Jazz & Improvisation / Free Jazz

The treasure of Japan’s jazz scene and its most formidable drummer, Takeo Moriyama, drives out a powerful, intense beat. This important work — recorded in April 1994 and the catalyst for Moriyama’s comeback — is being released on vinyl for the first time. Backed by a rock-solid lineup of players — Fumio Itabashi (piano), Toshihiko Inoue (S. Sax & T. Sax), Eiichi Hayashi (A. Sax), and Hiroshi Yoshino (bass) — the recording delivers a ferocious performance that condenses the universe of Moriyama’s…

*250 copies limited edition* Three singular voices in contemporary music come together for a recording that moves beyond genre, structure, and expectation. Triacontagon, the collaboration between saxophonist Ivo Perelman, multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp, and percussionist Cyro Baptista, is an immersive exploration of layered sound worlds, ritual energy, and spontaneous composition. Named after the 30-sided geometric figure, Triacontagon reflects the album’s constantly shifting musical dimens…

Strut Records proudly presents the first definitive expanded reissue of Somewhere Over The Rainbow, Sun Ra’s 1977 session recorded at the Bluebird in Bloomington, Indiana, presented across three Vinyl LPs or as a two-CD set. Please note the differing tracklist between the CD & LP.

*250 copies limited edition* The quartet of Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp, William Parker and Bobby Kapp returns with Synesthesia, a new recording that captures their deep connection and evolving voice in contemporary free jazz. Following the acclaimed Ineffable Joy and Heptagon, the group continues to explore spontaneous composition, open form, and strong collective interplay. This time, the music leans further into a modern jazz language, with sharper focus, clearer shapes, and a refined sense o…

*2005 release. 2026 stock* Kahimi Karie and Mariko Hamada guest as two vocalists on this orchestral work, which marks a dramatic advance from ONJQ. Its many scenes—sometimes hushed, sometimes intense—integrate (and disperse) every sonic possibility—jazz, ambient, rock, voice, noise, etc.—bringing new discoveries to every listener’s ear. Delicate sounds that can be heard if you listen closely. Even accidental onstage noises are intentionally included (you can hear them if you listen carefully), p…

"Ramune and the Power Plant" is the first duo album by Otomo Yoshihide and Ruike Shinpei, who have performed together many times in groups such as ONJQ. This recording captures almost the entire completely improvised live set held in October 2024 at the café-music gallery Kakululu in Ikebukuro. In this project Otomo primarily uses turntables as his main instrument and, on some tracks, electric guitar; Ruike plays trumpet as his primary instrument and employs electronics on certain pieces. Record…

*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.

Ascension, released in 1966 on Impulse!, stands as one of John Coltrane’s most radical and influential works. Subtitled “Edition I & II” to reflect the two complete takes recorded at the session - and presented together on LP for the first time - the piece is a nearly 40-minute large-ensemble performance marking Coltrane’s decisive embrace of the avant-garde. Recorded on June 28, 1965, at Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio and produced by Bob Thiele, the session assembled an expanded ense…

The music on “Green Prism” is rooted in the last of the many commissions Keith Tippett wrote in the latter part of his career. The original compositions featured on this album are arrangements drawn from a suite composed by Tippett entitled "Winter's Welcome" in 2018 for the brass ensemble Zinc & Copper, which premiered in Berlin on 17th February 2019. Due to ill health Keith was unable to attend the final rehearsals, which meant the project was never finished as originally envisioned. After Kei…

Departing from a run of releases for Discus Music featuring mainly large group composition, this stripped down, free-blowing session features a group of great players on top form, delivering music which is in turns heavily incisive and delicately traced. Dunmall himself has never sounded better than he does here.

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 Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts, The Cecil Taylor Unit detonates across two uncut Paris sets: a newly unearthed, vividly mastered document of Taylor, Sam Rivers, Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille stretching free jazz into an overwhelming, architectural storm of sound.

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.

