Jazz & Improvisation / Free Improvisation

Kaze and Koichi Makigami Unleash Musical Mayhem on New Album Shishiodoshi.

Zorn’s compositions for classical soloists with rhythm section are among the most successful and powerful meetings of classical and jazz ever conceived—completely notated virtuosic scores for classical players augmented by improvisers who illuminate the music with surprise, support, and an imaginative unpredictability. Mining this magical world since 2010, the project reached its apotheosis in the acclaimed 2021 release “Heaven and Earth Magick.” Here that same quartet divides into different gro…

With “Suite for Piano” in 2022, Zorn began exploring classical forms in the context of the jazz piano trio. The second CD in the series was a beautiful collection of “Ballades,” released in July 2024. This third project presents nine Impromptus—freewheeling forms that unfold like brilliantly imaginative short stories. Brian, Jorge, and Ches outdo themselves here with telepathic interplay, endless creativity, and a courageous ability to go places that have never been discovered before. With each …

Max Roach wasn't just one of the greatest drummers and percussionists in jazz history; he was also one of the greatest bandleaders in all of jazz, able to adapt his playing to an innumerable array of styles, from bop to free, and blessed with a keen eye and ear for talent. And he always, always kept pushing himself and his bandmates to find new modes of musical expression throughout his six-decade career. Speaking of modes, this 1968 release on the Atlantic label is one of his finest albums, a m…

2025 stock In the ever-evolving landscape of European improvised music, Groet stands as a testament to the restless creativity and sly wit of pianist Guus Janssen and drummer Han Bennink. Released on the Dutch label Data in 2005, this album captures two of the Netherlands’ most idiosyncratic voices in a dialogue that is as unpredictable as it is deeply musical. Janssen and Bennink, both veterans of the Dutch avant-garde, approach the piano-drum duo format with a sense of play that borders on the…

2025 stock In the ever-evolving landscape of European improvisation, Apa Ini stands as a testament to the restless creativity of saxophonist Tobias Delius and his ensemble. Released on the Dutch label Data Records in 2003, the album brings together a formidable quartet: Delius on tenor saxophone, Hilary Jeffery on trombone, Wilbert de Joode on double bass, and Serigne C.M. Gueye on percussion Apa Ini is not an album that seeks easy answers or comfortable resolutions. Instead, it thrives on the t…

2025 stock In the early 1980s, the Dutch improvisation scene was a crucible of restless invention, and Cellotape & Scotchtape stands as a quietly radical document from its margins. Released on the small but influential Data label, this collaboration between cellist Ernst Reijseger and Scottish percussionist Alan "Gunga" Purves is a study in playful, tactile exploration—music that feels as if it’s being assembled in real time from the detritus of the everyday. Reijseger, already known for his uno…

2025 stock In the late 1970s, Amsterdam was a crucible for radical improvisation, and Mistakes—the collaboration between South African saxophonist Sean Bergin and Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger—stands as a vivid document of that era’s restless energy. Released on the Data label, the album captures two musicians at the threshold of their creative powers, forging a dialogue that is as unpredictable as it is intimate. Bergin, who had recently relocated from Durban, brings a raw, searching lyricism t…

2025 stock Elastic Jargon is an album by Dutch composer and violist Maurice Horsthuis, released in 2007 on the Data label. The project brings together a unique ensemble of string players, with Horsthuis as the sole composer, exploring the boundaries of what can be achieved with string instruments alone.

2025 stock In the shadowy interstices of contemporary jazz and free improvisation, Slang by Elastic Jargon emerges as a document of restless inquiry and coded communication. Released on the Dutch label Data in 2010, the album is a cryptic dispatch from the margins, where genre boundaries are not so much blurred as actively subverted Elastic Jargon—true to their name—stretch the language of jazz until it snaps, then reassemble the fragments into something at once familiar and alien. The group’s a…

2025 stock In the ever-mutable landscape of Dutch jazz, Joost Buis’s Astronotes stands as a testament to the playful collision of composition and improvisation. Released on the Data label in 2004, the album finds Buis—trombonist, composer, and bandleader—at the helm of a vibrant ensemble drawn from the heart of Amsterdam’s creative music scene. From the opening bars of “The Eggs,” it’s clear that Buis is less interested in adhering to tradition than in subverting it with wit and invention. The b…

American percussionist Jeff Arnal and German pianist-composer Dietrich Eichmann’s two-decade partnership fuses polyrhythmic structures and vibrant textures in dynamic, improvised soundscapes. "Tides of Unrest" captures their creative synergy in a 2023 session, blending innovation, tradition, and collaboration.

