$39.00
Restored artwork + Obi Strip
First ever vinyl reissue of this French free jazz nugget from Sahib Shihab & Jef Gilson Unit
Remastered from the master tapes.
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Paris, February 1972. A few months after having released Le Massacre du Printemps, Jef Gilson was back behind his keyboards for a completely different experience. Heading up his Unit, he was joined by Sahib Shihab, expartner to Gillespie, Monk and Coltrane, for a brief stroll in the desert. For three-quarters of an hour, the caravan passes by, evoking, one after the other, Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane, Pierre Henry and Karlheinz Stockhausen… Oh yes, and one other thing, we forgot to mention that Shihab’s saxophone is… amplified.
La marche dans le désert, (The Walk in the Desert) is first and foremost the meeting of two iconoclastic musicians: Jef Gilson, pianist who tried his hand in all forms of jazz (bebop, choral, modal, free, fusion…) collaborating with emblematic American musicians (Walter Davis Jr., Woody Shaw, Nathan Davis…) or French musicians who were on their way to becoming so (Jean-Luc Ponty, Bernard Lubat, Michel Portal, Henri Texier…), and Sahib Shihab… Shihab is one of the many black American jazzmen who found refuge in Europe.
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After having played in the bands of Fletcher Henderson and Roy Eldridge, the saxophonist worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey and Tadd Dameron. He came to the old continent with the Quincy Jones orchestra, spent a few years in Copenhagen, returned to Los Angeles, then came back to Europe. When he met Jef Gilson, in February 1972, the saxophonist was happily touring with the Clarke-Boland Big Band.
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La marche dans le désert, is therefore the opportunity for this supporting player to show what he was capable of. And it was some opportunity: with Gilson and his Unit (Pierre Moret on keyboards and Jean-Claude Pourtier on drums, with whom the pianist had just recorded Le massacre du printemps, but also with Jef Catoire on double bass, and Bruno Di Gioia and Maurice Bouhana on flute and percussion respectively), Shihab got maximum exposure.
To mark the occasion, he put aside his baritone saxophone to play a soprano… varitone. The amplified instrument, while losing nothing of its natural sound, was capable of generating the same presence as Gilson’s electronic keyboards. And it would change the face of modal jazz: in a forest of percussion, Shihab and Gilson go on a sensual walkabout that will remain with listeners for long after. Between the two takes of Mirage, Shihab, this time on baritone again, takes up the mantle once more of a style of jazz he was unable to strictly define: “For me there is only one type of music: good”. Let’s make one thing clear from the outset: La marche dans le désert, is definitely good.
Label: SouffleContinu Records – FFL065 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Reissue, Remastered |
Country: France |
Released: 2020 |
Genre: Jazz |
Style: Avant-garde Jazz |
$45.00
International Anthem Recording Company
Rob Mazurek / Exploding Star Orchestra – Dimensional Stardust
$45.00
"Dimensional Stardust" showcases the intricacy and complexity of Mazurek’s compositions but in their most potent, most compacted forms. Opting to focus on tight ensemble orchestration over passages of open improvisation, Mazurek distills a maximal orchestra of explosive improvisers into a beautifully restrained, graceful group exercise in melodic minimalism. The album features almost no “soloist” moments, excepting Jeff Parker’s other-worldy guitar meltdown on “The Careening Prism Within,” and when Nicole Mitchell’s flute floats to the front of the barrage on “Sun Core Tet.” Mazurek himself is sparsely present as instrumentalist, only occasionally joining the ensemble with his piccolo trumpet (notably on “Parable 3000,” where he shares leads with Mitchell’s flute and Joel Ross’s vibraphone, and his trills and textures haunt ghostly around Jaimie Branch’s trumpet counterpoint). Even Damon Locks’s voice is employed more like an ensemble instrument than a lead vocalist. Locks’ distinctively dry, abstract narrative flow beams in intermittently – sounding almost like fragments of Deltron 3030 through an Orson Wells-style radio transmission – climaxing in the album-closing poetry of “Autumn Pleiades.” And all the way through, the electro-acoustic poly-rhythmic percussion section (Chad Taylor, Mikel Patrick Avery, and John Herndon) churns, thrusting the music forward as the harmonic instruments collectively bow between frenzied, futurist chromaticism and soaring, pan-humanist pentatonic anthems.
