★Intakt Records
Plie
The problem that besets British jazz - from Ray Noble and Ronnie Scott to Barbara Thompson and Andy Sheppard - is light-music, 'Radio 2' gentility; in Germany it is what Michael Kator (describing the results of the Nazi ban on "hot Jewish music") called "the bane of German jazz, the dreaded 'um-papa' sound". Here, four free music veterans from East Berlin (Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, alto; Ulrich Gumpert, piano; Connie Bauer, trombone; Günter Sommer, percussion) have decided to ease up, let some 'da…
World of Strings
Stephan Wittwer Intakt solo album, World of Strings has him all over the guitar. Live recordings.
Five Voices
International consortium of freaky vocal talent culled together here represent some of the finest exponents of extemporaneous jibber jabber extant. From the U.S., we have the zany N.Y. avant chanteuse Shelley Hirsch and her equally flipped out N.Y. compatriot in extended vocal technique David Moss as well as the L.A.-based Anna Homler, whose approach emerges from her personal zone of invented language generation as heard on her gorgeous Do Ya Sa Di Do CD, which I posted a while back. To that, ad…
Uluru
Solo work by one great saxophone player, founder of the Butch Morris' X-Communication and of the Cecil Taylor's European Big Band.
Hardcore Chambermusic
1995 release ** The “Hardcore Chambermusic” album is a music publishing phenomena that has taken Switzerland by storm, in which Koch-Schütz-Studer sampled and compressed hundreds of pieces of music from sources as diverse as Bela Bartok and Luciano Berio to Public Enemy and Bob Marley to create something revolutionary and altogether new."