Jazz /
Merci Yaya Bongo - Female Animation Groups in Gabon 1982-1989 (2LP)
Gabon, 1980’s. President Omar Bongo has been in power since 1967. Together with his wife, the infamous singer Patience Dabany, he invents one of the ultimate political propaganda machine: ‘animation groups’, massive female choirs and dancers, up to 60 women deep, singing the praise of his regime over some of the best soukous rhythms ever, broadcasted live on TV. Between 1982 and 1989, mainly thanks to the flourishing oil economy, a record-label is created, a state-of-the-art recording studio is …
Orientations
A raid on the values of oriental jazz master and pioneering ethnomusicologist Lloyd Miller.
Togo Soul 2
Hot Casa Records present Togo Soul 2: Selected Rare Togolese Recordings from 1974 to 1989.
Live in Roma 1980
Double CD box, perfect replica of the LP edition, with extensive booklet. The venerable Holidays, having already had an incredible 2023, returns with their final offering of the year and what might just be their most ambitions release to date, Sun Ra’s “Live in Rome 1980”, an astounding 3xLP vinyl box set that captures the Arkestra immersed in one of their greatest live gigs laid to tape. A perfect snapshot of why this band was so incredible, moving from furious free jazz fire into joyous June T…
Coraje Buenos Aire
Killer unreleased 1973 post-bop, avant jazz album from Argentina, with highly political texts. The missing link in Argentina's jazz history finally sees the light. Coraje Buenos Aires was recorded in 1973, conceived as a follow-up to the historic Bronca Buenos Aires (1971). More explicitly than its predecessor, the texts in Coraje denounced the atrocities of the military junta that ruled the country, and the album was inevitably censored before being released. The tapes, thought to have been bur…
Live At Fat Tuesday's, February 9, 1980 First Visit
First visit archive offers previously unreleased recordings of historic and musical importance. "When, in this music, he succeeds in fusing the emotional (translated into its lyrical and dramatic qualities) pas- sage of ritual with the complex architecture of his ensemble’s infrastructural procedures, we have a bridge into Cecil Taylor’s creative spirit, and far beyond." - Art Lange
"I was present at the recordings, sitting in the recording truck in front of Fat Tuesday’s in NYC. The recording w…
Three For Shepp to Gesprächsfetzen „Revisited“
"Brown was already defying categorisation in 1966 when he recorded Three For Shepp, whose six tracks open Three For Shepp To Gespächsfetzen Revisited. Brown’s opening “New Blues” and Shepp’s closing “Delicado,” though compelling,are relatively orthodox expressions of mid 1960s NewThing. The four tracks they bookend, however, are distinctive even today. Brown’s exquisite “Fortunato,” though it sounds like nothing Pharoah Sanders ever wrote, inhabits similarly pretty terrain as Sanders’ astral-ja…
Elastic
When Mars Williams dove into his vault to excavate several recordings for a Mars Archive series on Corbett vs. Dempsey, he immediately landed on a concert date from a decade earlier. The event, recorded at Chicago's Elastic Arts Foundation in 2012, featured a trio with Williams on reed instruments, Darin Gray on bass, and Chris Corsano on drums. This configuration had already been highly enough estimated by Williams that he'd posted one set on Bandcamp, but he saved the other set for future rele…
Hold That Thought
From a night of music in Holland that's become legendary among NRG Ensemble enthusiasts, Hold That Thought presents a blazing concert of the quintet's unique sound. With Mars Williams and Ken Vandermark on reeds, Kent Kessler and Brian Sandstrom on basses (the latter doubling on trumpet and electric guitar), and Steve Hunt on drums, this incarnation of the band was arguably its tightest and mightiest, taking the inspiration of founder Hal Russell (1926-1992) and running with it. All the way. The…
I know You Are But What Am I?
At the tail end of 1996, saxophonist Mars Williams and drummer Hamid Drake took the tall corner stage at Chicago's Empty Bottle for two sets of duets. The rock club had just started a weekly Jazz & Improvised Music Series, curated by Ken Vandemark and John Corbett, which would run for nearly a decade. This rare pairing brought together two pivotal figures in the city's creative music scene, both of whom had extensive experience in diverse areas of music, from the free jazz focus of this intimate…
Funky Stuff
Fresh reissued magic of Funky Stuff, formerly a rare exquisite by jazzmaster Jiro Inagaki, originally released in 1975. An enduring, pioneering fusion of jazz, funk, soul and rock - the album features some of the best and most acclaimed Japanese musicians of the time, enlisting the talent-wares of Hiromasa Suzuki on keyboards, Akira Ishikawa on drums and Takeru Muraoka on sax.