"What we have here is a result of an idea ignited almost 15 years ago with its roots deep in the era of subculture 1990s, when its teenage protagonists started listening to records. But the comradeship between the three of us started in the early 2000 when I was pursuing my first Utopian idea of an art commune in the form of a counter-festival in the Southeastern Slovenian countryside on the border with Croatia. An idea from which, years later, another Utopian project was born - an international…

Acclaimed Belgian duo Poor Isa (banjoists Ruben Machtelinckx and Frederik Leroux) present their third album, evolving their minimalist style by collaborating with saxophonist Evan Parker and percussionist Ingar Zach. The result is a rich blend of introspective textures and dynamic improvisation.

*2025 stock* 'From the early years of Norwegian jazz, few albums have stood the test of time as well as the venturesome and subtly psychedelic Plastic Sun. It was the Svein Finnerud's second disc, and was released on Sonet in 1970. Inexplicably for an album of such beauty, it has been a hard-to-find collector's item for decades, having only been reissued once before, in 1998, as a CD on the Norwegian Jazz Federation's Odin label. In April 2018, Odin have reissued it again, this time on CD and in…

Wheelhouse reunites as a trio after a decade apart. Their new work, "House and the Home," reflects years of artistic growth, personal change, and enduring bonds, capturing the essence of shared musical evolution and community.

2018 release ** "Pauline Oliveros was only partly serious when she coined the term "deep listening" 30 years ago. The American composer, accordionist and electronic music pioneer first offered the phrase after recording an album 14 feet underground. Regardless, it has grown to become a meaningful term in avant-garde music circles, promoting the idea that artists can (and perhaps should) listen and react to their environment when performing. This new effort from Xenofox - electric guitarist Olaf …

2016 release ** "With America’s National Parks, visionary composer and Wadada Leo Smith offers his latest epic collection, a suite inspired by the scenic splendor, historic legacy, and political controversies of the country’s public landscapes. Writing for his newly expanded Golden Quintet, Smith crafts six extended works that explore, confront and question the preserved natural resources that are considered the most hallowed ground in the U.S. – and some that should be. His 28-page score for Am…

Shifa is a name taken from the Arabic word for healing, شفاء. The trio's members are three of the UK's most experienced and in-demand improvising musicians.

Jerome Deupree, Sylvie Courvoisier, Joe Morris, Lester St. Louis unite for an album of explosive solos, profound improvisation—a canyon where all musical worlds collide in boundless synergy.

Long-time collaborators and legends of the British improvised music scene, the great saxophone virtuoso John Butcher and the master of the double bass John Edwards, join forces in a duet journey through a fascinating land of sounds, sometimes undiscovered, sometimes impossible, and always breathtaking.

Antonio Borghini and Banquet of Consequences continue on their path of jazz, freedom, and rigor, in which writing, improvisation, tradition, and chaos coexist in a vital and surprising mixture. Well-organized music that uses disorder to its enrichment and is a harbinger of melodic flourishes and references many different kinds of music.

Tip! Two long pieces, a live performance and a rehearsal at home, make up this work by the Braida Locatelli duo, a new stage in their 30-year journey. Improvised music that often sounds composed. Improvised, decomposed, recomposed, composed? A true duo, where one plus one makes one.

A cornerstone of avant-garde jazz, B-X0 NO-47A captures Anthony Braxton at a pivotal moment in his career and in the history of the Association For The Advancement Of Creative Musicians (AACM). Recorded in Paris in 1969 and newly restored from the original master tapes, this classic session finds Braxton leading a quartet of fellow AACM visionaries: trumpeter Leo Smith (before adopting the name Wadada), violinist Leroy Jenkins, and drummer Steve McCall. The group’s instrumentation is strikingly …

On September 30, 1963, American saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk and his quartet gave a small concert in the TV studios of Radio Bremen. The concert was broadcast on ARD in the spring of 1964 as part of the popular "Domino" series. Now the original tapes have resurfaced in the station's archives. Sensational! The former sideman of Charles Mingus, Gil Evans and Quincy Jones had come to Germany not only with his successful Mercury albums "Domino" and "We Free Kings" in his…

Alto saxophonist Marion Brown was an initially underrated hero of the jazz avant-garde. It was only after he moved from Atlanta to New York and joined John Coltrane that the public and the critics took notice of him.Dedicated to discovering the far-reaching possibilities of improvisational expression, Brown possessed a truly lyrical voice. In the early seventies, she played with Anthony Braxton, Andrew Cyrille, Bennie Maupin, Jeanne Lee, and Chick Corea, among others. On this recording he was ac…

German pianist Georg Graewe reunites with drummer Hamid Drake and bassist Brad Jones in a fiery 2024 trio debut at Konfrontationen Festival. Capturing the spirit of his 1990s Chicago collaborations, More Than Anything showcases masterful free improvisation and Graewe’s genre-blurring brilliance.

