★Esp-Disk
Breakdown Lane: Free Solos & Duos 1976-1998
"Duck Baker should be a national treasure. He should be an international treasure. Should be? In my book he already is. I first came across his work in the 1970s on early Kicking Mule LPs in my local library in the UK, which was his temporary base then, and is his permanent home now. Many years later I was astounded by Spinning Song, his CD of Herbie Nichols compositions. Around the same time, I made contact with him by way of thanks following a review he wrote of my work on Stuff Smith and, lat…
Infinite-Sum Game
“Thollem is a modern griot who has absorbed sounds from every place he has visited.” – William Parker, from Conversations II (Rogue Art)
One Evening and Other Folk Songs
Infinite-Sum Game is a curated selection of my solo piano performance in Palermo on May 13th, 2023, at Sala Perriera in the Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa. I have the deepest gratitude first and foremost to Lelio Giannetto and Valeria, as well as Gabri, Luca, Yuki, Angela, Curva Minore, SIO, and the greater Sicilian musical community. It's a great honor to have been embraced by the community in Palermo, to be able to spend so much time there, and to collaborate with so many artists who have become…
Paper Jays
While their name may conjure images of avian origami, rolled cannabis, or cut-up 10th letters, Paper Jays are an instrumental music body from Rhode Island that became fully formed during the session for their forthcoming eponymous release on ESP-disk. Prior, Jesse Cohen and Justin Hubbard’s guitar duo (a trio, only if counting the unmanned feedback drone of a hollow-bodied Gibson) had been contentedly performing and apartment taping for a solid five years. But after witnessing drummer and percus…
Oxtirn
2024 (lucky) stock, totally sold-out at source since many years. Limited edition of 300 copies, pressed on 180 gram vinyl. Oxtirn is a truly unique and powerful blend of free energy, modern composition, and mechanical music that defies genre. With two proper full-lengths and an array of self-releases under his belt, Eli Keszler has turned to ESP-Disk for the release of Oxtirn, his third, most composed, and large scale effort to date. Oxtirn captures Keszler and crew at their most frenetic, and a…
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…
Circular Temple
"On a good day it is strenuous to stay current with pianist Matthew Shipp's imposing and voluminous output. On an even better day it is a fool's hardy errand to say the least. Now with the planned re-issuing of some of his great early deconstructions of musical thought and theory, starting here with 1990's daringly incongruous yet hypnotically accessible, Circular Temple, keeping up just got a whole lot harder. With William Parker on bass and Whit Dickey on drums, this four-movement suite for pi…
Tales From The Skinny Apartment
*2023 stock* Tales from the Skinny Apartment is somewhere around the 20th or so Painted Faces release...Drucker has long lost count. He runs/curates gigs (and records at) the Skinny Apartment, his dwelling place in Ridgewood Queens, which some folks have called the "realest DIY zone in NYC." He also rips in Dead River Company, Big Hiatus, Shecky, Canyon River Blues and countless other unknown subterranean improv zoner outfits. "Ripping" involves keeping it freaky and weird and ripping sets where…
Seven pieces / about an hour / saxophone, piano, drums
There are some jazz musicians long known by cognoscenti for a mere handful of recordings: Dupree Bolton, Earl Anderza, Hasaan Ibn-Ali, Alan Shorter, Dewey Johnson. Add saxophonist Mark Reboul to that list. Before the release of this album, his discography consisted of four tracks on three albums on which he was a sideman. On Higher Primates’ Environmental Impressions (GM, 1987), he plays sax on two of the percussion-heavy album’s five tracks: a fragmentary track, and a sixteen-and-a-half-minute …
Normal Street
Normal Street is another salvo in ESP-Disk's drive to revive weird rock! Writer/musician/film maker Chris Shields says: "Near the DIY venue, cooperative, and punk/freak haven, The Firehouse, in Worcester, Mass, there's a street ironically named 'Normal St.' I was lucky enough to be playing a gig with Painted Faces there a few years back. Driving up the steep, labyrinthine roads we spotted the green sign, had a laugh owing to some solid riffing by all present, and then, moved on. The gig was good…
The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra Vol.1
