All Titles A-Z

For his third album on Blue Note, Big John Patton decided to expand his band to quintet. Retaining the services of his longtime colleagues, guitarist Grant Green and drummer Ben Dixon, he hired tenor saxophonist Fred Jackson (who also played on the previous work "Along Came John") and trumpeter Richard Williams. – All Music

.gif have earned critical comparison to the likes of Bjork, Yukimi Nagano, The xx and Portishead, but the illustrious pair have managed to retain a fresh and unique dynamic to their chimerical sound, one that proved so compelling that the pair began filling a void of their own making within the Singaporean music scene. 

Following the acclaim of their past releases, .gif's sophomore LP HAIL NOTHING still showcases the haunting vocals, deft lyricism and obsidian production that has become their distinctive sound. The album is named after a line in Ernest Hemingway' s A Clean Well Lighted Place - "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee." 

The duo digs deeper on HAIL NOTHING; an ode to chaos and nothingness, a love song to the void. Expanding on their synth-driven soundscapes, haunting vocals and poignant lyrics, the album also features guests Bani Haykal and Usaama Minhas. 

The Analog Vault is supremely honoured to be working with .gif for their first-ever vinyl release on TAV Records. 

In spite of the noisy aura it's drawn around itself, there's not much mystery to A Place To Bury Strangers. The New York band has been dishing out slight variations on the same sonic blitzkrieg since its self-titled 2007 debut; the only thing that's changed is the fine tuning. On the group's fourth album, Transfixiation, all of APTBS' trademarks are in evidence. Deadpan vocals float through apocalyptic static. The volume bleeds out. Cacophony reigns. - NPR

People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm is the debut album by alternative hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest, released in 1990 on Jive Records. Although the album was critically acclaimed, it had little mainstream appeal. However, the album did earn the band a devoted following among the alternative hip hop community. The album was praised for its lyrical inventiveness and bizarre sense of humor, mixed with socially aware and literate message tracks.

One of three A Tribe Called Quest albums to be included in The Source's 100 Best Rap Albums, certified gold by the RIAA on January 19, 1996. The record was given the perfect rating of 5 mics in The Source in 1990 — according to Pitchfork, it was the first album ever to receive this honor.

“The group is marked for their social consciousness, but not merely because of their awareness, but their ability to wax simultaneously about politics and art. On "Push It Along", Tip traverses police brutality, community unity, and rap dreams in a few bars, managing to be an approachable advocate for responsibility without seeming didactic: "The pigs are wearing blue/ And in a year or two/  We'll be going up the creek in a great big canoe / What we gonna do? Save me and my brothers?/ Hop inside the bed and pull over the covers?/ Never will we do that and we ain't trying to rule rap/ We just want a slab of the ham, don't you know, black?" The lyrics are 25 years old. But were they released today they'd seem right on time, while being out of place—because all these many years later People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm is more than a nostalgia artifact. It's a worthy listen, not because of what it was, but because of what it is.” - Pitchfork

Beats, Rhymes and Life is the fourth album of the hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest. Released in 1996, it followed three years after the highly regarded and successful Midnight Marauders. This album is a departure from the joyful, positive vibe of the earlier albums and is regarded as the group's darkest album in content.

It reached number-one on the Billboard 200 and Top R&B Albums charts. – Wiki

“"Damn, we ain't prophets/And if you think so, you need to stop it." A Tribe Called Quest launch that fiery verbal projectile in "Get a Hold," a slamming, paradox-driven track from the group's near-flawless fourth album, Beats, Rhymes and Life. A denial that serves as confirmation, the couplet snaps and frames the essence of this collection: selfless social commentary sneaked in between immodest claims to greatness.” – Rolling Stone

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People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm is the debut album by alternative hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest, released in 1990 on Jive Records. Although the album was critically acclaimed, it had little mainstream appeal. However, the album did earn the band a devoted following among the alternative hip hop community. The album was praised for its lyrical inventiveness and bizarre sense of humor, mixed with socially aware and literate message tracks.

