Jazz /
Educated Guess Vol. 1
2024 stock. Dave Tucker says that he brought this disparate group of musicians together for a live performance at London’s Cafe Oto last March on “an educated guess,” predicting that the artists - Mark Sanders (Drums & Percussion), Pat Thomas (Piano & Keys), Dave Tucker (Guitar) and Thurston Moore (Guitar) - would be able to create something extraordinary through improvisation. The condition of their encounter would later become the collective’s name, an “Educated Guess” and the eponymous title …
Maua
“A blissfully ecstatic sprawl of spiritual-jazz explorations of the most transcendent order” – Brooklyn Rail
The Advocate
One of the most important musical partnerships in English Free Improvisation was the duo of Tony Oxley and Derek Bailey. Their long standing friendship began as early as 1963 with the group Joseph Holbrooke (including composer/bassist Gavin Bryars) and lasted over forty years. These recordings were created in the studio in 1975 and catch them at their peak. Also included is Oxley’s touching tribute to Bailey, a dynamic new piece for electronics and percussion recorded live at the recent Bailey t…
Eddie Gale's Ghetto Music
From Elemental Music comes the long overdue vinyl reissue of one of greatest and most standalone albums in both the legendary Blue Note catalog and the history of American jazz: the longtime Sun Ra Arkestra trumpeter Eddie Gale’s 1968 debut “Ghetto Music”. A towering hybrid of free jazz, spiritual jazz, and gospel, infused with politics of Black Nationalism and self-determination of its era that culminate in a writhing, heavy sound like nothing else, it’s one of those records that pulls the rug …
NYC 1978
Evan Parker made his first trip to North America as a performer in the fall of 1978 touring solo in the US and Canada. His landmark solo record Monoceros had been recorded in April. This is a recording of his first solo performance in New York City. While it may lack the sonic fidelity of Monoceros, its raw passion makes a statement to the New York audiences lucky to have been at Environ that October evening.
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…
Heart Trio
CD Edition. 6-panel digipak, printed on heavyweight stock reverse board. Per AUM standard, a beauty. Notes/poem by WP & photos on inners. Heart Trio features three lifelong-devoted fellow travelers on the path of healing through sound. World-renowned & revered bassist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improvisor, community leader William Parker has performed and recorded extensively with both master pianist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, inveterate performer Cooper-Moore & master …
This Brings Us To Volume I & II
To celebrate saxophonist/flutist Henry Threadgill's career retrospective at the 2024 Big Ears Festival, Pi Recordings release both Volumes I & II of This Brings Us To together in a limited-edition double vinyl set. Featuring his long-running band, Zooid, the two volumes were originally released in 2009 and 2010 even though the music was all recorded at a single session. They were his first releases in eight years, longer than any hiatus in his career, a time that allowed for the gestation of wh…
Sinal Fechado
Of the early stars of MPB (Música Popular Brasileira), Chico Buarque was one of the first to become a certifiable pop star. With his warm, nasalinflected croon, elegant phrasing, and considerable skill at lyric writing, Buarque (who is handsome to boot) became extremely popular with women, who loved his understated sensuality. In 1974, Buarque recorded Sinal Fechado, after having his music censored numerous times by the Brazilian military dictatorship during the ‘70s. By the time of this recordi…
Live At Vidro '77
** 2LP version. 180 gram vinyl. Heavy sleeve and obi ** I had no idea that Ryo Fukui had left behind such a sound source. This is a completely unreleased live performance recorded on June 8, 1977. The recording was done at Sapporo's live house "Vidro" by Masataka Ito, the producer of Fukui's "Scenery" and "Mellow Dream” albums. It is exactly the performance of the Fukui Trio from that period, but at the same time, it has an overwhelming energy and freshness that is not found in studio recordings…
September Night
Recorded at Munich’s Muffathalle twenty years ago, in September 2004, this previously-unreleased concert recording of the Tomasz Stanko Quartet is a fascinating document, capturing a developmental chapter in the music between the song forms of the Suspended Night repertoire and the improvised areas that the Polish musicians would explore on Lontano. The Munich show was a highlight in a year in which the Stanko Quartet played a record number of gigs, with extensive tours of the US and Europe. T…
My Prophet
On My Prophet, Oded Tzur together with his quartet of pianist Nitai Hershkovits, bassist Petros Klampanis and the new group member Cyrano Almeida on drums, continues on the idiosyncratic musical path he has carved out for himself – a flowing jazz idiom that seamlessly combines multiple forms of expression –, while delving deeper into the meditative and highly concentrated realm of improvisation. In the process, the saxophonist presents some of his fiercest playing yet.