Somehow swirling the most adventurous elements of avant-garde jazz and contemporary classical into the most universal attractors of pop music, the cosmic opera of "Dimensional Stardust" is a pure spiritual extension of Exploding Star Orchestra’s unifying ethos, and a new peak in the prolific creative career of Rob Mazurek. – International Anthem
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album |
Country: US |
Released: 20 Nov 2020 |
Genre: Jazz, Classical |
Style: Contemporary Jazz, Avant-garde Jazz, Contemporary |
$32.00
“Authority is alive!”
Recorded live at the Playfreely Festival in Singapore, November 2019, Authority is Alive is a potent performance mixed from an intoxicating brew of poetry, philosophy and sonic alchemy. Bearing the theme “The Transparency of Turbulence”, the festival featured a strong line-up of East Asian and Southeast Asian artists and bore the ambition to be “an alternative to how we coalesce and navigate a region that is continuously torn apart by words, egos, greed and ideologies.”
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“Everything... living... breathe...”
In an unannounced coupling, Japan’s psychedelic and avant-garde legend Haino Keiji teamed up with Singapore’s art rock veterans The Observatory to deliver a visceral performance. Both have a history of using collaboration as method and it is evident that this meeting pushed all musicians to their creative and emotional limits. Haino, alternating between voice and guitar, was sonic shaman, channelling the raw forces of nature through his entire body. Ad libbing from a self-penned poem, his expressionistic vocals spanned tortured shrieks and falsetto whispers on ideas such as the nature of power, the dissolution of the self and the notion of mu-i 無為 (wu wei, or effortless action). Elsewhere, his guitar workouts were wild and unhinged, pure propulsions of energy.
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“Do not find...”
The Observatory, pared down to a three-piece since 2019, showed off their new predilection for thrilling improvisation influenced by their Southeast Asian roots. Dharma’s use of a mallet to strike his guitar, prepared with metallic sheets and rods between its strings, created moving, gamelan-like melodies. At certain points, in call-and-response fashion, percussive polyrhythms would be exchanged with Cheryl Ong on drum kit; Ong’s background in traditional Chinese percussion brings a fresh take to an instrument typically employed in western rock and jazz idioms. Meanwhile, Yuen Chee Wai sat his guitar on a knife’s edge between control and excess, introducing beautifully resonant tone clusters and harsh, crunchy noise.
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“Be found!”
Under the dim lights of the mid-size black box venue, with audience members sitting cosily at their feet, Haino and The Observatory led an ecstatic communion. Mixed and mastered by Lasse Marhaug, the chance to lose – and find – ourselves in this otherworldly performance is now here. - Bandcamp
Label: Ujikaji Records – UJI-017LP |
Format: Vinyl, 12", 45 RPM, Limited Edition |
Country: Singapore |
Released: 30 Sep 2020 |
Genre: Rock |
Style: Experimental, Art Rock, Avantgarde |
$39.00
On his solo percussion LP, Jamire Williams shows himself to be an inspired crafter of sound, capable of building entire worlds from just his drum hits.
On ///// Effectual, Williams shows himself to be both an inspired composer and tasteful crafter of sound. He can build whole worlds worth spending time in with nothing but drum hits. But, as the fuller tracks suggest, he might make something even deeper and richer if he allowed even one or two more primary colors into the frame. *///// Effectual *provides a powerful blueprint to build on. - Pitchfork
Label: CNF (2) – CNF002LP |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album |
Country: US |
Released: 25 Aug 2017 |
Genre: Jazz |
Style: Avant-garde Jazz |
$45.00
Arman Ratip began his piano lessons with his mother Jale Derviş at the age of five. He began composing at the age of seven and was a child prodigy. Later his musical career took off in London when he recorded two albums for EMI. After concerts in London, Vienna, Salzburg, Bucharest, Ankara International Music Festival,Istanbul, Marlborough International Music Festival, Bursa, Berlin, Islamabad, The North Cyprus International Music Festival, music critics hailed him as a brilliant virtuoso pianist- composer. He is among the top leading pianist-composers of Avant-Garde Improvisational Music and a jazz pianist of Avant-Garde Jazz and Turkish Jazz. - Bandcamp
Label: Mad About Records – MAR024 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Numbered |
Country: Portugal |
Released: Jul 2020 |
Genre: Jazz |
Style: Avant-garde Jazz |
$45.00
The Blue Note Record label needs little introduction. Musically, graphically and sonically iconic, the label created and defined the golden age of modern jazz on record. Founded in 1939 by German émigré Alfred Lion, the label's roster of artists is a litany of giants – Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Herbie Hancock and many more. With peerless musicians in the grooves, the legendary Rudy Van Gelder behind the boards, and graphic design genius Reid Miles creating emblematic artwork for every release, Blue Note – 'the Cadillac of the jazz lines' – was outstanding in every way.
