Jazz /
The Sweetness Of The Water
Spring Heel Jack brings esteemed trumpeter and vanguard composer Wadada Leo Smith to the mix, along with reedsman and longtime Spring Heel collaborator Evan Parker, fellow Brit John Edwards on bass, and drummer Mark Sanders. The Sweetness of the Water, from 2003, is a strong offering from John Coxon and Ashley Wales (the masterminds behind Spring Heel Jack), with a more intimate, live feel than the group’s previous electro-heavy efforts. Parker returns with his bellowing, screaming sax juxtapose…
My Favorite Things: October 14th, 1977
My Favorite Things October 14, 1977 presents a superb collection of tracks recorded by the great Sun Ra and his Arkestra at the Variety Recording Studio, NYC. One of the rarely heard documents of the El Saturn label of the ‘70s, these recordings catch Sun Ra and John Gilmore firmly in the foreground, especially when performing on masterly interpretations of John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things and Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy. The performance shows that both are capable of masterfully reflecting the…
Hesterian Musicism
Musicism is the core concept of transcultural artistic research that rose to prominence at the beginning of the 80s thanks to the ingenious mind of Karlton Hester. Composer, flautist and saxophonist Hester set himself as the promoter of a multidisciplinary idea in which musicians, visual artists and poets collaborate in a synergic manner to produce new art forms. Hesterian Musicism is an avant-garde spiritual jazz record composed and issued by Hester on his San Francisco based label Hesteria in …
Benkei
A Japanese rarity from 1984, Benkei is a unique jazz funk session that sees the drummer Akira Toyoda working with a group that features Joe Lovano on sax, Peter Madsen on piano and Dean Johnson on bass. This early document showcases the beginning of Lovano’s career as a fine jazz player as well as being an excellent testimony of the vibrant Japanese jazz scene of the mid-80s that drew many American players to visit the Land of the Rising Sun.
A Lifetime In Oriental Jazz
2019 Repress. Jazzman presents the definitive anthology of pioneering ethno-musicologist, mystical adventurer and real life jazz guru Dr Lloyd Miller. This album tells the fascinating life story of one man and his journey through Europe and the Middle East, living off nothing but his wits, talent and an open-minded attitude towards music and jazz.Master of dozens of languages and hundreds of instruments, Miller has spent fifty years immersed in the music of Europe, Asia and the Middle East.Featu…
It's Nation Time: African Visionary Music
Pan-African manifesto It's Nation Time — African Visionary Music, out of print since 1972, is available once again via Motown. A poet, writer, theater director, activist and more whose career spanned five decades, Imamu Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones) fearlessly vouched for racial equality until his passing in 2014. For It's Nation Time, his first album, Baraka was backed by many threads of African-American musical expression, including a funk band led by James Mtume and a free jazz quartet feat…
Flight 17
Outernational Sounds presents a cornerstone document from the Los Angeles jazz underground, Flight 17 -- the first appearance on record of the legendary Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, led by their founder and mastermind, Horace Tapscott. Available on vinyl for the first time in 40 years. The Arkestra would allow the creativity in the community to come together, would allow people to recognize each other as one people. Horace Tapscott's Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (P.A.P.A.) was one of the most t…
April Is The Cruellest Month
**Legendary "lost" album originally due to be released on the ESP-Disk, but the label folded before its release. Limited Edition** Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi (1932 - 1991) was a maverick Japanese guitarist, a revolutionary spirit whose oeuvre embodied the radical political movements of late '60s Japan. Having cut his teeth as an accomplished Lennie Tristano disciple playing cool jazz in the late '50s, Takayanagi had his mind blown by the Chicago Transit Authority's "free form guitar" in 1969 an…
Live 1971
We Release Jazz presents its fifth release, the first ever live performance and recording by Marc Moulin's sought-after jazz-funk band Placebo, captured at Casino Kursaal during the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1971 and never released before. June 17th, 1971, the Montreux Riviera, its delightful microclimate and postcard scenery, its fabled music history and the luscious wines of the region. A dream setting for Marc Moulin to lead his ensemble on a 26-minutes+ jazz adventure -- Nick Kletchkovsky on…
High Risk
Never before released 1974 recording of the all-female Spiritual jazz Californian outfit High Risk. A unique musical experience that is oozing the spiritual freedom of the early seventies in a creative mixture of jazz, folk and poetry – all fuelled with political lyrics.From an all-female band consisting of Virginia Rubino (of BeBe K’Roche fame) on keys, Cyndy ”Cynth” Mason Fitzpatrick (of flutemedicine fame) on saxes and flute, Bobi Jackson on bass and Sandy Ajida on percussion. The album featu…
