Jazz /
Thinking out loud
Boneshaker are Mars Williams (reeds, toy instruments), Paal Nilssen-Love (drums & percussion) and Kent Kessler (bass), three prolific powerhouse musicians, carrying among them a Grammy nomination and decades of experience with the top ensembles in the world. Thinking Out Loud is their third album. Personnel: Mars Williams - reeds; Paal Nilssen-Love - drums; Kent Kessler - bass.
1977-1981
Restocked, reduced price. A collection of rare free-jazz pieces performed by John Zorn and selected by the American guitarist and music critic Eugene Chadbourne. Come out in 1998 to accompany the book release “Sonora: John Zorn” (Materiali Sonori), the album is presented here for the first time in an exclusive release in limited edition on vinyl.The special issue includes the original book that features exclusive interviews, essays and photos about the artist’s entire oeuvre up to 1988.
Hydro
300 copies. Devoting most of his time to performing with various international groups, Liudas Mockunas is hailed as an ambassador of Lithuanian jazz. He is a multi-reeds player and composer, whose name stands for masterly performance and intriguing compositions. His 'natural' idiom is an explosive mixture of free jazz, lyricism and expressionism combined with highly unconventional performance techniques. His in-depth exploration of the properties of sound and possibilities of harmonic series lea…
Walthamstow Moon ('61 Revisited)
On November 17th 1961, John Coltrane played at the Granada Theatre in Walthamstow. On November 23rd, 55 years later, free jazz legend Evan Parker made this six track recording in the same space with John Russell and John Edwards. This recording has personal resonances for Evan: he attended Coltrane's performance 55 years ago at the Granada. Evan Parker: "John Russell, John Edwards and I are going to record in that same cinema. It has had the usual chequered life of classic old cinemas of the…
Asakusa Follies
Asakusa Follies is a luminous scene of interplay between melody, breath, and the shakuhachi flute. Following on from the initial triptych of electro-acoustic releases on the Cuspeditions imprint, Clive Bell’s Asakusa Follies shifts the listener away from the studio and toward the player himself. Breath is a central theme in the album where a punctuation of purring, spitting, flicking and gasping intersects the tones, overtones and noise of the shakuhachi. The opening composition Ultramoder…
Distinction Without A Difference
A reissue of the long out-of-print first solo record by American violinist Billy Bang (1947-2011), recorded at Gaku Gallery in New York on August 12, 1979. Originally released on Hat Hut Records in 1980. Distinction Without A Difference features Bang's own compositions, extrapolated at length in an intimate live concert, as well as traditional and improvised material. Remastered from original tapes and augmented by newly discovered recordings from the same concert. Part of the large cache of his…
King Alcohol
A reissue of King Alcohol, recorded for the German FMP label in 1972. King Alcohol is one of the landmark recordings of free jazz in Europe, a mind-blowing studio session featuring Rüdiger Carl on tenor saxophone, Günter Christmann on trombone, and the astonishing Detlef Schönenberg on drums. Volatile and precise, anticipating much of the future sound of free music in Europe but also paying homage to American antecedents like Roswell Rudd and Archie Shepp, King Alcohol is truly a lost jewel. Fir…
Nuclear Family
2016 release. Multi-instrumental master Joe McPheeand his longtime colleague, French saxophonist and clarinetist André Jaume, joined forces for this studio recording in 1979 that was prepared but never released. It is primarily structured around pairs of tunes by Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington (or Billy Strayhorn), adding Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" for good measure. The results are stunningly intimate and show the twosome's capacity for creative interplay at a fairly e…
There'll Be No Tears Tonight
2016 release. A reissue of Eugene Chadbourne's There'll Be No Tears Tonight, originally released by Parachute in 1980. One of the absolute essentials of Eugene Chadbourne's oeuvre, what he described as "free improvised country and western bebop", featuring his frantic, skewed interpretations of classic songs such as Merle Haggard's "Swingin' Doors", Roger Miller's "The Last Word In Lonesome Is Me", and Willie Nelson's "Mr. Record Man", There'll Be No Tears Tonight was recorded in Spring of 1980.…
Staffan Harde
2015 release. A reissue of Staffan Harde's self-titled album, originally released on Svenska Jazzriksförbunded Records (SJR) in 1972. Based on the tiny Swedish fishing island of Smogen, guitarist Staffan Harde created a wholly unique and wondrous approach to his instrument, documented assiduously on hand-made reel-to-reel tapes and this lone LP from 1972, which features Harde solo and with small groups. His accomplices included pianist Lars Sjösten, bassist Lars-Urban Helje, and the acclaimed pe…