Labyrinth: British Jazz On Record 1960-75 (Book)
Hardcover Edition, large format. Labyrinth is a massive hardback book, 375pp in length, printed on high-quality art paper, with an embossed cover and cloth quarter-binding, written by Richard Morton Jack. This beautiful, limited edition hardback is the most comprehensive overview of the subject ever published. It celebrates over three hundred albums, offering detailed background info about each, alongside excerpts from original reviews and masses of high-quality images that reproduce their fabul…
Maua
“A blissfully ecstatic sprawl of spiritual-jazz explorations of the most transcendent order” – Brooklyn Rail
Thembi
Pharoah Sanders recorded the songs that comprise Thembi in the winter of ’70/’71, in between sessions with Alice Coltrane that would eventually become her masterpiece Journey In Satchidananda LP. The same compelling spirituality that embued Coltrane’s masterpiece with a mood of stately calm and grace pervades Thembi. ‘On Thembi, that was the first time that I ever touched a Fender Rhodes electric piano. We got to the studio in California — Cecil McBee had to unpack his bass, the drummer had to …
Pharaoh Sanders Quintet
2024 Repress. ESP-Disk present a reissue of Pharoah Sanders Quintet, originally released in 1965. Recorded on September 10, 1964, prior to his well-known association with John Coltrane, this eponymous album (later renamed Pharoah's First) is the debut release of the iconic tenor saxophonist, Pharoah Sanders. (Yes, there are some spelling oddities here: the artist -- birth name Ferrell -- only later changed the spelling from the standard Pharaoh to the more personalized Pharoah). With one foot in…
Eye To Ear
2024 stock. Famous as an improviser and a rock guitarist (Henry Cow, Art Bears, Residents, Massacre, Skeleton Crew, French/Frith/Kaiser/Thompson), Fred Frith is still highly under-rated as a composer. Since relocating to Germany in the early '90s, Frith has composed soundtracks for a number of films and has chosen his finest for his first Tzadik release, Eye To Ear.
Rats Don't Eat Synthesizers
Akuphone in collaboration with Annihaya present Rats Don't Eat Synthesizers, the long-awaited second album by The Dwarfs Of East Agouza. Hailing from the Agouza district of Cairo, Egypt, this brilliant trio consists of Alan Bishop (acoustic bass, alto sax), Maurice Louca (keyboards, drum machine), and Sam Shalabi (electric guitar). Following their acclaimed first album Bes (NAWA 005CD, 2016), this new full-length is composed of two hypnotic journeys: "Rats Don't Eat Synthesizers" and "Ringa Mas…
Four For Trane
** Official reissue by Elemental music in collaboration with Impulse Records! Special Gatefold Edition. ** Recorded for the Impulse label by Archie Shepp in 1965, four of the five tracks on Four for Trane are reworkings of pieces originally recorded in 1959 & 1960 by John Coltrane, and released on his Giant Steps (1960) and Coltrane Plays the Blues (1962) albums. They are rearranged here by Shepp and trombonist Roswell Rudd. The album also features trumpeter Alan Shorter (Wayne Shorter’s brother…
Point Of Departure
Pure Virgin Vinyl, 180 Gram, Audiophile Grade, Limited Edition. Alfred Lion and Max Margulis established the Blue Note label in 1939, with photographer Francis Wolff becoming involved shortly afterwards. The caliber of the musicians that recorded for Blue Note coupled with its stylized cover designs has made it one of the most legendary jazz labels of all time. From the dozens of classic albums produced by the Blue Note label, our collection presents some of the most outstanding titles. They hav…
3+3
Much has happened to Tomeka Reid, who was already one of jazz's definitive figures in the 21st century, in the 4½ years since her last album by this all-star quintet. Most notably, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022, one of the most prestigious awards in the creative arts field in the USA. The same year, she also won the DownBeat Critics Poll for miscellaneous instrument (despite many deserving talents emerging on the instrument, the jazz polls don't have cello as a category for reco…