Jazz & Improvisation / Free Improvisation

Follow up to 2020's Plays For Trane, this is Plays For Trane Vol. 2. The band dives further into John Coltrane's catalog, turning it inside out, bending it, holding it with care. Forkelid, together with Mattias Ståhl, David Stackenäs, Vilhelm Bromander and Jon Fält, revisit the jazz giant in a celebrated transformation, reimagining the sounds of John Coltrane.

Paul Bley and trumpeter Herbie Spanier played free duets in Los Angeles in 1958, around the time Ornette Coleman passed through Bley's band. That music was never documented. In Montreal in August 1993 they tried again, with Geordie McDonald's rack of gongs, shakers and temple blocks. Thirteen short improvisations.

Paul Bley was born in Montreal in 1932 and left for New York at the start of the 1950s. He had already taken over Oscar Peterson's chair at the Alberta Lounge as a teenager. In December 1987 he came home, sat down at Studio Tempo, and recorded ten improvisations for a local label that was then four years old. Solo was the first of the dozen or so records Bley made for Jim West's Justin Time over the next twenty years, a run that ended with About Time in 2008. It is also a digital recording from …

Five years after Julius Hemphill's death, the World Saxophone Quartet records its farewell to him: four horns alone, no drums, at Studio Victor in Montreal in 1999. David Murray's title piece, three Oliver Lake tunes, a Jack DeJohnette opener. The Penguin Guide calls it one of the group's most accessible records.

Cecil Taylor solo at the Talos Festival, Ruvo di Puglia, 10 September 2000: one continuous improvisation, unreleased for twenty-one years and issued by Enja in 2021 for its fiftieth anniversary. From the same week as the Willisau concert and the same trip that produced The Owner of the River Bank.

Studio Tempo, Montreal, 19 July 1996. Kenny Wheeler and Paul Bley, two Canadians who left for New York forty years earlier, in duo for the first time on record. Thirteen short pieces, seven by Wheeler and six by Bley, alternating; trumpet and flugelhorn against a piano that leaves most of the space empty.

Villingen, 26 February 1971. Friedrich Gulda's self-portrait in the form of a course, a double LP mostly of solo piano with Klaus Weiss on drums, Fritz Pauer and a horn section including Benny Bailey and Sahib Shihab. Prelude and Fugue, Play Piano Play, a set of variations on Light My Fire, and a Goethe setting.

Berlin, Teldec Studio, 7 November 1971, the same day Terumasa Hino was cutting Vibrations for Enja across town. Joachim-Ernst Berendt, who had brought Masahiko Satoh's trio to the Berliner Jazztage, put them in a studio with the Hungarian guitarist Attila Zoller: Satoh on piano, Yasuo Arakawa on bass, Masahiko Ozu on drums, Zoller on guitar. MPS released it in 1972. Six pieces. Meet, nine minutes, opens; Sazo is short; the traditional Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair is the ballad; Clos…

Four improvisers in a historic water tower in Braunschweig: overtone singing, Tibetan bells, trumpet, pipe organ, alto sax and double bass stretched into seven long, reverberant, meditative pieces. Limited to 350 copies.

Alexander von Schlippenbach on piano and Sven-Åke Johansson on voice, accordion and drums, live at Onkel Pö in Hamburg in March 1978: a free improvised take on the German Lied, recorded by NDR.

Solo percussion album recorded in August 1980 by Masahiko Togashi, alone with drums, gongs, bells and hand percussion on a kit of his own design, reissued on LP with obi and liner notes in the Spin This Now! series.

Nick Dunston's trio with Kalia Vandever on trombone and DoYeon Kim on gayageum: open structures between song and soundscape for bass, trombone and Korean zither, with liner notes by Wendy Eisenberg.

Debut of the trio Secret People: Nathaniel Morgan on alto saxophone, Dustin Carlson on guitar and Bass VI, Kate Gentile on drums and vibraphone, recorded in August 2019.

Wendy Eisenberg performs her own long-form text score, memorised and played from memory: one disc of solo guitar and one of solo banjo, recorded at Firehouse 12 in New Haven in March 2019.

Father and son duo: Michael Formanek on double bass and Peter Formanek on tenor saxophone and clarinet, recorded in December 2019 after their first tour together, with pieces by each of them and by both.

Solo record by drummer and percussionist Scott Clark, also on harmonica, recorded live in Richmond, Virginia, in May 2019 and named after Rilke's poem Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower.

The complete first concert of the two-trumpet quartet of Herb Robertson and Dave Ballou with Drew Gress and Tom Rainey, recorded at The Stone NYC in June 2007: the first set reissued, the second issued for the first time.

First vinyl edition of Nick Dunston's 2019 debut Atlantic Extraction, on translucent yellow vinyl limited to 200 copies: a quintet of double bass, flutes, violin and viola, guitar and drums.

Michaël Attias' first solo album, recorded in one session with no overdubs: alto saxophone played with the left hand and piano with the right, the saxophone setting the piano strings into sympathetic resonance.

In Energy Center, Ed Hazell tells the essential story of Studio Rivbea, the Lower Manhattan loft where Sam Rivers and Bea Rivers made radical music possible on its own terms. Drawing on new research, photographs, posters and an unrivalled sessionography, the book restores 24 Bond Street as a home, school, rehearsal room and self-determined cultural engine.

After a nine-year hiatus, Marteau Rouge  — Pauvros, Foussat, Sato — made a comeback for a one-off concert, this time alongside Daunik Lazro, one of their long-standing friends.