Volume 8 of Jazzman's Spiritual Jazz series takes a close look at the deeper side of Blue Note – from the experimental avant-garde explored by younger musicians such as Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Henderson and Pete La Roca, to the exciting new developments in modal sounds put forward by stalwarts Hank Mobley, Jackie McLean and Duke Pearson. The music we have selected shows how musicians working with the label responded to a period of dramatic social and sonic change, charting the route toward the esoteric and spiritualised sounds that would dominate the deepest jazz of the 1970s. - Jazzman Records | Bandcamp
Label: Jazzman – JMANLP 104 |
Series: Spiritual Jazz – Volume 9 |
Format: 2 × Vinyl, LP, Compilation |
Country: UK |
Released: 08 Mar 2019 |
Genre: Jazz |
Style: Modal, Free Jazz, Soul-Jazz, Avant-garde Jazz |
$45.00
The tenth edition of our Spiritual Jazz series takes a closer look at the music Prestige was recording at the start of the 1960s. This was the period when the modal jazz sound pioneered by Miles and Coltrane was starting to percolate through the jazz underground. In its heyday, Prestige was the only jazz label that could hold a candle to Blue Note. Prestige was always quick off the mark to record new artists, and in the years after Kind of Blue the label was quick to release some of the most innovative early explorers of the new style.
Founded as New Jazz in 1949 by 20-year old jazz fan and entrepreneur Bob Weinstock, Prestige was the only other imprint besides Blue Note to capture the iconic jazz sounds of the 1950s, and like its rival it grew to be an icon itself. If Blue Note documented the sound of hard bop in its most carefully crafted and beautifully presented form, the low-key, jam-session approach that Weinstock preferred meant that the music captured by Prestige has a tough, unfiltered energy that was a lot closer to way it was being played live, night after night, by New York's most prominent jazz musicians.– Jazzman Records | Bandcamp
Label: Jazzman – JMANLP117 |
Series: Spiritual Jazz – Volume 10 |
Format: 2 × Vinyl, LP, Compilation |
Country: UK |
Released: 29 Nov 2019 |
Genre: Jazz |
Style: Soul-Jazz, Avant-garde Jazz, Contemporary Jazz, Hard Bop |
$45.00
Energy Control Center, Thomas's third LP with his Lightmen band is his masterpiece: Deep-set, Maverick Jazz that smolders in the embers of a cultural revolution. This is a highpoint amongst the best of the 1970s and this version of the album contains second with bonus tracks: unreleased alternate takes, including two versions of the Spiritual Jazz classic " All Praises to Allah" and the two singles Thomas produced for poet and activist Thomas Meloncon
$45.00
Originally released in 1981 as a limited vinyl pressing of 300 copies on Agi Yuzuru’s fabled experimental label Vanity Records (R.N.A. Organism, Dada, Sympathy Nervous, Tolerance…), Lady Maid is a testament to the creativity of the early 80s’ Japanese electronic and experimental scene, encapsulating a prolific era when audio gear became affordable for musicians to explore sounds in the comfort of their home, free from studio time pressure and major label rules.
