Jazz /
Eternity
*2024 stock* Released in 1976, Eternity was Alice Coltrane's first album for Warner Bros. after eight wondrous records on Impulse! Combining the drones and textures of India, the gospel and R&B of her Detroit youth and the dissonance of modern classical composition, Coltrane's music in the '70s would become increasingly difficult to categorize. Having moved a few years earlier to California (where she founded the Vedantic Center, an Ashram for spiritual studies), Coltrane stretches out on Eterni…
"Concerto Alla Statale" Nov. 29, 1975
*2024 stock* This concert was recorded live on November 29th, 1975, during "New Trends in Italian Jazz", a series of concerts held at the State University, Milan, and has never been released before.
Victor
lll人 = Daichi Yoshikawa + Paul Abbott + Seymour Wright. lll人 came from London in 2012, and played there, and internationally: Berlin, Bratislava, Budapest, Dala Floda, Glasgow, Hong Kong, Ljublana, Paris, and Tokyo. With lll人 the tools are familiar, the listening is not. VICTOR is a 2-CD for lll人's friend Victor Schonfield (1940-2022).
SpiriTuaL HeaLinG: Bwa KaYimaN FreeDoM SuiTe
Saxophonist Omicil builds atmospheres then upends expectations in this free-jazz homage to Haiti’s successful 18th-century slave insurrection - The Guardian
Orientations
A raid on the values of oriental jazz master and pioneering ethnomusicologist Lloyd Miller.
Live in Roma 1980
Double CD box, perfect replica of the LP edition, with extensive booklet. The venerable Holidays, having already had an incredible 2023, returns with their final offering of the year and what might just be their most ambitions release to date, Sun Ra’s “Live in Rome 1980”, an astounding 3xLP vinyl box set that captures the Arkestra immersed in one of their greatest live gigs laid to tape. A perfect snapshot of why this band was so incredible, moving from furious free jazz fire into joyous June T…
Elastic
When Mars Williams dove into his vault to excavate several recordings for a Mars Archive series on Corbett vs. Dempsey, he immediately landed on a concert date from a decade earlier. The event, recorded at Chicago's Elastic Arts Foundation in 2012, featured a trio with Williams on reed instruments, Darin Gray on bass, and Chris Corsano on drums. This configuration had already been highly enough estimated by Williams that he'd posted one set on Bandcamp, but he saved the other set for future rele…
Hold That Thought
From a night of music in Holland that's become legendary among NRG Ensemble enthusiasts, Hold That Thought presents a blazing concert of the quintet's unique sound. With Mars Williams and Ken Vandermark on reeds, Kent Kessler and Brian Sandstrom on basses (the latter doubling on trumpet and electric guitar), and Steve Hunt on drums, this incarnation of the band was arguably its tightest and mightiest, taking the inspiration of founder Hal Russell (1926-1992) and running with it. All the way. The…
I know You Are But What Am I?
At the tail end of 1996, saxophonist Mars Williams and drummer Hamid Drake took the tall corner stage at Chicago's Empty Bottle for two sets of duets. The rock club had just started a weekly Jazz & Improvised Music Series, curated by Ken Vandemark and John Corbett, which would run for nearly a decade. This rare pairing brought together two pivotal figures in the city's creative music scene, both of whom had extensive experience in diverse areas of music, from the free jazz focus of this intimate…
Labyrinth: British Jazz On Record 1960-75 (Book)
Hardcover Edition, large format. Labyrinth is a massive hardback book, 375pp in length, printed on high-quality art paper, with an embossed cover and cloth quarter-binding, written by Richard Morton Jack. This beautiful, limited edition hardback is the most comprehensive overview of the subject ever published. It celebrates over three hundred albums, offering detailed background info about each, alongside excerpts from original reviews and masses of high-quality images that reproduce their fabul…
Maua
“A blissfully ecstatic sprawl of spiritual-jazz explorations of the most transcendent order” – Brooklyn Rail
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…
Electric Telepathy Vol. 1
“A blissfully ecstatic sprawl of spiritual-jazz explorations of the most transcendent order” – Brooklyn Rail
I Went This Way
2024 stock. With her new album, I Went This Way, (due October 23, 2020), Rachel Musson debuts her own ambitious compositions, incorporating spoken word text and daring instrumental experimentation, alongside eight other accomplished musicians. The ensemble was built around the close working relationship between saxophonist Rachel Musson and drummer Mark Sanders. The music, a blend of compositions and improvisation designed to highlight all of the different musical voices in the ensemble, is susp…
Telepathic Mysteries Vol. 1
2024 stock. The Telepathic Band is named after the sort of improvisational style that can only be accomplished with a decade or two of collaboration, playing a signature ghostly, boundary-pushing music between friends. In their fourth album, Daniel Carter, Patrick Holmes, Matthew Putman, Hilliard Greene, and Federico Ughi exemplify the possibilities of in-person improvisation, offering extemporized performances with their characteristically daring instrumentation. Telepathic Mysteries, Vol. 1 ma…
New York United
2024 stock. Legendary downtown music master Daniel Carter meets Tobias Wilner from world-renowned electronic band Blue Foundation. Featuring Wu-Tang Clan bass player Djibril Toure & drum wiz Federico Ughi. As a band, they have played a number of concerts in NYC, including the Forward Festival 2016 and 2018, and are currently promoting their debut album. This group is the ultimate mix between the classic New York sound of the avant-garde (i.e., John Coltrane & Albert Ayler) combined with electron…
A Lifeboat Part I
2024 stock. In the first lockdown, Matthew Putman (on keyboard) and Michael Sarian (on trumpet and flugelhorn) began to meet up (with precautions) for semi-regular sessions in Sarian’s makeshift home studio. The conditions were less-than-ideal—a borrowed 20-year-old keyboard, an inadequate microphone, and cramped NYC apartment acoustics—but they continued their “weekly pilgrimages, searching for [their] cadences, rhythms and melodies through the Fall.” The sessions gave them much-needed sanity, …
The Secret Handshake With Danger (Vol. One)
Eddie Prévost, a preeminent musician in the UK improvised music scene and founding member of legendary AMM, might be equally renowned for his generous, decades-long mentorship. Both talent and Prévost’s mentorship are on display in this new album, The Secret Handshake with Danger, Volume One which features five musicians (Binker Golding on Saxophones, Henry Kaiser on Guitar, N.O. Moore on Guitar, Olie Brice on Double Bass and Eddie Prévost on Drums) improvising from a lifetime of collaboration. …
Unity
2024 stock. After decades of collaboration, scores of musical projects and 28 releases, old friends and professional musicians might find themselves searching for either novelty or a return to the foundations. In the case of UK-based saxophonist Paul Dunmall and UK-based drummer Mark Sanders, it was both. The two musicians have had prolific careers—and made much of their work together—but in a recent phone call, they realized that they had never created a project that featured just their preferr…
Educated Guess Vol. 1
2024 stock. Dave Tucker says that he brought this disparate group of musicians together for a live performance at London’s Cafe Oto last March on “an educated guess,” predicting that the artists - Mark Sanders (Drums & Percussion), Pat Thomas (Piano & Keys), Dave Tucker (Guitar) and Thurston Moore (Guitar) - would be able to create something extraordinary through improvisation. The condition of their encounter would later become the collective’s name, an “Educated Guess” and the eponymous title …