New Arrivals / Last 2 weeks
Smoke-Blackened Walls & Curlews
‘Surprisingly enough, program music is not all that common in jazz. For example, unlike their classical counterparts, not many jazz composers have set out to evoke particular places. Duke Ellington’s 'Tone Parallel To Harlem' is one of the great exceptions. Britain has been even more neglected, unless you count Billy Strayhorn’s 'Chelsea Bridge', and that was about Whistler's painting rather than the actual bridge itself. But the British jazz composer Graham Collier is one who is doing something…
Harpsichords
Tip! "Three harpsichords in various states of disrepair were kindly offered to me by Leeds Conservatoire. I accepted, and a memorandum of understanding was swiftly drawn up. The offer was made under the condition that I might make some music from them, given my penchant for infirm instruments, and their conventional worthlessness to anyone wishing to use them for their intended purpose. There seemed to be an auspiciousness surrounding these harpsichords, the stories they might reveal, and more i…
Metaphysical Swatting
After emerging from a red shag-carpeted basement in Baltimore in 2012, Comfort Link produced a series of skewed concrete muzak albums knitted together with wobbly tape loops of found and recycled sounds, gradually shifting toward a darker post-industrial sound collage style on more recent releases. On Metaphysical Swatting, battered reel-to-reel tape machines and portable cassette recorders scramble up the primary sound sources of voice and organ - ancient reels of tape with loose oxide are over…
The Movers Brought Rainbows
Long-running Jersey outfit Human Adult Band come to us after dropping a sickening array of no-fi noise rock and damaged art punk tapes and records upon the public. And yet, The Movers Brought Rainbows is probably their most abstract and alien work to date. While the guitar/bass/drums/voice formation is still the genesis of these recordings, at its core feedback and reverb are the star players here. Source sessions recorded at various locations are unapologetically run through the ringer, subject…
Sintered
Tip! Tim Olive lives in and operates out of Kobe, Japan, where he has built an impressive discography of solo and collaborative recordings using magnetic pickups as a primary instrument. Sintered was created with several of these magnetic pickups, along with metal objects, radios, and spring reverb. Working with such temperamental technology, it’s clear that Olive’s intuition and timing are assets put to good use here, sharpened from decades of collaboration and improvisation, from his early wor…
Blue Piccolo
*2024 stock* A trumpeter who played in the Charles Mingus Group and other groups. This album is somewhat unique in the Whynot catalog, which is lined with works overflowing with blackness. The bop style is orthodox, but the one-horn style of playing original compositions is truly poignant. Cecil Mcbee and drummer Steve McCall join the band.
Morning Prayer
*2024 stock* Chico Freeman wrote all the originals and arranged it for the septet. The music is an excellent documentation of what was going on in Chicago during the avant-garde period. The tunes and performances make challenging and rewarding listening. It is now thirty three years since this important, pioneering recording was made and it a testament to it's value that the music has matured so well and to this day remains vital, challenging and fresh. Chico Freeman - tenor & soprano saxophone,…