Jazz & Improvisation / Free Improvisation

German saxophonist Luise Volkmann and Brazilian guitarist / vocalist Kiko Dinucci return with intimate, devotional new album Canto de Olho.

*2026 stock* The third album of the quartet "Akira Sakata x Triple Edge," in which Masayasu Tsuboguchi, Takeharu Hayakawa, and Masataka Fujikake gather to create a rare improvised world with dynamism as if diverse organisms were wriggling under Akira Sakata, a giant tree several thousand years old.

On Blue Lake, Don Cherry dissolves borders in real time: a transcendent 1971 Paris trio set with Johnny Dyani and Okay Temiz, now restored by Charly and BYG, where flute, bass and percussion spiral through Native American echoes, Far‑Eastern tonalities and two sprawling, ecstatic journeys past the twenty‑five‑minute mark.

Were you to tap the lifeblood of Chicago music, you would find Josh Berman flowing liberally through its veins. Active on the scene for more than a quarter century, the cornetist, bandleader, and composer has helped retain the unique flavor of the city's soundscape, with particular attention to the music of its jazz past – groups like the Austin High Gang and the Oliver-Armstrong lineage and Freddie Keppard, as well as more recent figures from Lester Bowie to Wadada Leo Smith. But Berman is more…

On Live in Europe 1968 & 1972, Marion Brown leads a borderless quartet through two rare European concerts, pairing his singing alto with Gunter Hampel's vibes, Barre Phillips' bass and Steve McCall's drums in a sound that hovers between lyrical free jazz and chamber‑like intimacy.

On Sonic House Reunion, Bobby Bradford, Mark Dresser and Hafez Modirzadeh reconvene a long‑running alliance, turning cornet, five‑string bass and hybrid reeds into a quietly radical chamber unit where Ornette‑rooted lyricism, spectral tuning and deep listening pull the music in multiple directions at once.

On Sun’s Blessings, Sunny Murray and Sabu Toyozumi meet as a double‑drum frontline, turning a 1999 Sapporo concert into a two‑part ritual where clattering polyrhythms, rolling thunder and sudden hollows of space make free improvisation feel both volcanic and oddly tender.

On Keeping It In Context, Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, William Parker and Lou Grassi turn a 1996 Context Studios session into a blazing, deep‑listening workshop, with twin reeds, singing bass and restless drums stretching free jazz language without losing its earthy pulse.

On Three for Shepp, Marion Brown leads a blazing American free‑jazz ensemble with Dave Burrell, Norris “Sirone” Jones and Grachan Moncur III, unleashing high‑energy fire music that shows the Impulse! era at full boil yet still somehow under‑sung.

*2026 stock* Motvind Records stalwarts Miman mark their 10th year as a working band with “X-IV”, their first release since 2021. Including four very different albums, it gives both old and new listeners the opportunity to get to know some of the different musical landscapes in which Miman are right at home. «It doesn’t make much sense to apply a lot of the usual metrics to both the music created by the Scandinavian trio Miman or the way the group operates. Its members possess deep curiosity and …

On Concert A Prades Le Lez, Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra turns Tusques’ radical internationalism into exuberant sound: a border‑smashing live suite where New Orleans, Brittany and North Africa collide in dance‑charged, militant joy.

A late and welcome arrival from the Matchless vaults. Phlegm captures AMM in their classic trio configuration, Eddie Prévost on percussion, Keith Rowe on tabletop electronics, John Tilbury on piano, recorded live at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, November 2015. One continuous hour-long piece, a setting closely aligned with the group's longstanding commitment to electroacoustic improvisation and one of the final documented performances of the trio. By this stage AMM's language had …

Pianist Joel Futterman and bassist William Parker deliver an epic improvisatory journey on this three-track,  hour-long studio recording. Futterman and Parker have worked together in duo and group contexts since the 1980s, and their deep creative bond is audible in every note of this suite.

On this new NooPop Records session, Muriel Grossmann and Tõnu Naissoo ignite a live‑wired studio communion: fully improvised Tallinn meditations where spiritual jazz fervour, modal trance and molten organ grooves collide in real time.

On Oscillations, Sol Sol stretch their free‑jazz vocabulary into something almost cosmic: ten pieces where Elin Forkelid’s four saxes, David Stackenäs’ guitar and the Agnas brothers’ rhythm team move from feather‑light drift to razor‑edged intensity with effortless precision.

On Balladyna, Tomasz Stanko leads Tomasz Szukalski, Dave Holland and Edward Vesala through seven originals that weld lyrical, Slavic melancholy to volcanic free‑jazz undercurrents, forging a 1970s European classic that still feels startlingly alive.

On Firebirds Live At Berkeley Jazz Festival Volume 1, Prince Lawsha convenes a dream quintet with Hadley Caliman, Bobby Hutcherson, Buster Williams and Charles Moffett, igniting a front‑line of reeds over vibraphone‑lit rhythms that balance spiritual uplift and fierce swing.

4LP set. Gatefold sleeve with photographs, concert poster, and new liner notes. Centenary edition. Limited to 2,500 copies worldwide. June 28, 1965: John Coltrane records Ascension at Van Gelder Studio - forty minutes of collective free improvisation that detonates every remaining convention in jazz. July 2: New Thing at Newport. July 6-18: a two-week residency at the Village Gate, doubling with Thelonious Monk. July 26: Coltrane walks onto the stage of the International Jazz Festival at Juan-le…

On Convergence: Live In China, William Hooker and John King turn a Shenzhen stage into a pressure chamber, stretching one unbroken hour of drums and guitar from whispering tension to volcanic release in a charged act of real‑time communication.

