Jazz /
Eyes On The Horizon
Bassist-composer Joe Fonda’s Eyes on the Horizon is a gift—a gift from a former student to his master teacher, Wadada Leo Smith. It is the best possible gift a mentor can receive—it doesn’t imitate Wadada’s own work, it’s entirely in Joe’s voice. Featuring Wadada Leo Smith himself, pianist Satoko Fujii, and drummer Tiziano Tononi, it is a gift given by a mature artist out of respect to another whose example of artistic integrity, perseverance, and ongoing creativity continues to inspire him to …
The Susceptible Now
‘The Susceptible Now’ is the new record by drummer and 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner Tyshawn Sorey, who on this occasion offers covers of some of his favourite tracks. With his trio consisting of Aaron Diehl on piano and Harish Raghavan on bass, Sorey continues in the wake of his masterful ‘Continuing’, a record that placed fourth in the 2023 rankings voted by over 150 jazz critics in the Francis Davis Poll and was described by The Guardian as: ‘5 stars: seething with reinventions of ancient magic.…
Folio #5
Brûlez les meubles is a dual-headed jazz project led primarily by Éric Normand (Rimouski) and Louis Beaudoin de la Sablonnière (Montreal). Born from their mutual passion for each other’s eccentric musical worlds, this duo is known for collaborating with experimental improvisers and renowned artists. Their music is abstract and meditative, both modern and simple, drawing inspiration from jazz guitar legends such as Jim Hall, Bill Frisell, René Thomas, and Brandon Ross.
Their fifth album, Folio #5…
Àlea
"Sofa is delighted to announce the Italian musician and composer Andrea Giordano (b. 1995)’s Àlea, a suite for large mixed ensemble in which Giordano also performs as vocalist and multi-instrumentalist. Dedicated to Giordano’s friend and mentor, the Italian jazz musician and pedagogue Alessandra Giachero, who died unexpectedly in 2020, Àlea is at once a lament and testament to Giordano’s multifarious musicianship. In dense, rending orchestration, the artist shows us the multidimensionality of gr…
Dawn & Dusk
*2024 stock* The Wind (music by Scott Clark, lyrics by Laura Ann Singh/Scott Clark)Dawn & Dusk (music by Scott Clark, lyrics by Laura Ann Singh)Silent Singing (music and lyrics by Scott Clark)Above The Gray (music by Scott Clark)
Tracks 1-4 recorded August 16, 2021 and mixed at Minimum Wage Recording by Lance Koehler.Tracks 5-8 recorded live March 28, 2022 and mixed at Spacebomb Studio by Curtis Fye.Tracks 1-8 mastered at Minimum Wage Recording by Lance Koehler.Album art + design by TJ Huff (huf…
Clamor
*2024 stock* Clamor rethinks the notion of 'women's work' as a space for both collaboration and singular voice. Just as our ensemble is limited and enabled by the written score, so might be individual enunciations of how gender norms limit agency. Clamor utilizes a collective, improvisational vision that prioritizes an intentionally fluid style by employing indeterminacy, navigated by the performers via time-based scores. These principles are balanced with metered notation to shape the overall f…
Bakunawa
Andrew Barker - drums, percussion William Parker - bass, b flat pocket tuba, gralla Jon Irabagon - tenor saxophone, sopranino saxophone
Recorded by Andrew Barker January 3rd, 2022 at Phantom Ear Studio, Brooklyn, NY.Mixed by Andrew Barker.Mastered by Steve Silverstein.
Sweet World
Sweet World was recorded in the summer of 2023 in Brooklyn. It features a book of songs that my trio with drummer Nathan Ellman-Bell, and cellist Christopher Hoffman performed for a year or so leading up to the recording. I wrote most of these songs with Nathan and Chris in mind. I tried to bring my whole musical self to this project. I love so many kinds of music. Improvisation is central to everything I do. The written material for these pieces all fit on one or two pages and each of them crea…
Hammer, Roll and Leaf
The saxophonist Sakina Abdou follows up her first solo album with this trio release, which has all the freshness of a very first encounter.The album is the fruit of an improvised, closed session of several days in her home, punctuated by two concerts, and offers an arc of 60 minutes that retraces a musical itinerary that is intimate and acoustic. We have previously heard Toma Gouband with Evan Parker and the pianist Marta Warelis with Dave Douglas and Andy Moor. Sakina Abdou first played with Go…
Entwined
Avant-garde bassoonist Karen Borca's first proper leader record is a series of duos with drummer Paul Murphy who she first played with in Jimmy Lyons group.