Entirely imagined and brought to life by an inspired Yukio Fujimoto, the 6-track opus was conceived with a Korg MS-20, a Korg SQ-10, a Boss Dr. Rhythm DR-55, and…a Texas Instruments Speak & Spell! It’s elegantly minimalist, honest and witty, very playful, cleverly pop, and downright fascinating. The a-side captures the fun side of avant-garde electronica, lo-fi wave, proto-glitch, and IDM, a joyful ride beautifully interrupted by the cinematic mood switch of the b-side - a 20 minute ambient piece flirting with sci-fi, melancholy, and hints of metallic darkness. Unclassifiable and marvelous! – Bandcamp
More from the label We Release Whatever The Fuck We Want Records
Label: We Release Whatever The Fuck We Want Records – WRWTFWW029 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue |
Country: Switzerland |
Released: 08 Mar 2019 |
Genre: Electronic, Rock |
Style: Minimal, Experimental, Ambient, Avantgarde |
$45.00
AllMusic awarded the album 4½ stars. The Chicago Reader noted "Tapscott was leery of the music business in general, and of this deal in particular—and considering a promise that he'd be involved in the mixing process was subsequently broken, his skepticism was prescient. He didn't record again for another decade, and then only for small independents like Nimbus and Interplay. In any case, as listeners, we should be grateful Tapscott agreed to make The Giant at all" - Wiki
This is FRESH AIR. In the 1960s and early '70s, Los Angeles-based pianist Horace Tapscott was one of the jazz musicians who identified with emerging African-American political and social movements. He was a mentor to many musicians. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead has a review of a re-issue of Tapscott's 1969 debut album. He led a big band at the time, but this recording is with his quintet, which was drawn from the ranks of his big band. – NPR (on air)
Label: Real Gone Music – RGM-1012 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Reissue, Neon Green |
Country: US |
Released: 2020 |
Genre: Jazz |
Style: Contemporary Jazz, Free Improvisation, Avant-garde Jazz |
$42.00
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
Label: ORG Music – ORGM 2096, ORG Music – ORGM-2096, Freedom – FLP40117 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Remastered, Repress, Stereo |
Country: US |
Released: 01 Mar 2017 |
Genre: Jazz |
Style: Free Jazz, Avant-garde Jazz |
$39.00
Antwerp-based nonconformist Dennis Tyfus debuts on PAN under his Vom Grill moniker with the ‘Knerpen! (bevel)’ LP. Tyfus’ dealings in unstable media—spanning paintings and illustrations, films, radio transmissions and more—reflect the freeform, sometimes parodic nature of his sonic output, which has been archived on his own Ultra Eczema imprint alongside many outsider, weirdo and noise underground artists.
‘Knerpen! (bevel)’ is a jarring collage of skewed electronics, tape loops and treated vocals. Opening sequence ‘I’ writhes and seizes with electricity. Skull-resonant clangs are sucked and “scrunched” back into themselves, before throbs of condensed static give way to the sound of someone rummaging around inside the bodies of acoustic instruments. On b-side ‘II,’ Tyfus multitracks the vocalizations of opera singer Emilie Fleamountains into an empyrean choir, before winding back the tape into a foaming-at-the-mouth mechanical meltdown.
The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, pressed on 140g LP. It features photography by Dennis Tyfus and layout by Bill Kouligas.– PAN
Label: Pan – PAN 62 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album |
Country: Germany |
Released: 29 Sep 2015 |
Genre: Electronic, Non-Music |
Style: Abstract, Experimental, Field Recording, Modern Classical, Musique Concrète, Industrial, Leftfield, Noise |
$45.00
Label: Idibib – DB 102, Manufactured Recordings – MFG-065 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue |
Country: US |
Released: 2019 |
Genre: Jazz |
Style: Free Jazz |
$39.00
Carioca is the term used to describe those who originate from Rio de Janeiro. But, in fact, there’s only one Carioca in the music scene in Brazil: Ronaldo Leite de Freitas, who took up this nickname in São Paulo after relocating from his native Rio de Janeiro to study music at University.
Recorded in 1980, Mistérios da Amazônia is also, at least to our knowledge, one of the first crowd-funding initiatives in the Brazilian music scene. Carioca, lacking the resources to pay for the studio and manufacturing fees, sold the album to fans, friends and independent record stores before having recorded it.
