Jazz /
Hellraiser
Icepick is the super-power trio of some of the busiest musicians on this planet – American, Brooklyn-based trumpeter Nate Wooley, Norwegian, Austin-based bass player Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and American, Upstate New York-based drummer Chris Corsano. «Hellraiser» is already the third album of this trio and was recorded live in February 2018, on the occasion of a gathering supporting the Option series at Experimental Sound Studios (ESS) in Chicago. Originally, this performance was slated for anoth…
Luke Stewart Exposure Quintet
"Back in 2018, I was invited by Dave Rempis to participate in the Exposure Series at Elastic Arts in Chicago. The Series was for me a shining example of artist-lead organizing of different yet connected communities around the Music. From my standpoint, it is yet another in the continuum of such actions, specifically in Chicago, and has been a major inspiration for my work as an artist and for the material on this recording.
The ensemble was assembled by Mr. Rempis, and was the first time the gro…
Heart Of Darkness
After "Divertimento for tenor saxophone and small ensemble" (Alien Transistor) and "The Anatomy Of Melancholy" (Disko B) the two members of the Tied & Tickled Trio, Johannes Enders and Carl Oesterhelt, now publish their third collaboration Heart Of Darkness (Themes and Variations). 16 compositions, variations / improvisations for duo or chamber music ensemble;
"Extremely interesting blend of jazz and non-jazz; Great ad hoc jazz improvisations on jazz-informed patterns " - Thomas Meinecke
Daymare
Taking their name from a Thelonious Monk quote, I Like To Sleep are three young Norwegian musicians, all 22 years old. "Nicolas and Øyvind first met in high school in Trondheim before they joined up with Amund in a youth big band. It soon became apparent that they shared the same musical background centered around 70s progressive rock, jazz, improvisation and classical music. Soon after the trio was formed, first for fun, but soon with higher ambitions, they won the prestigious "Young Jazz Music…
Tour Beats Vol. 1
In process of stocking. Anteloper is a duo of psychedelic sonic compatriots starring a pair of raggedy celestial sound warriors: trumpeter Jaimie Branch and drummer Jason Nazary. These longtime friends and collaborators met as young explorers and consider their electronic duo a continuous experiment into the unknown sonic abyss. Recent results have come back as mind-bendingly abstract head boppers, improvised organisms guided by a unique desire to hear what hasn’t been heard before. This is musi…
She Knows...
Temporary Super Offer! The Thing started as a recording project in 2000, for the newly formed label Crazy Wisdom, run by Christian Falk, Conny Charles Lindström and me. I wanted to put together a trio, to record some Don Cherry pieces and since I had recently played with Paal in Stockholm and heard Ingebrigt playing live, I knew they were tight. So, things went where they went.
I invited the two young Norwegians to Stockholm for a recording date at Atlantic Studios. One day of recording for the …
The Unasked Answer
Temporary Super Offer! In 1908, Charles Ives wrote a work called “The Unanswered Question”. It was for the unusual instrumentation of offstage string ensemble, woodwind quartet and, most significant for our purposes here, solo trumpet. Though it was inspired, we think, by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “The Sphinx”, Ives provided his own explanatory text. The trumpet asks “The Perennial Question of Existence” seven times, to which the woodwinds provide only six increasingly disordered answers, while…
Semantics
Semantics was a jazz supergroup consisting of Elliott Sharp, Ned Rothenberg and Samm Bennett.
Elliott Sharp, born in Ohio in 1951, began playing the piano at the age of six and started to perform concerts two years later. He soon gave up the piano, first in favour of the clarinet and later for the guitar. Sharp became intrigued with all types of experimental music, from contemporary classical to free jazz and sophisticated rock. He studied anthropology at Cornell University, where he played in a…
The Shape of Jazz to Come
Zeitkratzer keeps on being good for a surprise and finally goes jazz! Looking at the line-up of the "modern composition supergroup" (The Wire) it seems astonishing that it took so long: Saxophonists Frank Gratkowski and Hayden Chisholm both won independently the German radio SWR Jazz award, the French horn virtuoso Hild Sofie Tafjord grew up with jazz, as her father and uncle are members of Norwegian jazz group Brazz Brothers, Hilary Jeffery toured with numerous jazz musicians, as did drummer Ma…
Zebulon
Peter Evans on trumpet and compositions, John Hébert on bass and Kassa Overall on drums. Recorded live at the Zebulon Cafe in March of 2012. Debut album by this rare trumpet - bass- drums trio. A review from Gapplegate Music Review: "Peter Evans was and is a trumpet player who never ceases to surprise me. When I first heard the solo album he did for Evan Parker a number of years ago I thought, "huh?" And it's been that way ever since, whether it's with MOPDTK, with others or on his own. He is a …
Destination : Void
The long awaited second release from the Peter Evans Quintet. Four new compositions commissioned by the Jerome Foundation's Emerging Artist Grant and recorded at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. The album is named after a novel by Frank Herbert concerning a mission into space to create an artificial consciousness, a mission designed to use planned failure as a springboard to new levels of creativity. Destination: Void is an epic, cinematic synthesis of eccentr…
Rocket Science
The eponymous debut recording from the quartet Rocket Science, recorded live at the Vortex in London. Rocket Science brings together four virtuosic instrumentalists: Evan Parker (tenor and soprano saxophones), Craig Taborn (piano), Sam Pluta (live electronics) and Peter Evans (trumpet and piccolo trumpet).