On Klotski, Lao Dan Quartet throws tenor, bamboo flute and suona into a Chicago crucible, where Mabel Kwan, Joshua Abrams and Michael Zerang keep reshaping time and texture until free jazz feels like a sliding puzzle in permanent motion.

On Circumstantial, Ira Sullivan returns to Chicago after fourteen years away, sounding both relaxed and razor‑sharp as he trades easy, hard‑won wisdom with a seasoned hometown rhythm section and a fiery young guitarist at his side.

On Procession of the Great Ancestry, Wadada Leo Smith threads trumpet history and civil rights struggle into a lean, glowing suite where dedications to Davis, Gillespie, Little and Eldridge sit alongside blues testifying and a closing hymn for Martin Luther King Jr.

On Spirit Catcher, Wadada Leo Smith moves between luminous small‑group ritual and radical chamber experiment, setting airy trumpet-and-vibes lyricism against the austere blaze of a muted horn surrounded by three harps.

On Generation, Hal Russell’s NRG Ensemble collides with Charles Tyler to turbo‑charge its already volatile chemistry, turning multi‑author charts into a raucous, shape‑shifting suite of free‑jazz blowouts, sly grooves and side‑eyed melody.

On their 1981 debut, NRG Ensemble, Hal Russell and his much younger bandmates detonate a joyous, combustible mix of free jazz, skewed swing and dada humour, turning multi-instrumental chaos into a sharply etched group identity.

On Ride The Wind, Roscoe Mitchell scales up the chamber‑like intensity of his Conversations work, setting it inside a 20‑piece Montreal–Toronto ensemble that treats his textures as weather systems to move through, reshape and suddenly ignite.

On Four Ways, Roscoe Mitchell joins Stephen Rush’s shape-shifting Yuganaut trio for an electrically unstable encounter, where reeds, synths and oddball acoustics melt into one long, multi-hued improvising organism.

On Celebrating Fred Anderson, Roscoe Mitchell honors a fellow Chicago giant with a live quartet that turns remembrance into motion, weaving Fred’s themes and Mitchell’s originals into long, tensile arcs of chant, swing and open-form ritual.

On Before There Was Sound, Roscoe Mitchell’s 1965 quartet with Fred Berry, Malachi Favors and Alvin Fielder captures the AACM language in embryo: sharp themes, free rhythm and a restless sense of form already pushing past hard‑bop borders.

On Old/Quartet Sessions, Roscoe Mitchell’s 1967 Art Ensemble - with Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors and Phillip Wilson - appears in raw formation, sketching the grammar that would soon detonate as one of free music’s most inventive bands.

On Snurdy McGur dy and Her Dancin’ Shoes, Roscoe Mitchell launches the Sound Ensemble with a volatile mix of abstraction and groove, folding AACM rigor into slyly funky frameworks that keep tilting from tight forms into open risk.

On LRG/The Maze/S II Examples, Roscoe Mitchell frames three radically different constructions - a lucid brass-and-reeds trio, a labyrinthine percussion octet and a stark soprano solo - as parallel studies in space, timbre and compositional intelligence.

On Nonaah, Roscoe Mitchell turns the alto saxophone into a fault line, setting stark solos, prickly duets and dense small‑group pieces against one another to test how far a single composition and a single sound can be stretched.

On Congliptious, Roscoe Mitchell strips the Art Ensemble idea to its bones, pairing stark solo showcases with a fierce quartet blowout that makes freedom feel both methodical and combustible.

Recorded in Chicago in 1976, All Music catches Warne Marsh in lucid, late-middle form: a cool-toned tenor moving with dry wit and quiet daring through Tristano-school material, buoyed by Lou Levy, Fred Atwood and Jake Hanna’s alert swing.

On Independent / Interdependent, Savina Yannatou, Gonçalo Almeida and Costis Drygianakis turn a live trio into a dark, hovering organism, where voice, double bass and electronics circle each other in tense, shifting proximity, testing how far independence can stretch without breaking connection.

On Mushin, Susana Santos Silva and Vasco Trilla strip trumpet and percussion down to pure responsiveness, letting sound arise and vanish like breath in a Zen exercise, where every gesture feels both unpremeditated and utterly focused.

On In Concerts, Mujician - Keith Tippett, Paul Dunmall, Paul Rogers and Tony Levin - are caught across 17 years of pure, pre‑verbal improvisation, four voices moving as one organism, forever searching and sometimes touching the truly uncanny.

Suncuts emerged in 2023 from the earlier project Teufelskeller, originally founded by Anton Ponomarev in Moscow. Teufelskeller was invited to perform at the Xciting Festival in Stuttgart but due to various serious reasons the bass player and drummer were unable to go. Ponomarev brought in Swiss drummer Maxime Hänsenberger and Brazilian bassist Felipe Zenicola as replacement musicians. Both integrated quickly, and the new line-up performed the scheduled concerts. Although the three musicians had …

*2026 stock* Deep within the heart of an ancient forest, The Wolf, The Jaguar, The Bull, The Bear, and The Raven resided. They were guardians of the woodland, protectors of balance and harmony. But one fateful night, a foreboding darkness seeped into their sacred realm, whispering tales of corruption that had plagued the planet beyond the trees. Driven by an unnerving curiosity, they made a pact to venture beyond the borders of their lush abodes and uncover the source of this malevolence. Togeth…