One of three A Tribe Called Quest albums to be included in The Source's 100 Best Rap Albums, certified gold by the RIAA on January 19, 1996. The record was given the perfect rating of 5 mics in The Source in 1990 — according to Pitchfork, it was the first album ever to receive this honor.

“The group is marked for their social consciousness, but not merely because of their awareness, but their ability to wax simultaneously about politics and art. On "Push It Along", Tip traverses police brutality, community unity, and rap dreams in a few bars, managing to be an approachable advocate for responsibility without seeming didactic: "The pigs are wearing blue/ And in a year or two/  We'll be going up the creek in a great big canoe / What we gonna do? Save me and my brothers?/ Hop inside the bed and pull over the covers?/ Never will we do that and we ain't trying to rule rap/ We just want a slab of the ham, don't you know, black?" The lyrics are 25 years old. But were they released today they'd seem right on time, while being out of place—because all these many years later People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm is more than a nostalgia artifact. It's a worthy listen, not because of what it was, but because of what it is.” - Pitchfork

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A TAV Essential Listening Album.

The Low End Theory is the second album by American hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest, released after their debut album People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990).

Originally released in 1991 through Jive Records, the album produced three singles: "Check the Rhime," "Jazz (We've Got)," and "Scenario."

The Low End Theory was one of the first records to fuse hip hop with a laid-back jazz atmosphere. Ali Shaheed Muhammad along with Q-Tip and Phife Dawg showcase how rap was done before commercial success influenced many rappers' creativity. The album's minimalist sound is "stripped to the essentials: vocals, drums, and bass." The bass drum and vocals emphasize the downbeat on every track.

The Low End Theory helped shape alternative hip hop in the 1990s. It established the musical, cultural, and historical link between hip hop and jazz. – Wiki

“From the sinuous Art Blakey samples and myth-making rhymes of "Excursions" to the joyous free for all of the epic posse cut "Scenario", The Low End Theory is a stone masterpiece that establishes Tribe's place in hip-hop's history. They draw on everything from the crowd-hyping improvisations of their early park jams, to the complex sciences of Golden Age rhyming styles. Simply put, The Low End Theory is essential for anyone seeking to understand hip-hop.” – Fat Beats

“While most of the players in the jazz-rap movement never quite escaped the pasted-on qualities of their vintage samples, with The Low End Theory, A Tribe Called Quest created one of the closest and most brilliant fusions of jazz atmosphere and hip-hop attitude ever recorded. The rapping by Q-Tip and Phife Dawg could be the smoothest of any rap record ever heard; the pair are so in tune with each other, they sound like flip sides of the same personality, fluidly trading off on rhymes, with the former earning his nickname (the Abstract) and Phife concerning himself with the more concrete issues of being young, gifted, and black.  … It's a tribute to their unerring production sense that, with just those few tools, Tribe produced one of the best hip-hop albums in history, a record that sounds better with each listen. The Low End Theory is an unqualified success, the perfect marriage of intelligent, flowing raps to nuanced, groove-centered productions.” – AllMusic

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A-F-R-O is a breakthrough artist born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, who was first discovered by legendary rapper, R.A. The Rugged Man. Marco Polo is a Brooklyn based producer, raised in Toronto, Canada, who has produced music for artists such as Talib Kweli, Pharoahe Monch, Boot Camp Clik, Royce Da 5’9 & more.

“At a first glance, techno and contemporary classical music do not seem like ideal partners. One, a bass-heavy hedonistic genre designed for dancefloors, the other suited to the calm of the concert hall. Yet Darren Cunningham, aka electronic producer Actress, and the London Contemporary Orchestra have built their careers in pushing boundaries of genre.

Both sets of artists explore the hybridity between the electronic and the acoustic: the LCO regularly records experimental film scores, including Jonny Greenwood’s recent anxiety-inducing compositions for You Were Never Really Here, and last year Actress performed a live rendition of Steve Reich’s 1988 work Different Trains. On Lageos, rather than have the orchestra approximate the alien sounds of Actress’s electronics, they formulate a new sonic palette that is in equal measures intriguing and unsettling.

