Jazz /
Tenor, The Willisau Concert, Black Magic Man
This bundle includes Joe McPhee's "Tenor", "The Willisau Concert", "Black Magic Man" LPs, released by Superior Viaduct. Recorded in the same sessions as 1971's classic Nation Time, Black Magic Man is smoldering, late-Coltrane-inspired modal free jazz. While The Willisau Concert features longtime collaborator, synth player John Snyder and South African drummer Makaya Ntshoko, McPhee unleashes his first solo LP, simply named Tenor. Together the albums represent the sound of McPhee opening up, open…
Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina
"27-year-old Tomin Perea-Chamblee is a brass- and reed-centered multi-instrumentalist, the composer and arranger of pieces with excellently thorny harmonies, an at-times reluctant musicker and enthusiastic Brooklynite (born and raised, so his admiration primarily concerns the borough’s pre-gentralification qualities), who, by day works as a bioinformatician. If you're in New York, there’s an ok chance that you’ve heard him play before, with young (jazz-adjacent) bands and musicians of some renow…
Tenor
There are lots of outstanding Joe McPhee LPs. Nation Time being chief among them, but there's also Pieces Of Light, Oleo and Topology. The Poughkeepsie, New York-based multi-instrumentalist, by now an international star of free music, has amassed a daunting discography, no doubt. If you want to peer deeply into the soul of Joe McPhee, however, there's no way around it, you need to spend some quality time with Tenor.
" Tenor is McPhee's first solo record. He did not set out to make it. It was an …
The Willisau Concert
Joe McPhee's first international release, Black Magic Man, was issued on the newly formed Hat Hut imprint in 1975. It was a watershed moment for the 35-year-old musician. Based in Poughkeepsie, New York, he was too far away from Manhattan to have participated extensively in the Loft Jazz happenings of the decade. European exposure, however, would give McPhee an alternative circuit, something of an escape route from the trappings of American cultural myopia.
" In support of the new record for thi…
Black Magic Man
Black Magic Man is arguably the pivotal Joe McPhee release. It bridged the span between the regional and the international, bypassing the national altogether. "Recorded in the same sessions that produced Nation Time, Black Magic Man consists of music not chosen for that LP. Like its much-feted sister, technically it falls under the domain of CjR, Craig Johnson's herculean effort in support of McPhee. An erstwhile painter, Johnson became a self-taught audio engineer, acquiring equipment expressly…
Derailleur
Archie Shepp's world has always been filled with fire music, and eventually Fire Music. Before that landmark LP, Shepp made Four for Trane -- his August 1964 beachhead with Impulse. And even before that, as it turns out, came this one blip -- the earliest Shepp leader project yet on record. Under supervision of the artist, this previously unissued demo recording is now available from Triple Point Records. As the cover of Derailleur suggests, Shepp tries out some surprising combinations for the s…
An Evening With The Devil
2023 repress. "The Tribe co-founder's debut, remixed from the original mutli-track master tapes under the direction of its creator and lacquered by Bernie Grundman. Now-Again presents the defi¬nitive Tribe Records reissues. Deep, spiritual jazz of the highest order. The Tribe label, one of the brightest lights of America's 1970s jazz underground, receives the Now-Again reissue treatment. This is your chance to indulge in the music and story of one of the most meaningful, local movements of the 2…
Duo Exchange: Complete Sessions
** 2023 much-needed repress ** A Free Jazz masterpiece is again on the block—bigger and better than ever. Rashied Ali & Frank Lowe Duo Exchange is legitimately re-released on LP for the first time, mastered from original tapes for the first time, and expanded with nearly an hour's music from the session never before heard. You know Duo Exchange as the flagship release of Rashied Ali's Survival Records. When the record was made, Survival still belonged jointly to Ali and Frank Lowe, and the reco…
Nation Time
2022 Repress. "Joe McPhee's solo album, Tenor literally changed my life. The recording (one of his first for Hat Hut, in September 1976) displayed his unique ability to integrate unconventional sounds and extended techniques with pure melodicism, and it permanently altered my perspective on what the saxophone could do and what music could be. Nation Time was recorded six years earlier, but ideas regarding the integration of means and methods were already at the forefront of McPhee's approach to …
Traditional Noise (LP)
**300 copies** Traditional Noise, the final instalment in Holidays’ latest batch, is a collaboration between two up and coming stars of experimental music - Mette Rassmussen and Pak Yan Lau - and possibly the most exciting of them all, offering glimpses of probable futures of improvisation across its brilliant two sides.Mette Rasmussen is a Danish saxophone player based in Trondheim, Norway, who first gained attention as a member of Trio Riot, before increasingly branching out as solo artist, wo…
Old And New Dreams
