Jazz /
Rotella Variations
2003 release ** "“The human voice must not be limited only to a conventional language, but is an inexhaustible source of natural musical instruments. If it is coupled with jazz it becomes a double musical instrument”: Mimmo Rotella dixit, and here is a combative group of Italian jazz musicians, stimulated by the maestro in his eighties, puts the theory into practice. The Rotella Variations therefore materialize in nineteen episodes of mostly short duration, often introduced or concluded, contami…
Rise & Bloom
*100 copies limited edition* The sixth issue in the U Jazz Me catalog is an album by the jazz super group Late Night Poems, which has already appeared on wax with the U Know Me Records logo in 2022. Imagine a jazz club straight out of New York in the 1990s. Imagine a jazz club in one of Poland's medium-sized working-class cities, which has been operating continuously for 45 years, driven and run by one tireless man. The greatest from the country and the world have played there. They stare at you…
Irreversible Entanglements
Irreversible Entanglements’s self-titled debut album was originally released in September 2017, and features the first music ever played together by the freshly assembled Philly/NY/DC-based quintet of poet Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), bassist Luke Stewart, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, and drummer Tcheser Holmes. The explosive collection of improvised free-jazz with spoken word accompaniment was born after the group's initial meeting at a Musicians Against Police Bruta…
A White Horse Is Not a Horse
"There was a school of philosophy in ancient China whose core theory stems from a debate entitled “A White Horse Is Not a Horse.” In a book by Gongsun Long (公孫龍 320-250BC, about 200 years after Confucius) in the Warring States Period, two persons argue if a white horse is a horse: the protagonist argues it is not, because ‘white’ is the color of a (particular) horse while a ‘horse’ is a shape and a generic term. It’s a linguistic/logical paradox, or sophistry. Ridiculed by his contemporary philo…
Taking Off
1995 release ** "Taking Off was first released as an LP in 1982 and re-issued as a CD by Bleu Regard in France in 1995. Wallenstein increases the size of his jazz accompaniment/collaboration, featuring Bill Chelf on piano, Charles Tyler on saxophones, Jeremy Steig on flute, and Jeff Meyer on percussion. The opening poem "Careful Bump," begins with a jolting kick and cymbal crash leading into a bop-jazz drum beat. "The Short Life of the Five Minute Dancer," which describes action in the face of f…
I Love Noise
Biiig Tip! Edition of 300. Paal Nilssen-Love and Joe McPhee started playing together when Paal was 25. Now he’s 50, so this musical dialogue has been going on for the quarter of a century. It has taken many forms, first with The Thing, then The Thing/Cato Salsa Experience big-band, on to the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, with several one-off collaborations on the way (some previously released on PNL) – but throughout the years the duo format has been the best way to hear these two voices. It’s…
Cuica In The Third House (CDr)
2008 release ** Limited and numbered edition of 250 copies, part of the KMB Jazz CDr Series. "The 2007 solo debut of New York free improvising trumpeter Matt Lavelle, here performing on the hybrid instruments, the Bass-Trumpinet and Bass-Clarumpet, introduced and punctuated with spoken word insight and declarations, and using overdubs on selected tracks, making for an intimate and accomplished album of modern free jazz."
Schweben – Ay, But Can Ye?