The album is often upbeat: strings streak in between clattering, fairground rhythms on Galya Beat, while Hubble and N.E.W. are softer, more melodic interpretations of Actress’s previous releases. It is in moments of quiet ambience, though, that Lageos excels, blurring the boundaries between static and harmony on Momentum or between creaking double bass and kick drum on Voodoo Possee, Chronic Illusion. A challenging yet satisfying listen.” – The Guardian

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A TAV Curator's Pick.

Actress, real name Darren Jordan Cunningham, known to friends as DAZ, returns with a new album, now on Ninja Tune and a new music system called “AZD” (pronounced “Azid”), a chrome aspect journey into a parallel world. An artist who has always preferred to make music than to talk about it, in “AZD” he has achieved another remarkable landmark, one which is as resistant to interpretation as it is demanding of it. Following on from his previous albums, R.I.P, Splazsh and Hazyville, an epilogue poem attached to the press release for Ghettoville was construed by media, commentators and spectators that Cunningham had retired. This led him to conceptualise this mass of conclusion as the key to ‘Giving power back to identity.’

So a few pointers, or possible ways to think about “AZD”. The album is themed around chrome – both as a reflective surface to see the self in, and as something that carves luminous voids out of any colour and fine focuses white and black representing the perfect metaphor for the bleakness of life in the Metropolis as suggested by Anish Kapoors Cloud Gate.

Another way to approach would be through the art of James Hampton and Rammellzee (who inspired “CYN,” which Cunningham also sees as a vision of New York in reverse…) – both of whom, though of different generations of the African-American slave diaspora, created art through “Sourcing castaway materials from their environment and reinterprating them into absolute majesty given from the fourth dimension.” There is also the career-long influence of the Detroit techno pioneers, something which becomes clear on this album “there is a contrast in the type of glow or reflection”.

Alternatively, you could write your PhD thesis on Jung’s Shadow Theory and AZD: “Lots of ideas come from dreams, this isn’t new, but sometimes the conscious mind starts to meld into the universal consciousness through constellation tunnelling.” If that sounds too taxing then you could always fall back on Star Wars and, in particular, the Death Star: “It has a dark dystopian backdrop, with highly sophisticated technology, but it is fading into the ether, still holding on and emitting a powerful energy. The music remaking the embers, binding them together and pulling them apart again.”

Alternatively, just listen. That “glow” Cunningham talks about makes this in some ways more immediate than previous Actress releases. Take lead single, “X22RME” (pronounced “Extreme”) which elegantly plays between the lines of Oriental classic rave and Balinese warehouse Techno machined in a Rotherhithe lock up welding the grooves into a seamless cracked joint.

At the other end of the spectrum is “Faure in Chrome,” a byproduct or development from his collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra, in which he “repatterns” aspect of Faure’s Requiem into a piece which sounds like the very institution of classical music being encased in electronic ice and scanned through a high frequency bandwidth. In between are gems like “Runner,” a personal re-soundtracking of Blade Runner “its from the deleted Fade Runner scene where AZD in a Peckham Cafe realises his barber has over the years etched a faded scroll into his head using early 80s African synthpop as a vexing serum“, or “Falling Rizlas,” an alienated music-box ballad. It’s a remarkable piece of work, that harks back both to Actress’ previous productions and to earlier iterations of the (broadly conceived) “techno” project without being beholden to anything but Cunningham’s forward-facing, individual and disembodied vision. – Ninja Tune

The simplest you could say about “AZD” is that it’s art – the unique creation of a unique mind. There will be few more distinctive, brilliant or visionary suites of music released in 2017. Call him what you will, this is the year that Darren ‘Daz’ Cunningham - aka Actress, aka AZD – asserts more clearly than ever before his complete independence. “Actress has a talent for melodies that snag at you, as demonstrated on the music-box ambience of Falling Rizlas, or Blue Window, on which house music battles to be heard over the sound of tape hiss. He also has an ability to twist the sound of dance music until it sounds private and intimate. Even the album’s most upbeat moment, X22RME, has a strangely introverted atmosphere to it: when the beats drop out, it doesn’t feel like a euphoric breakdown, but rather as if someone’s mind has wandered in the middle of the dancefloor.” – The Guardian