Carioca’s first work is a fascinating one of a kind album, certainly difficult to classify. Often compared to the path set by musicians such as Egberto Gismonti or Naná Vasconcelos, who were always seeking new musical expressions whilst retaining a Brazilian character. - Altercat Records
Label: Altercat Records – ALT008 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Reissue |
Country: Germany |
Released: 2019 |
Genre: Rock, Latin, Folk, World, & Country |
Style: Avantgarde |
$38.00
Doug Carn created a personalized strain of jazz music that expressed a loving hopefulness. He found a home at the Black Jazz label, where African-Americans called the shots and, of course, racial tension was nonexistent. Who was this 22-year-old whose first album, Infant Eyes, sold very well away from the machinations of the music industry? Once a child prodigy on piano and alto saxophone, Carn had attended Jacksonville University on a full music scholarship and afterwards performed on the Florida-Georgia roadhouse circuit with a band that mixed jazz, rock and R&B. – Forced Exposure
Label: Black Jazz Records – BJ/3 |
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Stereo |
Country: US |
Genre: Jazz |
Style: Soul-Jazz |
$39.00
"The music of Cuban-born, Brooklyn-based pianist David Virelles conjures a hallucinatory world in which ancient Afro-Cuban rhythms and ritual reverberate in the here and now. His latest ECM offering is Antenna, music attuned to a timeless rhythmic-cultural current even as it pulses with a vibrantly urban, modernist energy. Antenna – a six-track, 22-minute EP to be released exclusively on vinyl and digitally – sees Virelles channel Afro-Cuban percussion into an electro-acoustic, almost psychedelic swirl, one that melds jazz improvisation and organic grooves with digital refraction, shadowy synthesizers, otherworldly field recordings and Cuban street poetry. Antenna is an undulating, throbbing, dizzying dream of sound. Mbòkó, the pianist’s ECM leader debut from 2014, featured in Best Of The Year lists in The New York Times, NPR, iTunes and The Village Voice, among others. The Guardian described Mbòkó as “a jazz-infused world-music project beyond categories,” adding: “Virelles looks set to make big differences in contemporary music for years to come.” - ECM Records
Item Description:
Artist: |
David Virelles |
Title: |
Antenna |
Label: |
|
Format: |
Vinyl, 10", EP |
Country: |
|
Release Date: |
02 Dec 2016 |
Genre: |
|
Style: |
|
Catalog No: |
ECM 3901 |
Condition: |
New |
$39.00
“Second album, released in 1979, by French keyboard wizard Benoit Widemann (ex-Magma). “Tsunami” is an incredible mix of electronics and jazz-fusion with prog / avant-garde /minimal elements. Treated Minimoog, Oberheim synths, Rhodes, early computer sequencing plus bass, drums, guitar, sax. Featuring Jean-Pierre Fouquey (es-Magma), Jean-Pierre Grasset (Verto) and Jean-Paul Ceccarelli among others.
Remastered sound, insert with linear notes and photos” – Sommor Records
Item description:
Artist: |
Benoit Widemann |
Title: |
Tsunami |
Label: |
Sommor |
Format: |
Vinyl, LP, Reissue |
Pressing: |
Spain |
Release Date: |
2018 |
Genre: |
Electronic, Jazz, Rock |
Style: |
Jazz-Rock, Avant-garde, Prog Rock |
Catalog No: |
SOMM043 |
Condition: |
New |
$39.00
“Recorded in ’73 and rejected by tin-eared major label execs in ’75, Crystal Spears (or “Crystal Clear” as it appears on the tape box) subsumes a cathartic brawl between Minimoog and Yamaha combo organ, with percussionists providing tonal textures, and plaintive oboe colliding with roaring electronic keyboards over waves of rollicking marimba, devilishly chattering below the fray. Crystal Spears is Ra’s once lost aural cinematheque! Includes a quad-ra-color Sun Ra poster!
Crystal Spears, intended for release in 1975 by ABC/Impulse! and assigned catalog # AS-9297, was ultimately rejected by the label. Ra and business manager Alton Abraham retained the rights, rechristened the album Crystal Clear and assigned Saturn Records catalog # 562—but they never got around to issuing it. The first three tracks on this album were mastered from that tape, a 1/4-inch four-track (15 ips) brand favored by home recording enthusiasts—and generally disfavored by pro engineers. The sessions took place at Variety Recording Studio in New York on February 3, 1973, a month before the Ark returned on March 8 to record Cymbals, as well as tracks issued decades later under the title Sign Of The Myth (and perhaps even Pathways To Unknown Worlds).” – Sundazed
Item description:
Artist: |
Sun Ra |
Title: |
Crystal Spears |
Label: |
Modern Harmonic |
Format: |
Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo, Red Vinyl |
Pressing: |
US |
Release Date: |
This reissue: 23 November 2018 | Original: 2014 |
Genre: |
Jazz |
Style: |
Avant-garde Jazz, Space-Age |
Catalog No: |
MH-8082 |
Condition: |
New |
$60.00
A TAV Essential Listening Album.
The Köln Concert is a concert recording by the pianist Keith Jarrett of solo piano improvisations performed at the Opera House in Cologne (German: Köln) on January 24, 1975.
The double-vinyl album was released in the autumn of 1975 by the ECM Records label to critical acclaim, and went on to become the best-selling solo album in jazz history, and the all-time best-selling piano album, with sales of more than 3.5 million.