The quartet’s synergy is…
Live In Munich
This concert recording from Munich’s Schwere Reiter performance space features improvisation with an expanded palette of possibilities. “To work with these colours is a great challenge and joy!” says bassist Barry Guy of the glowing and ever-changing tints, timbres and tones radiating from Jordina Millà’s freely associative piano. Like Guy, Millà is both a player of prodigious technical capacity and a fearless improvisational explorer, and her highly creative use of the piano interior opens up …
Bakteria
The Błoto quartet had made a comeback six months ago with their first singles in over two years dropping “Szlam” and “Ścieki”. These tracks were pressed on a 7-inch vinyl by Astigmatic Records, but this only whetted the appetites of the band’s mud-loving fans, as the singles sold out instantly. And so, the band's musical onslaught continues. Ahead of their upcoming LP “Grzybnia” set to release in autumn 2024, Błoto is putting out another bacteria-laden 7-inch to conclude this brief series of sin…
The Invisible
"Masters of musical tension. Maintaining tension, resolving tension. It's an integral part of improvised music, but of this international trio in particular. Rodrigo Amado and Dirk Serries first bonded over a couple of duo concerts in the summer of 2018. With his roots in (free) jazz, lauded Portuguese saxophonist Amado became an intriguing sparring partner for the Belgian guitarist, who's been involved in a more abstract style for some time now. With English Andrew Lisle, a drummer with an extr…
Towards The Flame, Vol. 2
"Three of Europe's most acclimated and proven improvisers—pianist Robert Mitchell (Steve Coleman, Greg Osby), bassist Neil Charles, and drummer/percussionist Mark Sanders (Jah Wobble, Rachel Musson)—band together as The Flame for the first time and emerge from pandemic isolation, and the forever wars and broken civics that accompanied it, with a hypnotic performance captured absolutely live on Towards the Flame.
Recorded at London's Cafe Otto in February of 2022, The Flame comes to life like mos…
Lullabies And Other Stories
CD edition. Solo album by Walter Prati, here back on his cello driving us through an illuminating and sublimative journey. Walter Prati’s composition for cello seems to interpret this range of facets, these transparent and elusive angles. Contemplative music, to a certain extent, but also ready to express fragments lyrically, and their rushing to compose a mosaic. For reasons I cannot explain, I catch a glimpse of several iridescent colours, between turquoise and hard blue with odd crimson strip…
Maschine
Mozo Mozo was founded in 2018. Moritz Haberkorn (guitar, FX), Michael Masen (sax), Christoph Kirmaier (bass, FX) and Lukas Wöber (drums) played many intense session before forming the group. Their aim was to bring original free jazz to a young audience. Their live shows are legendary - their gigs are complex, performative and combine elements of jazz and rock. In 2021 Felix Linhart took Moritz Haberkorn's place with the former concentrating more on his solo projects like Morast. The name Mozo Mo…
Feed Back Saxo Fone
Michael Fischer is a musician, composer andinstant composition conductor. He works on the immanence of language within sounds, their sculptural and dramatic evidence, on the tenor saxophone, the violin, on cd-player setting and conducted instant compositions, in improvised and experimental music / noise / soundscapes. Collaborations in literature - focus experimental poetry, dance, performance, installation, video. Next to his long standing collaborations such as duo Bagg*Fish with drummer Marco…
Frank Gratkowski's Entrainment
Frank Gratkowski studied woodwind instruments at Hamburg University. He constantly works on extending the repertoire of his instruments: solo and in various groups, large or small. He uses unusual techniques to play his instruments and sees himself as working in contemporary improvised music. Composition and improvisation are both equally important. In 1995 he founded the first Frank Gratkowski trio with Gerry Hemingway on drums and Dieter Manderscheid on bass. Since then, he is part of various …