*2025 stock* Important for this composition commissioned by the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra from Barry Guy, is the unity of composed and improvised passages, the concern for the capabilities and strengths of individual players, the way in which small groups are part of the larger structures. Based on “Ay, but can ye?” a Russian poem translated into Scots by Edwin Morgan and using images of Wassily Kandinsky, this mostly graphically notated score is a musical adventure for the players as well a…
List of Demands
List of Demands, Damon Locks’s first foray into creating an entire album from spoken and text-based work, finds the Chicago-based musician and educator collecting cultural abstractions and reorganizing them into a firm truth. The album lays out a vision of Black liberation and transmits it outward as a song cycle of bite-sized Nikki Giovanni-meets-MF DOOM-style rhythm experiments. The sample-based constructions are steeped in a lifetime of not only keen cultural observation, but direct communal …
Habits of Assembly - Live at Cafe OTO
Taking 2023’s critically-acclaimed collagist anti-opera Sovereign Bodies / Ritual Taxonomy (Diatribe Records) as its starting point, composer Jamie Thompson invited three open-eared improvisers, Stephen Davis (drums), John Pope (bass) and Sam Comerford (tenor saxophone) to join him (on piano and electronics) in entangling themselves not only with the textual and political themes of the record – migration, racist linguistic taxonomy, nationalism, Europe’s deadly borders policies – but with its po…
Berkeley Lecture, 1971
One for the ages here. Unearthed from the ESS archives and officially released for the first time ever, a previously unknown half-hour from cosmic mythologist and sound scientist Sun Ra's 1971 U.C. Berkeley course "The Black Man in the Cosmos." Ra's soft-spoken intensity is underscored by the sound of chalk on the board as he ambles effortlessly through his potent and prescient ideas. The class session closes with two musical tracks, a piano version of "Love In Outer Space" and a blistering Moo…
Seize The Time - Black Panther Party
“Between 1974-77 Elaine Brown led the Black Panther Party, the 1st and only woman to do so. Seize The Time is a curiously elegiac and somber affair. Five of the tracks also features arrangements written by pianist/composer Horace Tapscott and performed by the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra”
A milestone of the Black music movement, originally released on Vault in 1969. The debut album of Elaine Brown was arranged by piano player and composer Horace Tapscott, conducting the Californian Pan-Afrikan P…
Constitution
“Members of the dispossessed, won’t you lend me your ears!”
Cereal Music
LP – strictly limited one-time edition / 500. Jacket printed on reverse board, includes insert with full credits & liner notes by William, Ellen, and Steven. A beauty. Includes full-res download card/code of the total work (w/ 3 bonus tracks). Cereal Music is indeed William Parker’s first spoken word album – poetry and observations from a profound life devoted to the path of finding truth in beauty and speaking truth to power. Hard to believe this hasn't happened before! Parker’s words are furth…
Smoke-Blackened Walls & Curlews
‘Surprisingly enough, program music is not all that common in jazz. For example, unlike their classical counterparts, not many jazz composers have set out to evoke particular places. Duke Ellington’s 'Tone Parallel To Harlem' is one of the great exceptions. Britain has been even more neglected, unless you count Billy Strayhorn’s 'Chelsea Bridge', and that was about Whistler's painting rather than the actual bridge itself. But the British jazz composer Graham Collier is one who is doing something…
Hemligheter På Vägen
*2024 stock* Swedish pianist Karin Johansson has set music to some of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems for her band ORD. Vocals, horns, and bass converse freely around the piano. Some parts are free improvisations, often with a prepared piano.
Time Capsule
A heretical symbol of Rare Groove, with its alternative and avant-garde ferocity! Irvine Weldon's 1973 masterpiece, which continues to have a wide influence around the world even today! Although it is based on jazz, it is a work released in 1973 that is more soul/funk than the first album, and reflects more experimental and political aspects and ideas. For over 30 years, it has been loved by diggers all over the world and reigns at the top of the rare groove as a most wanted item, and today the …
The Night Of Power (Laylatu'l Qadri)
Recorded in one mystical night during Ramadan in 1982, The Night of Power (Laylatu'l Qadri) is a prophetic tapestry of politically and spiritually conscious poetry and revelatory home-studio electronic jazz.
I Had A Fever When
Arto Lindsay is an influential American guitarist, singer and record producer. He was a member of the pioneering no-wave group DNA in the late 70s. He can be heard as singer and guitarist on the first album of the Golden Palominos and as guitarist on the debut of the Lounge Lizards, which was dismissed as fake jazz. He later founded the group Ambitious Lovers with Peter Scherer.
He has an unmistakable soft voice and an often loud, self-taught guitar corruptions that consists almost exclusively …
Star Of The Future
*300 copies limited edition*
Xenia Ende - vocalsJulius Gabriel - saxophoneAchim Zepezauer - electronicsGabor Bodolay - bass guitarKarl F.-Degenhardt - drums & sensory percussion
All music by Das Behälter. All lyrics by Xenia Ende. Recorded by Pablo Paredes at Tucapel Studio. Mastered by Filipe Louro at Arda Recorders. Artwork by Rosh Zeeba. Design by Thomas Spallek.