Jazz /
More Lost Performances (Revisited)
"The almost five year span bookended in this particular Ayler revisitation marks, in a certain sense,
the beginning and end points of the most lasting and creative portion of his remarkable, though
sadly brief, career." – Brian Olewnick
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…
Crescent
*2023 stock* "John Coltrane's Crescent from the spring of 1964 is an epic album, showing his meditative side that would serve as a perfect prelude to his immortal work A Love Supreme. His finest quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones supports the somewhat softer side of Coltrane, and while not completely in ballad style, the focus and accessible tone of this recording work wonders for anyone willing to sit back and let this music enrich and wash over you.
While not quite at th…
Midnight All Day
*2023 stock* Some of the best improvised percussion solos from the early years.
Environment For Sextet
*2023 stock* "In 1978, thanks to Eugene Chadbourne, Davey Williams and John Zorn I was able to organize a memorable US tour. On this CD you’ll find the original New York recording session with a sextet of great musicians. The tape has been released in the past on Ictus LP in a reduced version and on CD in an unfortunate cut full of wrong edit. Now you can finally enjoy the music as it was conceived and performed. Environment for sextet LP was made possible by a generous loan from the unforgettab…
L.A. Strictly Confidential
*2023 stock* "The West Coast Chamber Jazz Trio, recently formed, remains faithful to its name, in the sense that the undoubted chamber size and the jazz component, apparent in rhythmic melodic lines and improvisation always kept under control, are beautifully conjugated in the narrative modes, colloquialisms and relaxed of the Californian jazz, not only from the fifties and sixties, but also that one of the most recent landings …" - Libero Farnè
October Wind Vol. 1
*2023 stock* "The release of the two volumes of October Wind, on the tenth anniversary of Steve Lacy death, has a special meaning for me. Not only because it’s probably the last unreleased recording of this extraordinary trio, but also because I was working on it with my dearest friend Gilles Laheurte, who had been one of the best friend of the late Steve Lacy. Gilles was a scholar of Steve Lacy music and I had the privilege to have his liner notes on the previous re-discovered trio recording re…
October Wind Vol. 2
*2023 stock* "The release of the two volumes of October Wind, on the tenth anniversary of Steve Lacy death, has a special meaning for me. Not only because it’s probably the last unreleased recording of this extraordinary trio, but also because I was working on it with my dearest friend Gilles Laheurte, who had been one of the best friend of the late Steve Lacy. Gilles was a scholar of Steve Lacy music and I had the privilege to have his liner notes on the previous re-discovered trio recording re…
Ictus Nights @The Stone - Anthology Volume 2
*2023 stock* "Celebrating a label's 35th anniversary at a venue as iconic as The Stone in New York City is already quite revealing of the nature of the music to be heard, i.e. definitely unusual and daring, definitely with no piano bar and no noisy cash register... But with the present celebration, there was an added element of surprise, as Andrea Centazzo — founder of the creative Ictus label and curator of the 12 nights Festival (April 1-14, 2012) -- brought for the first time ever to the hear…
Ictus Nights @The Stone - Anthology Volume 1
*2023 stock* "Celebrating a label's 35th anniversary at a venue as iconic as The Stone in New York City is already quite revealing of the nature of the music to be heard, i.e. definitely unusual and daring, definitely with no piano bar and no noisy cash register... But with the present celebration, there was an added element of surprise, as Andrea Centazzo — founder of the creative Ictus label and curator of the 12 nights Festival (April 1-14, 2012) -- brought for the first time ever to the hear…
Ictus Records' 30th Anniversary Collection
*2023 stock* "This 12CDs Box Set is perhaps the most important collection of music in the Ictus Records history, a celebration for the 30th anniversary of the birth of one of the first independent labels of the 70′.