Together they perform an hour of highly detailed, dynamic and surprisingly beautiful improvised electro-acoustic chamber music. Each member of the group is widely recognized as having pushed t…
Being & Becoming
The first release from Evans' new group Being & Becoming, featuring some of the leading lights from the next generation of creative musicians: Joel Ross, Nick Joziwak, and Savannah Harris. This debut album features a set of new compositions from Evans, moving between notated chamber music textures, free improvisations, deep grooves and telepathic ensemble playing.
Being & Becoming represents a new chapter in Evans' commitment to composition and improvisation in a small-group format. After workin…
Rejoice
Reissue. Originally released in 1981. "A two-LP set on Theresa, Rejoice features Pharoah Sanders in excellent form in 1981. Sanders sounds much more mellow than he had a decade earlier, often improvising in a style similar to late-'50s John Coltrane, particularly on 'When Lights Are Low,' 'Moments Notice,' and 'Central Park West.' The personnel changes on many of the selections and includes such top players as pianists Joe Bonner and John Hicks, bassist Art Davis, drummers Elvin Jones and Billy …
Sun Piano
Spiritual keyboard improvisations performed by Laraaji and recorded in a Brooklyn Church by Jeff Zeigler (Kurt Vile, The War On Drugs, Mary Lattimore). Sun Piano finds Laraaji fulfilling a lifelong ambition to return to his first instrument, learnt whilst growing up in 1950s New Jersey. A departure from his FX-soaked cosmic zither jams, these elegant miniatures nevertheless reveal enough personality and inner light to be clearly identifiable as ‘Laraaji Music’.
This release is the latest step in…
Jazz Piano
Roman pianist and film composer Armando Trovajoli scored over 300 feature films during his remarkable career. Starting out in the 1930s as a player in Orchestra Rocco Grasso and Sesto Carlini’s beloved jazz orchestra, in 1949 he represented Italy at the Festival du Jazz de Paris and he began composing films three years later. Jazz Piano, released by RCA in 1959, saw Trovajoli fronting a quartet with three of his regular orchestra members, namely drummer Sergio Conti, bassist/arranger Berto Pisan…
Marching Songs Vol. 2
It's hardly surprising that Mike Westbrook reigned supreme in the latter quarter of the 1960s and early 70s. His big band was voted top of that category in the late-lamented Melody Maker British jazz polls for 1970 (and the two years either side of that). In the same year, his third album, Marching Song, recorded a year earlier came third in the category "LP Of The Year" (the number one album that year was John McLaughlin's seminal Extrapolation so there was exceptionally strong competition). Th…
Marching Songs Vol. 1
It's hardly surprising that Mike Westbrook reigned supreme in the latter quarter of the 1960s and early 70s. His big band was voted top of that category in the late-lamented Melody Maker British jazz polls for 1970 (and the two years either side of that). In the same year, his third album, Marching Song, recorded a year earlier came third in the category "LP Of The Year" (the number one album that year was John McLaughlin's seminal Extrapolation so there was exceptionally strong competition). Th…
Trio
Mike Taylor died, probably by his own hand, at age 31 in 1969, having realised a fraction of his potential as a composer and player, and written for the New Jazz Orchestra, singer Norma Winstone and the rock band Cream. Cream's singer and bassist Jack Bruce and Ron Rubin (occasionally) are on acoustic bass here, with Jon Hiseman on drums, a line-up that highlights the close links between 1960s Britain's creative rock and R&B scenes and the jazz of the time.
Taylor is a highly rhythmic pianist wh…
An Elizabethan Songbook
In compiling a modern album of Elizabethan music, London Jazz Four were faced with both technical and interpretive problems. Musically they had to decide how far we could alter the original notation in order to allow ourselves a more modern basis for improvisation, and at the same time preserve the original character of the music. To achieve this, they concentrated on melodies that were strong enough to withstand at times rather violent re-harmonisation, without losing their Elizabethan flavour.…