Pianist Jonas Cambien, bassist Magnus Skavhaug Nergaard and drummer Dag Erik Knedal Andersen have been indispensable to followers of the eclectic creative music scene in Oslo for years; among others with bands such as The Handover, Reôlo, Maca Conu, Delish, Cortex and Sulida. Until now, only lucky concertgoers have been able to experience their excellent improvising trio, but fortunately Motvind Records are doing something about that! "The Ear Behind the Airport" is a multifaceted being. Between…

Henriette Eilertsen's solo debut from 2021, "Poems for flute", is regarded by many as one of the classics in the Motvind Records catalogue. Since then, many concertgoers have also been thrilled by the flautists fresh trio, with Joel Ring (cello & electronics) and Øystein Aarnes Vik (drums). Finally, we are all approaching the opportunity to dive deep into this warm, mysterious and alluring sonic bath. Henriette Eilertsen Trio's debut album "Moder" is characterized by captivating compositions, an…

Norwegian clarinetist Andreas Røysum and the legendary Chicago-based poet / artist Marvin Tate met in 2023, when both were performing at Berlin Jazzfest. “Andreas Røysum Ensemble with Marvin Tate” is the fourth album by the ensemble, and contains the first recorded fruits of this meeting of visionaries. The new-found collaborators bring out the best in each other, reaching new levels of expression and purpose. Dig into richly evocative and multi-layered poetry, expansive long form compositions a…

"Daughter of War" is the debut album of the new four-piece band It Was Her Idea. Vocalist Juliana Venter and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love have already worked together in Paal’s PNL Circus project and wanted to continue that collaboration in a different direction — to explore other aspects they touched on in Circus and to work with material not solely composed by Paal. Their first choice for bassist was Ole Morten Vågan, who on his own is an orchestra. Ole Morten and Paal have long been friends with…

"What Just Happened?" is an album that collects four pieces by Paal Nilssen-Love, composed for smaller configurations of his Large Unit ensemble. The pieces are for specific instruments: snare drum, saxophone and tuba — from three to six performers. This act of stripping the ensemble down to single instruments does not mean sparse minimalism, quite the opposite, as Paal explores the possibilities — and limits — of the individual instruments. Contributing to the music's quality is the incredible …

"Calls!" is the third album by Paal Nilssen-Love Circus, following "Pairs of Three" (2022) and the live recording "Turn Thy Loose" (2025). Circus originally emerged from Large Unit as a side project but quickly grew into its own band. The group performs music composed by Paal, and in live performances the musicians are free to play any parts of any song at any time. On this studio recording they take a different approach: the songs were recorded separately and carefully produced. On the live alb…

«Steam Waterfall» is the second album in an expanded version of Paal Nilssen-Love's Large Unit. But this isn't the same Extra Large Unit you heard on «More Fun Please» from 2018. This is a live recording from the Oslo Jazz Festival in 2022 featuring core members of Large Unit along with a range of younger musicians Paal had met through workshops and teaching in the two years leading up to the concert. The number of musicians heard is 25—the largest Unit to date—but during the performance, there …

«Hohai-Bushi» is the meeting between Paal Nilssen-Love and his Large Unit ensemble, here in a 13-person lineup, and the legendary Japanese musician Akira Sakata. Since the 1960s, Sakata has been one of the leading saxophonists in free jazz and improvisation, starting with the Yamashita Trio, continuing with his own ensembles, and later transitioning to younger musicians from various genres, including noise and experimental music. Akira Sakata is a living legend from the last 50 years of radical …

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 Hidden Fire, Sun Ra turns the late‑’80s Arkestra into a digital seance, using Yamaha DX7 shards, strings and haunted vocals to swap cosmic swing for dissonant ritual, opening one last, ominously glowing portal in his Saturnian saga.

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 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 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 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.

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 …

On Vonski Speaks, Von Freeman stretches out with his New Apartment Lounge Quartet at Jazzfest Berlin 2002, turning four long pieces into a swaggering, late‑career testimony to Chicago grit, club intimacy and unforced authority.

On Serenade & Blues, Von Freeman eases his Chicago tenor into an after‑hours glow, trading the swagger of Have No Fear for late‑night ballads and slow blues that stretch time without ever losing their bite.

On Have No Fear, Von Freeman turns a 1975 marathon session into a fiercely personal manifesto, his elastic Chicago tenor pouring blues, bravado and vulnerability into performances that sound both off‑the‑cuff and obsessively shaped.