initiation rituals and organized chaos into weapons of discourse against hierarchical coercion. After the psychoactive success of their 2023 Japanese tour, Entropic Hop returned to NYC envisioni…

After paying his dues with bluesmen Albert King and Bobby "Blue" Bland and jazzman Jaki Byard, Michael Marcus had his first album released in 1991, when he was 39. He's been prolific since then, co-leading Cosmosamatics with Sonny Simmons, SaxEmble with Frank Lowe and James Carter, Blue Reality Quartet with Joe McPhee, Warren Smith, and Jay Rosen, and Duology with Ted Daniel as well as Marcus's many albums as sole leader. Marcus had his debut on ESP with Abstractions in Lime Caverns in 2022. As …

This album is part of two ESP-Disk' initiatives. The one that came first is the idea of teaming up artists who haven't worked together before. In this case, longtime collaborators Ullmann and Swell play with a rhythm section new to Ullmann: Morris and Downs. And, this is another ESP release featuring Charles Downs. The senior member of the trio, he is also known to jazz aficionados as Rashid Bakr, the name he used while drumming in various Cecil Taylor groups, Ensemble Muntu, and Other Dimension…

The core of Gschlössl, Ullmann, and Leipnitz remains; Haves has become a constant as well. This time out they are joined by Messerschmidt and Hillbig. GULF of BERLIN is a sextet consisting of five musicians and a real-time sound designer, exploring the space between improvisation and composition. What initially appears to be spontaneous sonic creation gradually reveals itself as music that emerges in the moment while unfolding according to its own internal logic. Each individual acoustic voice i…

Notes by Bruce: water under the bridge: "... and now we've returned to the work as different people, imaginations stretched in unimagined ways. With this new recording, rehearsal and performance dates set, the quartet is once again finding its footing, weathering many forces at play - those life-and-death circumstances that attend us daily. Yet, as the years pass, ROVA remains dedicated to creating/realizing personal works for saxophone quartet. Booked with pieces by Steve and Jon, we present th…

Giancarlo Schiaffini composes, arranges and conducts a brass-heavy ensemble from the trombone, recorded at Trafalgar Studios in March 2007. With Giovanni Maier on bass, Beppe Caruso on tuba, Gianpiero Malfatto on euphonium, Martin Mayes on French horn and U.T. Gandhi on drums. Seven pieces, from Basic Blues and Tuba Libre to Concerto Grasso. Released by Pentaflowers.