*2021 stock* This album, originally released in 1977, was re-mastered and repackaged in Digifile cardboard format. It includes the original full-color booklet. Old and New Dreams was a jazz group that existed from 1976 to 1987, and was composed of tenor saxophone player Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden, trumpet player Don Cherry and drummer Ed Blackwell. A virtual reincarnation of Ornette Coleman's first ensembles, the cooperative Old and New Dreams brought together trumpeter Don Cherry, te…
The Complete Remastered Recordings On Black Saint & Soul Note
Amazing music from trombonist George Lewis – five different albums that each show a different side of his talents! First up is Shadowgraph 5 – a great early Black Saint, and a key example of the way the AACM spirit thrived overseas, thanks to the efforts of labels like this! The work is quite serious and experimental – almost compositional in nature, and definitely heading towards the AACM promise of "Great Black Music" – and other players include Roscoe Mitchell on saxes, Leroy Jenkins on violi…
Shadowgraph, 5 (Sextet)
This album, originally released in 1978, was re-mastered and repackaged in Digifile cardboard format. It includes the original full-color booklet. "Shadowgraph and the duos with Douglas Ewart are characteristic of the free abstract jazz that emerged out of AACM's explorations in the '60s and early '70s. Listening to them, one is aware how little this music has been assimilated into the mainstream of either jazz or improvisation."
Jila - Save ! Mon. - The Imaginary Suite
**CD Edition** A post-free masterwork, recorded in Milan in 1978. This is an extraordinary encounter between George Lewis's electronically modified trombone and the flute, alto sax and bass clarinet played by Douglas Ewart, a giant of impro jazz, often at Lewis's side. Both George Lewis and Douglas Ewart create arresting, complex music here, in ways that powerfully contrast and powerfully pull together. The two are prodigious musicians, their understanding is perfect and you can only admire the …
Black Fairy
Original Glued Prints on Thick Cardboard / handily gluing / Original Black and White Private Press artwork/ 100 copies limited edition worldwide. Legit reissue of this obscure privately pressed album from 1975. Black Fairy is a fairy tale, but not in the traditional sense. When writing this play, i did not want to re-create the types of fantasies which are so common in Childrens theater. There is no kind of magic that can relieve black children from the oppression that retards their development.…
Trombe
Here it is, naked to the bone, free jazz in all its glory, loose, intense and furious, not in hanger but with "joie de vivre." A sax-drums duo like comprised of Thomas Beaudelin on saxophone and Erwan Cornic on percussion, makes you anticipate an essentialist approach to the communicative powers of improvisation. The music is dense and intense, seeming to drag everything that happens to be in their path with vehement free sounding and shamanic interplay. Don't miss this one
The Flam
Black Saint present a reissue of Frank Lowe, one of the most powerful tenor sax voices in the post Free Jazz era and one of the main figures in the mid Seventies NY Jazz Loft scene. "The Flam" recorded and released on Black Saint in 1975 stands as one of Lowe's best albums ever. This is highly Intense music with deep meaning and timeless message performed by an amazing collective featuring Frank Lowe - tenor sax, Leo Smith - trumpet, flugelhorn & wood flute, Joseph Bowie - trombone, Alex Blake -…
Antiphonen
Sainkho Namtchylak is a singer originally from Tuva, an autonomous republic in the Russian Federation just north of Mongolia. She is known for her Tuvan throat singing or Khöömei. Her music encompasses avant-jazz, electronica, modern composition and Tuvan influences. Once the Soviet Union had collapsed, she moved to Vienna, making it her base, although she traveled widely, working in any number of shifting groups and recording a number of discs that revolved around free improvisation. Amongst th…
With, Without
Phil Minton is a jazz/free-improvising vocalist and trumpeter. He is a highly dramatic baritone who tends to specialize in literary texts: he has sung lyrics by William Blake with Mike Westbrook's group, Daniil Kharms and Joseph Brodsky with Simon Nabatov, and extracts from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake with his own ensemble. Minton is perhaps best known, however, for his completely free-form work, which involves "extended techniques" that can be as unsettling as they can be mesmerising. His voca…
Nothing but the Music
The sounds of late '70s and '80s east coast avant-garde jazz, soul, and punk rock are well documented, but in Nothing but the Music Thulani Davis gives us something beyond, delivering a collection of synesthetic, transportive documentary poems that breathe anecdotal and impressionistic life into a sonic-social history about which most can only speculate. Davis' verse takes free flight with its muses, scatting and leaping off the page and the shoulders of the musicians, nightclubs, and choreograp…