Dust And Ash
“Weston lays down a ferocious groove with ecstatic shouts … tugging rhythmic displacements that tease like thunder and lightning throughout.” — All About Jazz
Tchak
Un Drame Musical Instantané were founded in 1976, featuring Jean-Jacques Birgé, Bernard Vitet and Francis Gorgé. Their aim was to promote collective musical creation, co-signing their albums, which they consider as artworks in themselves, or their live shows which they tried to renew every time they played. Their sound was created with many influences: They borrowed their sources from rock (synthesizer player Birgé and guitarist Gorgé, both authors of the album, Défense de); jazz (trumpeter Vite…
Star Motel: An American Music Experience
The J&F Band is on the move once again! The new musical journey taken by the band with "Star Motel: an American music experience" spans from the North-East Chicago blues, with Route 66, to the funk of the deep South, going West to L.A. via Nogales, Arizona, to meet the Mingus ghost and his visions, back through the Great Plains where the Rez is the way of life for many. To end where it all began, in the South-East country and funky vibe... The 30-minute Mingus celebration, in the 100th annivers…
Dream Walks
"The starry floor/The watery shore/Is given thee til the break of day.“ - William Blake
Music records a dream in which your other body goes out for a walk with a friend or two or more and brings back things you can grasp in the real world. If the ground beneath you is water and reflects the stars you may dream you're walking on stars. One morning, the Somnambulist woke up from his dream-walk with a record in his hand and miraculously they were all there: the uncanny encounters, spooling elucubra…
Everything Is True
Everything is True is an album of a personal and sentimental nature, where various musical styles blend, influenced by music from different cultures, contemporary, orchestral, and electronic music. The instrumentarium is equally diverse, combining acoustic, electronic, and even unconventional instruments such as lithophones or prototypes of string instruments like the bassdesmophon. This fusion creates timeless-sounding pieces with exceptional tonality. Most of the tracks on the album were recor…
Forest
This year, one of the greatest pianists of improvised music, Marilyn Crispell became the winner of the famous NEA Jazz Masters 2025 award, thus joining the ranks of such jazz wizards as, among others. in Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Dizzy Gillespie, Sun Ra, Gil Evans, Sarah Vaughan, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Muhal Richard Abrams and Anthony Braxton, with whom, by the way, Marilyn spent several years in his second great quartet.
As all of us intrigu…
Oils
In the second half of the eighties, I heard the duo of Charles Gayle and Peter Kowald at the Jazz Days in Novi Sad. A few years later, when Szilárd Mezei and I met, and played music together, I told him a lot about the experience that this concert had given me. I remember that the intensity, the density, the strikingly different quality of Gayle's music-making was beyond my comprehension, or even my measure. And then the world changed, and what seemed unattainable at the time became reality. A j…
PolyTropos / Of Many Turns
PolyTropos / Of Many Turns is the highly-anticipated new release from influential saxophonist / composer Steve Coleman. Comprised of two live sets recorded during a tour in France, it features his band Five Elements, with long-running partners Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet and Sean Rickman on drums, with new addition Rich Brown on bass. Recorded in concert in Paris and Voiron, the performances are raw, relying on spontaneous conversions of rhythmic and tonal shapes that weave musical figures int…
Zealous Angles
Zealous Angles is the first documentation of pianist/composer Matt Mitchell’s long-running trio featuring bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Dan Weiss.Pi Recordings’ not-so-secret weapon, Mitchell now has six releases as a leader or co-leader and fourteen appearances on the label. His 2024 release Illimitable (on his and Kate Gentile's Obliquity Records) was called “one of greatest albums of spontaneously composed solo piano music, ever…. a masterpiece of twenty-first century solo piano music” by…
Levs
Bassist Kim Cass is among a vanguard group of Brooklyn-based improvisors who are creating works at the leading-edge of rhythmic acuity. Levs, his debut with Pi Recordings, features pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who called Cass “a singular composer and player: the man can do things that don’t seem possible on the bass, displaying a technical command of the instrument on the level of the most celebrated virtuosic performers in any genre of music.”The compositions on Levs were in…