2023 repress. 180-gram black vinyl. The astonishing sessions that went light years beyond "free jazz" improvisation to create a music of deeply felt, explosive and gentle gesture made from sound itself without reference to previous notions of melody or harmony are now reissued on 180 gram vinyl with Sun Ra's original, self-created cover art. Recorded by Richard Alderson on April 20, 1965, this set of tunes finds Sun Ra breaking ground by using synthesizers and having the Arkestra musicians doubl…
The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra Vol.2
2023 repress. 180-gram black vinyl. Volume two of Sun Ra's classic Heliocentric recordings from the 1960s. The astonishing sessions that went light years beyond "free jazz" improvisation to create a music of deeply-felt, explosive and gentle gesture made from sound itself without reference to previous notions of melody or harmony are now reissued on 180 gram vinyl with Sun Ra's original, self-created cover art. Recorded by Richard Alderson on April 20, 1965, this set of tunes finds Sun Ra breaki…
In The Dark
Allen Lowe writes: In the Dark is a commemoration (sic) of the worst time of my life – a period of time during which, having been operated on to remove a cancerous tumor in my sinus, I slept for only brief periods of time. Sometimes I made it as long as two hours continuously, but most often I dozed off for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe an hour – encamped as I was on my couch, trying not to wake my wife as I wandered in the dark contemplating the long night ahead. Sometimes I turned the televisi…
America: The Rough Cut
Allen Lowe writes: "America: The Rough Cut is my statement not only on American music and American song, but also my commentary on the way American musicians of all styles handle that old-time music and those old song forms . . . The old things -- not just the blues, but gospel music and pre-blues shouts and language, plus hillbilly/minstrel song and medicine show irony -- reflect a disinterest in the polite trappings of (primarily but not only white) society, an implicit rejection of basic tona…
No Joke!
ESP is proud to present a new William Parker album in collaboration with his wife Patricia Nicholson. No Joke! is unapologetically political, facing down injustice and inequality and other “in”s with artistic integrity and “outside” music.
World Construct
Throughout his long and prolific career, Matthew Shipp has presented several different and impressive trio formations. Among the featured members have been bassists William Parker, and Joe Morris, and drummers Guillermo E. Brown, Whit Dickey, and Susie Ibarra. In 2015, two other premier players, bassist Michael Bisio, and drummer Newman Taylor Baker stepped in as the rhythm section on The Conduct of Jazz (Thirsty Ear). Their fourth album as a unit, World Construct makes the group the most enduri…
SILVA
Bára Gísladóttir is an Icelandic composer and double bassist based in Copenhagen. She is an active performer and regularly plays her own music, mostly solo or with her long-time collaborator Skúli Sverrisson. Additionally, she is the double bassist of Elja Ensemble. Occasionally, she performs as a soloist with ensembles or orchestras, most recently in her own double bass concert, "Hringla," with the Copenhagen Philharmonic. Every sound on SILVA is of the double bass, processed to various degrees…
Sonic Fiction
*2023 stock* After a duo album and two trio albums by Shipp and Walerian, all for ESP-Disk', we get a quartet album from them that continues their strategy of working with different musicians each time out. Bisio and Dickey are long-time collaborators with Shipp, but the addition of Walerian's Zen style changes the dynamics of their interactions. Walerian and Dickey, masters of restraint, were a match waiting to be made, and their instant rapport is one of the attractions of this album.
Your Prayer
Super Tip! Reissue, originally released in 1967. Frank Wright returned to the studio in May 1967 to make his second album using a quintet of players little-known at the time but now legends to free-jazz cognoscenti. Trumpeter Jacques Coursil, who almost made an album for ESP-Disk' himself, went on to the greatest fame of the players besides Wright; alto saxophonist Arthur Jones was not recorded nearly as often as his talents deserved; Steve Tintweis's stint playing with Albert Ayler raised the y…
Frank Wright Trio
Reissue, originally released on ESP Disk' in 1966. Frank "The Reverend" Wright was one of the most powerful saxophonists to pick up on Albert Ayler's freedom and ferocious playing. Born in Mississippi and raised in Memphis, TN and then Cleveland, OH, he started in music as a bassist in blues bands but switched to tenor sax under the influence of his Cleveland friend Albert Ayler. Wright's "energy music" approach to tenor saxophone was influenced by Ayler but at the time in the '60s Wright's inte…