“…for all its artfully-deployed discordance, *AZD *maintains a musicality that holds the listener close. Sometimes this comes through in more danceable techno moments, like the single “X22RME” or the 80s-leaning synth-driven track “RUNNER,”; elsewhere, it’s in the  emotive minimalist breaks of “FALLING RIZLAS” or “THERE'S AN ANGEL IN THE SHOWER.” Cunningham participates in a futurist tradition, following an arc set by artists and writers like Rammellzee and Eshun. But that futurism isn’t predictive, something yet to come; rather, his combination of science fictions, music histories, and socio-spatial realities feels deliriously adjacent to the world we’re listening to it in.” – Pitchfork

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A suite of electronic laments, tone structures and dreamtime rhythms, with a conceptual arc taking in death, life, sleep and religion.

Right from Hazyville, Actress’s music has been deeply marked by London’s rave music heritage. But after the angular dynamics of Splazsh, R.I.P heads out into deep space. The rhythms and pulses are smudged or blurred, or are hinted at by their absence. 2-step garage is collided into gamelan, and freeform interludes explore microtonal spaces and imagined string instruments.

R.I.P underlines Actress’s reputation as one of the most eloquent voices to emerge from the sub-bass nexus of London dance music. His intuitive and original grasp of beats, textures and rhythm puts him on a parallel path to dance music innovators such as Basic Channel, Burial and Aphex Twin. But the way he engages with electronic sound from first principles, realising his own self-contained sonic worlds, hints at less obvious kinships outside the dance music fraternity, with pioneers of homebrewed sound experiments such as Cabaret Voltaire, Pan Sonic and Oval. It moves the body but the sounds also tap into to something more intangible inside you; you dance, but also ‘slip/drift into another realm, probably without even realising.’ – Honest Jon’s Records

“Darren Cunningham is a dance producer who references extroverted, populist music to create a meditative, introverted, immersive experience.…It's not the sound that makes the music, though, but the structure of it. R.I.P. is a deliberately uncoordinated album. Rhythms, basslines, and melodies slip in and out of line with each other. Comparatively straightforward, house-oriented tracks like "Shadow From Tartarus" are situated next to murk and ambience like "Tree of Knowledge". The emphasis here, though, is on "comparative": Even R.I.P.'s steady 4/4 tracks sound grimy and deconstructed. But there's something almost flirtatious in the way he lets the sounds worm around in the dark, looking to hook up with something firm. When they do, it's both mechanical and mystical, like watching a sculpture cut from raw stone.” – Pitchfork

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Adele Sebastian was an Afro American jazz flutist and singer, active from the early 70s (when she was still a teenager) until her untimely death at the age of 27 (!) in 1983 from a kidney failure. In fact she had been depending on monthly dialysis to stay alive for years. She lived through and for the music and you can hear it on her only solo album “Desert Fairy Princess” which was first issued in 1981. The mostly acoustic instrumentation brings a very natural and therefore rather retrospective sound considering the year the album was recorded.

Adele and her band pull it off right from the start as if it had been 1966 and it was time for a revolution to shake the dust from the old time jazz. In a perfect way she mixes classic American vocal jazz elements with playful and more free passages, Latin music and tribal African sounds in the lengthy and quite rhythm oriented “Man From Tanganyika” and makes the title track start with a mystical “Allahu akbar“ chant while it turns more and more into a dark and gloomy song with something like a psychedelic edge reminiscent of Pharoah Sanders on his early works. Wild rhythms from drums, percussions with tons of bells and chimes weave a thick groove carpet and conjure a magical atmosphere. Those jazz aficionados who love the mid 60s John Coltrane, his sidekick Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane will go crazy for this album. - Light In The Attic

In Spades is the eighth studio album by American alternative rock band The Afghan Whigs, released on May 5, 2017 on Sub Pop Records. - Wiki

“Cleromancy” isn’t a word one normally finds in rock lyrics. Then again, In Spades – the forthcoming album by The Afghan Whigs, from which the new song “Oriole” hails – is defined only by its own mystical inner logic. The term means to divine, in a supernatural manner, a prediction of destiny from the random casting of lots: the throwing of dice, picking a card from a deck. From its evocative cover art to the troubled spirits haunting its halls, In Spades casts a spell that challenges the listener to unpack its dark metaphors and spectral imagery. – Sub Pop