First meeting of two incredible talents - Tyshawn Sorey on drums and Pat Thomas on piano.

Two side-long improvisations recorded in a spring evening beneath a 1908 shot tower. That is the whole record, and it is enough. Fysiikka ja Kemia - Physics and Chemistry - surfaced in late 2025 with Biologia, a debut LP on Tampere's Ultraääni Records that the label summed up in a single line: rural psych-jazz improvisations by the Finnish bastard sons of Arbete & Fritid. Three hundred copies, each sleeve screen-printed by hand by the band, gone quickly. We Jazz picked a track for their Friends …

Trost Records is pleased to release Live at Kafé Hærverk, the latest transmission from one of the most exciƟng figures in European jazz, the Oslo-based Danish saxophonist and composer Amalie Dahl. Since dropping the debut album with her stellar quintet Dafnie in 2022, Dahl has enjoyed a meteoric rise, both in terms of acclaim and ambition. This new live album, taped at one of Oslo’s most beloved venues in March of 2025, arrives on the heels of the duly lauded Dafnie Extended—Live at Molde Jazz, …

*200 copies limited edition* Jump is a new pan-European trio bringing together three musicians from different generations and backgrounds: British pianist Pat Thomas, Danish saxophonist and composer Maria Dybbroe, and Italian vocalist, composer and multi-instrumentalist Andrea S. Giordano. The three met in Oslo in August 2021, as the pandemic was finally beginning to loosen its grip. Their first encounter was immediate and symbiotic, making it clear that a new band had taken shape. Since then, J…

On Sweet Love, Bitter, Mal Waldron turns a fictional portrait of Charlie Parker’s final years into a darkly luminous suite of cinematic jazz. His lyricism, tension and blues‑stained restraint guide a formidable 1967 ensemble through music that moves beyond soundtrack function, making New York feel bruised, nocturnal and fiercely alive.

Back at the end of 2023, Giotis Damianidis and Aleksandar Škorić, while finishing their tour with Entasis, began talking and dreaming about a tour of the Balkans—starting from Thessaloniki (Damianidis’s hometown) and heading north to Novi Sad (Škorić’s hometown). Next came deciding the lineup. John Dikeman on saxophone and Petros Damianidis on double bass were the obvious choices, as Škorić, Dikeman, and the Damianidis brothers have worked together for many years. On March 16th, 2024, the tour w…

Wewantsounds presents the first official release of a legendary 1977 concert, capturing Don Cherry, Collin Walcott and Leon Thomas in their only documented performance together, joined for part of the night by the rest of Oregon. Long circulating among a few Cherry fans, Sunrise is a hypnotic forerunner to Codona, newly remastered, with Moki Cherry artwork and new liner notes by Jason Weiss.

In September, 1967, three of the primary ensembles of free music in Northern Europe gathered for a mini-festival on Radio Bremen: the Manfred Schoof Quintet, the Peter Brötzmann Quartet, and the Irène Schweizer Trio. Pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach appeared as part of the Manfred Schoof Quintet, but in these sets, which mixed the dozen members of the ensembles, as well as presenting them on their own, Schlippenbach in fact either led or was at the center of several groupings, presenting two …

Brasil & The Gallowbrothers Band are proud to announce the release of Record, Erase...Start Over Again, a powerful new record that captures the energy of live performance, the emotion of reinvention, and the joy of turning mistakes into momentum. Across the album, the band invites listeners into a world where every groove tells a story and every transition feels like a fresh start. From driving moments to deeply reflective passages, Record, Erase...Start Over Again follows an arc of growth—one t…

Very rare 4LP box set released in 2013 by Sagittarius A-Star in an edition of 26 numbered copies containing one LP by Idris Ackamoor & Hakeem Muhammad, one LP by the Idris Ackamoor Paris Quartet and two LP's by The Collective. With cards.

Original and sole edition of 300 copies on Humming Bird Records of the 1980 album. Never re-issued on either vinyl or CD.

Original and sole edition on Garlic Records of the 1988 album. Never re-issued on either vinyl or CD.

Original and sole vinyl edition on QED Records of the 1979 album.

* Edition of 300 copies. High thickness cardboard with opaque laminated cover. Comes with a printed insert * So… Steinmetz. Hugh Steinmetz. A Danish trumpet player my mentor Peter Brötzmann always talked highly about. 'Aaaaah jaaaaa - those crazy Danes!' Steinmetz was one of very few Scandinavian musicians who actually travelled south and collaborated with European musicians in the late 60s. He is a legend. And a key to understand the early developments of free jazz. The possibilities given to S…

Two sessions from the white heat of mid-sixties New York, drawn from the ESP-Disk archive and returned to full clarity in the new Reference series from AlAy, the Basel imprint curated by Werner X. Uehlinger. The Call brings together the only recording ever made under the direction of the painter, engineer and multi-instrumentalist Marzette Watts and the sole date led by the great bassist Henry Grimes, the connecting thread between the two, in a single volume with sonic restoration and mastering …

Original German edition on Enja Records of the 1979 album.

1974 Japanese re-issue on Fontana/Limelight's "'75 Attention! Completely Limited ¥1,300" series of the 1965 album featuring Misha Mengelberg, Jacques Schols and Han Bennink. With insert and obi.

1974 Japanese re-issue on Mercury of the 1965 album featuring Misha Mengelberg, Jacques Schols and Han Bennink. With insert and obi.

1984 Japanese re-issue with different cover on Fontana's "New Jazz Series" of the 1965 album featuring Misha Mengelberg, Jacques Schols and Han Bennink. With insert and obi.