Lost celestial solo piano transmissions retrieved!

Saxophonist Steve Lehman and trio, with Mark Turner, celebrate Braxton’s 80th in a live set: intense emotion meets cool articulation and rhythmic mastery.

Fred Moten & Brandon López’s duo debut explores cultural innovation, virtuosity, and confronting institutional madness while preserving humanity.

2010 release ** "This is certainly not William Parker's first solo album, he already released "Lifting The Sanctions", "Testimony" and "Painter's Autumn", but this is the first one on which he doesn't play pizzicato, using his bow for the first and lengthy track, called "Cathedral Wisdom Light", on which he demonstrates the unbelievable riches that are hidden in his instrument : from the cry of whales to those of birds, over the pulsing or a heart, or just bone-chilling shrieks. He goes deep her…

2005 release ** "Recorded at the Institut fur Elektronische Musik und Akustik in Graz, Austria during the first week of August 2003, Anthony Braxton's (+ Duke Ellington) Concept of Freedom is a dazzling exercise in collective creativity. Braxton does not perform on this recording. Neither does Ellington, for that matter. Both men and their substantial accomplishments are honored and invoked by a quartet of skilled improvisers. These are trombonist Roland Dahinden, pianist Hildegard Kleeb, violin…

1993 release ** "This trio, comprised of bassist/vocalist Jöelle Léandre, violinist Carlos Zingaro, and accordion and clarinet player Rüdiger Carl have, under the auspices of Léandre's inspiration, come together to create a musical mosaic under the guise of "chamber improvisation." These players take their cues from long developed practices like nuance, empathy and even a kind of sonic telepathy. Léandre, though most understated, is clearly the catalyst in making all things possible in this trio…

1991 release ** The third in a three volume compilation (each available separately) of 114 improvisers from around the world, covering a wide variety of approaches to improvisation. "A turbid dive into new music, this release packs everything from free-form jazz-like scraw to variations in composition, structure and situation to solo exploration." Featuring Pluto, Amy Denio, Davey Williams, LaDonna Smith, Marty Walker, Crawling With Tarts, IDLH, Ed Herrmann, Andrew Voigt, Tom Nunn, Tamio Shirais…

Musical messages from Oslo, New York, Basel and Lugano – recorded between 2018 and 2022 – are juxtaposed and recombined on an absorbing recording that features Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen solo and in a series of duets . With such partners as Craig Taborn, Chris Potter, Sinikka Langeland and Jorge Rossy,  the musical frame of reference is very broad.  Elements from Langeland’s’s archaic-sounding folk to Potter’s post-Coltrane saxophone and Taborn’s whirlwind modernist piano each find their p…

1991 release ** "Recorded at the Listen to Lacy festival in Vienna, 1990, this large ensemble recording is really the Steve Lacy Sextet plus ten. One of the dectet members is Franz Koglmann. Although some of Lacy's other large group experiments met with mixed results, it is not so here. Itinerary, with its seven selections, is an orchestral work on par with at of Gil Evans' (to whom this record is dedicated) Out of the Cool sessions for Impulse, and of course the Gil Evans and Ten recordings tha…

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1989 release ** "On November 23, 1986, at the Galerie Maximilien Guiol, a small art space in Paris, Alan Silva, Roger Turner, Misha Lobko, Didier Petit, and Bruno Girard shared the stage for the first time. They knew each other well, since they had all performed alongside one another in various groupings, but as a quintet, as this quintet, it was their first concert. From the moment Turner starts hitting his metal scraps, they all dive in and begin to Take Some Risks. A satisfying session, focus…

Diriaou (“Thursday” in Breton) captures the singular collaboration between Kristen Noguès-pioneering Celtic harpist and explorer of Breton tradition-and legendary British saxophonist John Surman, renowned for his atmospheric jazz on ECM. Recorded live in 1998 at the Dre Ar Wenojenn festival, this album presents the duo weaving together original compositions and traditional melodies into a tapestry of free folk, modal improvisation, and ambient soundscapes. Noguès, deeply rooted in Breton music y…