“As ever, Dulli spends the majority of In Spades teetering on that shaky precipice where romance turns to rancor, and pillow talk leads to restraining orders. But like a master genre filmmaker, he’s always got a couple of new tricks up his sleeves to keep us on our toes. “Birdland” honors his tradition for slow-burning, cinematicscene-setters, but rather than gently immerse us into his nocturnal netherworld, we’re pushed right in by staccato shocks of harmonium and operatic vocal gasps, like strobe-lit flickers of an image that take you a few moments to process into a fluid moving picture. “We’re coming alive in the cold,” Dulli declares, like a beast reawakened and ready to do damage once again.

In Spades clocks in at just 10 songs in 36 minutes, but feels as expansive and substantial as a double-album statement. And that’s thanks in large part to coolly paced, multi-sectional songs like “Arabian Heights” and “Light As a Feather,” where Dulli masterfully ratchets up the tension before unleashing his fevered howl at just the right moment (while reminding us that the Whigs are the rare rock band that can pull liberally from ’70s Blaxploitation funk without sounding like they’re making a jokey porno soundtrack).” – Pitchfork

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Jamal Moss, aka Hieroglyphic Being, returns for a new second album on Soul Jazz Records, after last year’s debut The Acid Documents. this time under the name Africans with Mainframes.

Hieroglyphic Being and fellow Chicago producer Noleian Reusse have been releasing music under the name Africans with Mainframes for over 15 years now, ever since their debut on Hieroglyphic Being’s own Mathematics Recordings label in 2005. ‘K.M.T.’ is the debut album from the group, a collage of apocalyptic Chicago acid meets industrial and transcendental post-house machine funk.

Both intense and unique, the album of forward-thinking, experimental, boundary-pushing Afro-futurist electronic music shows why Hieroglyphic Being is regarded as one of the most serious purveyors of experimental black music today. You can't stop the prophet! – Sounds of the Universe

“Devastating album of epic dancefloor rituals and visions from Jamal Moss (Hieroglyphic Being) and Noleian Reusse in their prized Africans With Mainframes guise, amounting to their most substantial and impressive collection.” – Boomkat

“…Working with fellow producer Noleian Reusse as Africans With Mainframes, [DJ and producer] Jamal Moss swings from Windy City jazz to Chicago acid at its most caustic. While the duo have released a slew of 12”s dating back to 2001, K.M.T. is their first full-length. Kemetic Modulating Textures is eight tracks of Moss and Reusse at their most unrelenting and there’s a coarseness to every texture that at times might make you mistakenly think it was just slapped together. Yet the frequent references to Egyptology (Googling each track title reveals a profound knowledge of prehistoric culture) suggest a greater thought at work, and if you manage to survive the bruising BPMs of the album's first half, it becomes mesmerizing.

Opener “Anachronistic” sets the table for what lies ahead: everything in the red, a snare fill stumbling and slipping across the grid, the 808’s edges increasingly fuzzy with distortion. And then just when it verges on pure noise, that telltale acid squiggle worms through and the snare coheres into a visceral thrill.

Last year, Moss explained his first encounter with Sun Ra’s music as a shock to the system: “His music wasn’t about making sense: it was just about receiving these transmissions, this knowledge.” It’s a lesson that Moss carries forward with K.M.T., suggesting that while some of his tracks might scan as scrambled transmissions, continued exposure reveals a profound signal beneath the noise.” – Pitchfork

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Second album by Greece’s premiere Afro-jazz band. An Odyssey of sound through West African percussion, jazz, Greek melodies and a tinge of funk.