At that time for a young musician like me, the recording scene was fairly discouraging especially in my country of origin, Italy. Record companies were not interested in producing “avant-garde music”, and this music found its way out through few small musicians – owned labels. In o…
In Real Time
*2023 stock* "Real Time is an extraordinary example of interaction between musicians coming from different worlds of new music. I had the chance to perform with those two great musicians on other occasions: in duo with Curran and in duo, trio and sextet with Parker. Alvin came from the American school, full of minimalist references, melodic structures and open to all kinds of contamination.
Evan had left jazz to accomplish his own instrumental language, aiming at total improvisation. The idea of…
Thirty Years From Monday
*2023 stock* Rare duo performance by Andrea Centazzo and Alvin Curran in 1977 between minimalism and blues.
Alvin Curran Gran Piano, Trumpet, Synthesizer, VocalsAndrea Centazzo percussion, tape effects
Back To The Future
*2023 stock* "The story behind this CD is really singular and date back to a couple of years ago. One day I got an e-mail from Marco Cappelli a young Italian guitarist, living in New York and making quickly a reputation in the avant-garde and improvised music scene. Marco was trying to establish a contact, claiming similarities between my and his experience. I was intrigued by the letter and, even if my recent music was totally on another planet, I decided to write him and establish a relationsh…
Scraps
*2023 stock* "Sometime an old box of tapes, overlooked for decades, could reserve nice surprises. This album is a collection of those surprises. In the years of my collaboration with Steve Lacy, we did a lot of recording and we selected what was the best for the short length of the vinyl LPs. So some tracks were edited leaving part of the improvisations out or discarded for a similarity with something already included in the albums. Thanks to the digital editing, I had the chance to reorganize t…
Bridges
*2023 stock* "On a summer-like evening of May 2012 in Milan, Italy, three master improvisers played together for the first time, and created music full of spontaneity and ethereal beauty at JapzItaly – Jazz Aid for Japanese Children. At a superficial level, Andrea Centazzo – the idiosyncratic composer and percussionist renowned for refined finesse – and Akira Sakata – the iconoclastic reedman famed with volcanic emotional display – would make an ‘odd’ musical team. Despite this presumption, guid…
Latecomers
*2023 stock* "This is quite an attention-catching band, with its two very clever trombones styles, a piano fully explored both inside and outside, and a truly stunning multi-effects percussions set. As a quartet, the musicians had never played together until that particular evening of the Ictus’ 35th anniversary Festival. Yet what we hear from the very first bars is a band in the communion of the moment, painting together greatly textured music with many surprising turns. Their creative energies…
Bang!
*2023 stock* "In a morning of 2 years ago, I got a surprising email from somebody from my past: guitarist Roberto Zorzi. I think to remember that we met briefly in 1975 only and then our paths diverged until that email out of the blue. Roberto was in Los Angeles visiting, so we had the opportunity to reconnect and meet. I had the chance to listen to his past works and I was very impressed. Very versatile and innovative guitarist who deserves much greater recognition, Roberto Zorzi is one of the …
September Impressions
*2023 stock* "On September 23, 2010, the day following Andrea's Kennedy Center appearance, two of my colleagues in the Twenty-first Century Chamber Ensemble, Janel Leppin (cello) and Mike Sebastian (reeds), came over to my home to jam. It was the anniversary of Coltrane's birth -- thus, "impressions" in this work's title to honor the master's legacy. I set up my recording rig to capture what I could. It was, in Andrea's words, "battlefield conditions": his expansive percussion rig in the living …
Infinity Squared
*2023 stock* "What happens when you multiply limitlessness by infinity? You absolutely do not know. Which is why it's such a great idea to toss Henry Kaiser and Andrea Centazzo into the same reaction chamber. As one of the West Coast's premier freakers for some three decades, Kaiser has made a career of sticking his guitar in unpredictable places. Dude's also an experimental-film-&-lit buff and an ace scuba diver, and grows radioactive coral on Neptune.Meanwhile Centazzo has crashed regularly ou…