Push Pull
2016 release. A reissue of Jimmy Lyons's Push Pull, originally released on Hat Hut Records in 1979. Long known as Cecil Taylor's most reliable and loyal colleague, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons has a select discography as a leader, and among its best entries is Push Pull, originally issued by Hat Hut Records as a massive three LP set. Recorded during a single marathon performance at the Collective for Living Cinema in New York in 1978, Push Pull features five extended pieces, all by Lyons, with h…
Axiom
2015 release. A reissue of arguably the rarest LP of European free jazz, Axiom, recorded in 1963 for the Swedish label Sonet. Test pressings were released to the musicians, but they were not approved and the label never printed more than the two first copies. Tom Prehn's music, which is exclusively known from a 1967 release that was reissued on the Unheard Music Series, is not only impossibly uncommon, it is also exceptionally wonderful, featuring an extended tenor saxophone solo by Frits Krogh …
Glasses
2012 release. A reissue of Joe McPhee's Glasses, originally released on Hat Hut Records in 1979. Glasses was recorded in October, 1977, during a highly significant period in McPhee's work, as he was pioneering the transatlantic, collaborative spirit that has helped to define the last three decades of his career. Documented in Tavannes, Switzerland, the set contains sensational tenor work, including the title piece, which finds McPhee ringing out a rhythm on a half-full wine glass, from which he …
Cut Air
Jim Denley has been playing flute since 1969 - after 50 years of a curious love/hate relationship with the instrument this is his first solo flute-only recording. He aims to situate this music within a global outlook, with a pacific perspective. Being from a continent, Australia, where there is no flute tradition, he’s taken cues and elements from flute traditions that still have power and currency — the European flute with it’s purity, brilliance and dexterity, the earthy simplicity of bamboos …
Frogs (Ep)
7" picture disc for Barry Guy's 70th birthday. Interspecies personnel: Laubfrosch (Hyla Arborea) - acoustic sounds; Wasserfrosch (Rana Esculenta) - acoustic sounds; Barry Guy - acoustic sounds. Recorded May 30th, 2011 by Maya Homburger in Oberstammheim, Switzerland; Edited and mastered by Mikael Werliin at Studio Oodion Göteborg; Photos by Maya Homburger; Graphic design by Lasse Marhaug; Produced by Mats Gustafsson. Limited edition of 300 (numbered).
Refraction
I first met Mark sometime in the early 90’s when we were both working in Chelmsford. He was running Soundworld Records above the musical instrument shop of the same name, I was over the other side of town in an insurance brokers. I’d played quite a bit of free improvisation at that point, mostly at the old LMC in a quartet called Make Shift together with Peter Urpeth, Stuart Wilding and long-time colleague and playing partner Geoff Collins. But had been away from it for a few years and wa…
Prophecy
ESP-Disk present a reissue of Albert Ayler's Prophecy, originally released in 1975. Recorded in concert at the Cellar Cafe, NYC, June 14, 1964. Three weeks before this trio recorded ESP-Disk's first jazz album, the epochal Spiritual Unity (ESPDISK 1002CD/LP), it was captured "live" by Canadian poet Paul Haines, who also recorded the New York Eye and Ear Control soundtrack (ESPDISK 1016CD/LP). This is one of the most influential groups in jazz history, a coming together of like-minded innovators …
The Paris Smith - Kenneth Hill Quartets
The Quartets album, Paris Smith and Kenneth Hill's first album together with original material. A truly remarkable underground jazz album from 1977 that sounds like it was recorded 15 years earlier, top feeling and very much alive. Paris Smith – vibes, Kenneth Hill – sax, Michael Smith & Donnell Lambert – Bass, Usama – Drums. Comes with new pictures, download codes and new liner notes and remastered sound.
Threnody, At The Gates
This trio is on to something extraordinary; full on furor brushed w thin melodic lines or rage contained in a certain kind of drunken beauty and bliss - all stumbling on towards the heard and the unheard - in a whisper, in a shriek, forces joined and disjoined....This trio is the whole in the never ending audible crack Johan Berthling: double bass; Martin Küchen: tenor and soprano saxophones, retardophone, flute; Steve Noble: drums and percussion. Recorded by David Carlsson at Gula Studion, Malm…
Divine Music
3CD version. History can be a motherfucker - its authors vindictive and deeply unfair. Though Jazz - long heralded as the great American art form, got its due, buried within its canon are the legacies of systemic neglect. Its narrative is a mere shadow of the truth. Robert Northern is a lost giant - a name that almost no one has heard - a prodigy once recruited by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Roland Kirk, Donald Byrd, Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, and S…