Afrodyssey Orchestra are:

Konstantinos Arvanitis – Electric guitar
Vassilios Ikonomidis – Doun Doun, Balafon, Percussion, Keyboards
Christos Konstantinidis – Drums
Vasilis Papastamopoulos – Bass
Narayan Protin – Djembe, Congas, Kamelen Ngoni, Talkin’ Drum, Chekere
Thodoris Rellos – Tenor Saxophone

“Afterglow is the music moniker for local fashion retailer HOAX's owner Julian. Having been involved in the local music scene for years as a guitarist and programmer, Julian has since found his muse in black music. Driven by this newfound passion, his recent music ambitions sees him going back to sounds he grew up with such as Michael Jackson and Prince, to the disco funk of the 70s and 80s, and the "Free Soul" series of Japanese compilations. "Different Light" is Afterglow's debut album, a music amalgam that takes cues from 80's synth-funk/boogie, electro from Street Sounds, r&b from Tabu, fusion from Herbie Hancock, to the sound of city pop greats such as Toshiki Kadomatsu, Tetsuji Hayashi, and Tatsurō Yamashita. A marriage of synths, thumping basslines, and drum machine grooves, the album also features the vocals of both SOPHY Wong and Yeung Tung. In contrast to what one might expect out of a vaporware aesthetic, the result is rather a pop music infused exploration of funk's past and future.” – Bandcamp

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Did you enjoy how easygoing the 2012-2017 album was? The way Nicolas Jaar, working as Against All Logic, breezily edited disco, house and soul songs for the dance floor? Well, you can now forget all of that—the military has moved in. This seems to be the message from the new Against All Logic material, an all-originals mix Jaar broadcast via NTS this week and Illusions Of Shameless Abundance, this new EP. His request that Against All Logic be represented in the media by "any picture of a military man holding a cellphone" kind of captures the new vibe. This is heavy, strange and commanding music. A little of the original housey warmth and sample work coloured the mix on NTS, but the big takeaway here is that Jaar has refreshed the project by kicking it into the red, something Illusions Of Shameless Abundance makes extremely clear. – Resident Advisor

"In the early 1980s, Ahmed Malek was already in his 50s, when he discovered synthesizers and electronic music for himself and started to experiment with sounds. None of it was ever released but we got a huge box of master tapes from his family and we're happy to present this different side of Ahmed Malek's music. It was compiled and co-produced by Flako, a fan of early electronic and synth music. This is not a remix album though, Flako's aim was to create an album out of 2 hours of material that sounds like it might have if Mr. Malek would have finished it himself before of his death. Fully approved by the artists family." Habibi Funk 

Classic Boombap - Lovers of Pete Rock right up to Jay Dee, this album is for you. True to the style and a homage to that classic sampling vibe we all love about the 90s boom-bap. Do yourself a favour and check this out!

Roughly translating to "dinner is ready," the double-LP was recorded with Yellow Magic Orchestra and originally coproduced with Ryuichi Sakamoto across Tokyo and Los Angeles. The 14-track album showcases Yano's move away from her pop and jazz funk origins towards a synth pop sound. Akiko Yano is a Japanese pop and jazz musician and a longtime YMO affiliate. This reissue follows two Yano albums rereleased on Wewantsounds this year, Japanese Girl and Iroha Ni Kompeito. – Resident Advisor

Beautiful, soulful African folk from singer Akofa Akoussah. Lovely reissue by Mr Bongo.  

“With the release of the album Al Green Gets Next To You, the music of Hi Records is brought to wholesome fruition. Green, simply, is one of the most highly energetic and intensely expressive new singers around, with a master’s ability (notably, Charles and Redding) to subordinate lyrics to the urgent rhythmic primacy of their sounds, while suffusing them with their corresponding emotional feeling.

When I saw Green at the Apollo a few months ago, he virtually confronted his audience and compelled them to respond with the energy he generated. And so it is on this record, with Mitchell opening musical terrains for Green to roam. On the cliche-prone “Light My Fire,” Mitchell sets up almost unbearable tension by seductively slowing the groove, with Green pacing through it, characteristically moaning, panting, shrieking, and even stuttering.