Diom Futa
Killer! Seminal and much sought after Afro Jazz session recorded in Paris in 1979 featuring Senegalese percussionist Cheikh Tidian, produced by Jean-Paul Rodrigue for his cult Freelance label. The session features saxophone player Jo Maka - leader of the Celestial Communication Orchestra but perhaps best known for his work with Angolan singer Bonga - and regular Steve Lacy collaborator Bobby Few, in a Parisian answer to Black Jazz and Strata East. A Brilliant leftfield spiritual jazz release fr…
Alice Coltrane bundle
**In process of stocking** of Alice's four extraordinary albums Eternity, Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana, Transcendence and Transfiguration in bundle. With liner notes by Mark Richardson and rare photos by Gary Heery and Ginny Winn. Alice Coltrane was a pioneer - one of a tiny number of women in 1960’s jazz to be allowed through the door – wielding her instrument with a force and artistry which couldn’t be ignored. It was her visionary mind which helped push her husband toward the astounding sonic …
Crossings
Crossings was the second release by the Herbie Hancock Sextet lineup known as the Mwandishi Band, following 1971's Mwandishi which stretched Hancock's already-adventurous writing and expanded the music through post-production. This approach would play an even larger role on Crossings, the pianist's final album for Warner Bros. For two of Crossings' three pieces ('Quasar' and 'Water Torture'), Hancock took basic instrumental tracks to Patrick Gleeson's Different Fur Studios, hoping to learn how t…
Mwandishi
After releasing their Warner Bros. debut, the Herbie Hancock Sextet underwent a major transformation in the early '70s. Over the course of a year, every member was replaced (except Herbie Hancock himself and bassist Buster Williams) and each adopted Swahili names. (Williams even led the group in occasional sessions of Buddhist chanting.) Hancock chose the moniker Mwandishi (meaning 'composer'), and the Sextet became unofficially known as the Mwandishi Band. The lineup's first album -- simply tit…
Fat Albert Rotunda
If Fat Albert Rotunda sounds like the most fun Herbie Hancock had in
his early years as a band leader, it should. He composed the music for
the pilot of the children's television show Fat Albert, redirecting the
post-bop jazz he honed in a five-year stint with the Miles Davis Quintet
towards the R&B and funk styles with which he was becoming
enamored. The result was a playful, joyous album in which Hancock
clearly had a great time.The same goes for the rest of his Sextet, which by the time…
Je Suis Un Sauvage / Le Moral Necessaire
A single produced by the highly-revered Saravah label at the time, featuring the Art Ensemble of Chicago backing the poetry of the little-remembered Alfred Panou, is not as well-known as the label's other releases. Seen in the 1967 film Weekend by Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Panou who is of mixed Benin-Togolese origin, already had a career as an actor in political theater when, pushed by producer Pierre Barouh, he recorded two of his texts concerning Black Power. Panou's prose is one of the first, i…
Winged Body
This album is about a way to simply make raw, basic, natural and joyful music. This album is also about and with the Swedish saxophone visionary Bengt Nordström, ”Frippe” who first of all talked to me about making and playing natural music. The legend of Bengt Nordström (1936-2000) tells how he picked up the clarinet and the saxophone after being deeply touched by the music of Tony Scott and Sonny Rollins.Then meeting Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler changed his musical vision; so much that he n…
Axis
The initial vinyl edition comes with a CD. The debut album from this Norwegian-American trio consists of two long tracks that move between intimate lyricism and hardcore expressionism, shaping one of the strongest free jazz offerings we have heard for quite some time. Filipino-American Jon Irabagon has topped both the Rising Star Alto Saxophone and the Rising Star Tenor Saxophone categories in Down Beat´s critics polls and been named one of Time Out New York´s 25 New York City Jazz Icons. Among …
John Cage Meets Sun Ra: The Complete Film
* Restocked, reduced price * The never-before-seen in its entirety, visual documentation proving this avant-garde collaboration of mythic proportions did indeed occur. Recorded at Sideshows by the Seashore along the Coney Island boardwalk on June 8th, 1986 as documented on VHS by John Polizzi under the commission of event producers Rick Russo and Bronwyn Rucker. It was long believed that John Cage and Sun Ra never performed together but as you'll see,these two shared the stage the entire time. T…
Brussel Live
Highlights of their first 2 concerts in about 20 years, live in Brussels (2007-2008), shows the trio of Gilbert Artman, Jac Berrocal and Jean-Francois Pauvros anarchistic, powerful and controversial as ever. Uncertain rockers, exacerbated freejazzmen, pranksters, Jean-Francois Pauvros: guitarist, Jac Berrocal: trumpeter and vocalist, Gilbert Artman: drummer and pianist are a bit of everything, rock stomping, boring the avant garde, enraging the virtuosity. Trespassing the unbreakable with the su…