Other brilliant conceptions are the unprecedented rendition of a gospel song in a completely secular context, Johnny Taylor’s — cum — Soul Stirrers, “God is Standing By,” done in Mitchell’s most favored, insistently syncopated groove. And there is, of course, Green’s Top 20 hit, “Tired of Being Alone.” The ultimate Hi song, it is a compelling pastiche of hooks and riffs that coalesce more firmly and commandingly into song with each listening.” – Rolling Stones

 Vibrations is the second album released by American free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler’s quartet, featuring Don Cherry, Gary Peacock and Sonny Murray. The album was recorded in Copenhagen in September of 1964. Originally issued by the Freedom label, it also been released under an alternate title, Ghosts. The recordings were remastered for an audiophile-grade pressing on 180gram vinyl at Pallas in Germany. – ORG Music 

“My Name Is Albert Ayler is the debut album by American free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler recorded in Copenhagen in 1963 and first released on the Dutch Debut label.” – Wiki

“Hearing the soft-spoken voice of Albert Ayler at the beginning of this 1963 recording is spooky. Not because he's gone, but because he's so calm, so young, and so hesitantly articulate: Nothing like the voice of his saxophone playing at all. This session is a reissue of a Fantasy recording, and one which pairs Ayler up with a Scandinavian rhythm section that includes the 16-year-old Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass.” – All Music

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Broadcast from SWR and recorded at the legendary 1967 Free Jazz Meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany this is a collection of four different performances by different line-ups, featuring big names in the European free jazz 60s scene of the time along such top players as Don Cherry, Albery Mangelsdorff, Marion Brown and Evan Parker. – Linear Notes

“Ali Ibrahim "Ali Farka" Touré (31 October 1939 – 6 March 2006) was a Malian singer and multi-instrumentalist, and one of the African continent's most internationally renowned musicians. His music is widely regarded as representing a point of intersection of traditional Malian music and its North American cousin, the blues. The belief that the latter is historically derived from the former is reflected in Martin Scorsese's often quoted characterization of Touré's tradition as constituting "the DNA of the blues".Touré was ranked number 76 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and number 37 on Spin magazine's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time…

… As the first African bluesman to achieve widespread popularity on his home continent, Touré was often known as "the African John Lee Hooker". Musically, the many superpositions of guitars and rhythms in his music were similar to John Lee Hooker's hypnotic blues style. He usually sang in one of several African languages, mostly Songhay, Fulfulde, Tamasheq or Bambara as on his breakthrough album, Ali Farka Touré, which established his reputation in the world music community." – Wiki

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“This LP was recorded in late 1971 and it’s the sixth solo album of Alice Coltrane. It is also considered as being one of the most important and strongest records from her entire music career and ‘’one of the finest moments in jazz from the early '70s’’, as quoted by fellow journalist Thom Jurek. The harp is probably one of the very few instruments that you can reach the most divine and spiritual sound with; and there’s plenty of harp, in each song on this LP. The trilogy of the Galaxies (''Galaxy Around Olodumare, in Turiya and in Satchidananda) travels through time and religion, eventually hypnotizing the listener with its ridiculously rough melody, harmony and love. This album is pure love.” – The Attic

“On the two days in November when World Galaxy was recorded, Coltrane chose drummer Ben Riley, bassist Reggie Workman, violinist Leroy Jenkins, saxophonist Frank Lowe, and timpanist Elayne Jones in addition to a string orchestra of 16 to help her realize her latest vision. Coltrane herself plays piano, harp, and organ on this date, sometimes within a single track, as she does on her glorious post-modal reworking of "My Favorite Things." This was a gutsy move, considering it was one of John Coltrane's signature tunes, but Alice has it firmly in hand as she moves from organ to harp to piano and back, turning the melody inside out wide enough for the strings to whip up an atmospheric texture that simultaneously evokes heaven and hell and skewers the prissy nature of the tune in favor of bent polyharmonics that allow the entire world of sound inside to play. The jazz modalism Coltrane presents on "Galaxy Around Olodumare" is quickly undone by Lowe in his solo and reconstructed into polyphony by the string section; it's remarkable. The harp work on "Galaxy in Turiya" (Alice's religious name) is among her most beautiful, creating her own wash of color and dynamic for the strings to fall like water from the sky into her mix. As colors shift and change, the rhythm section responds, and focuses them in the prism of Coltrane's textured harpistry.” – All Music

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