The concert was organized by 17-year-old Vera Brandes (de), then Germany’s youngest concert promoter. At Jarrett's request, Brandes had selected a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano for the performance. However, there was some confusion by the opera house staff and instead they found another Bösendorfer piano backstage – a much smaller baby grand – and, assuming it was the one requested, placed it on the stage. Unfortunately, the error was discovered too late for the correct Bösendorfer to be delivered to the venue in time for the evening's concert. The piano they had was intended for rehearsals only and was in poor condition and required several hours of tuning and adjusting to make it playable. The instrument was tinny and thin in the upper registers and weak in the bass register, and the pedals did not work properly. Consequently, Jarrett often used ostinatos and rolling left-hand rhythmic figures during his Köln performance to give the effect of stronger bass notes, and concentrated his playing in the middle portion of the keyboard. ECM Records producer Manfred Eicher later said: "Probably [Jarrett] played it the way he did because it was not a good piano. Because he could not fall in love with the sound of it, he found another way to get the most out of it."
Jarrett arrived at the opera house late in the afternoon and tired after an exhausting long drive from Zürich, Switzerland, where he had performed a few days earlier. He had not slept well in several nights and was in pain from back problems and had to wear a brace. After trying out the substandard piano and learning a replacement instrument was not available, Jarrett nearly refused to play and Brandes had to convince him to perform as the concert was scheduled to begin in just a few hours. The concert took place at the unusually late hour of 23:30, following an earlier opera performance. This late-night time slot was the only one the administration would make available to Brandes for a jazz concert – the first ever at the Köln Opera House. The show was completely sold out and the venue was filled to capacity with over 1,400 people at a ticket price of 4 DM ($1.72). Despite the obstacles, Jarrett's performance was enthusiastically received by the audience and the subsequent recording was acclaimed by critics. It remains his most popular recording and continues to sell well, decades after its initial release.
The performance was recorded by ECM Records engineer Martin Wieland, using a pair of Neumann U-67 vacuum-tube powered condenser microphones and a Telefunken M-5 portable tape machine. The recording is in three parts: lasting about 26 minutes, 34 minutes and 7 minutes respectively. As it was originally programmed for vinyl LP, the second part was split into sections labelled "IIa" and "IIb". The third part, labelled "IIc", was actually the final piece, a separate encore.
A notable aspect of the concert was Jarrett's ability to produce very extensive improvised material over a vamp of one or two chords for prolonged periods of time. For instance, in Part I, he spends almost 12 minutes vamping over the chords Am7 (A minor 7) to G major, sometimes in a slow, rubato feel, and other times in a bluesy, gospel rock feel. For about the last 6 minutes of Part I, he vamps over an A major theme. Roughly the first 8 minutes of Part II A is a vamp over a D major groove with a repeated bass vamp in the left hand, and in Part IIb, Jarrett improvises over an F# minor vamp for about the first 6 minutes.
Subsequent to the release of The Köln Concert, Jarrett was asked by pianists, musicologists and others, to publish the music. For years he resisted such requests since, as he said, the music played was improvised "on a certain night and should go as quickly as it comes." In 1990, Jarrett finally agreed on publishing an authorized transcription but with the recommendation that every pianist intending to play the piece should use the recording itself as the final word. A new interpretation of The Köln Concert was published in 2006 by Polish pianist Tomasz Trzcinski on his album Blue Mountains. A transcription for classical guitar has also been published by Manuel Barrueco.
The album was included in Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. - Wiki
- Recorded live at the opera in Köln, Germany January 24, 1975
About Keith Jarrett:
Keith Jarrett’s ECM discography embraces solo improvisation, duets, trios, quartets, original compositions, multi-instrumental ventures, masterpieces of the classical repertoire and wide-ranging explorations of the Great American Songbook.
Jarrett was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May 1945. He took his first piano lesson before his third birthday and gave his debut solo recital aged seven. “I grew up with the piano,” he has said, “I learned its language while I learned to speak.”
His earliest training was classical, but by the age of 15 his piano lessons had ceased and Jarrett’s interest in jazz was burgeoning. He turned down an opportunity to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and in 1964 took the decisive step of moving to New York to establish himself in the jazz world. After a spell touring with Art Blakey’s New Jazz Messengers, Jarrett joined Charles Lloyd’s quartet in 1966. He also played organ and electric piano with Miles Davis in 1970 and 1971.
Jarrett’s association with ECM dates from November 1971, when he and producer Manfred Eicher first collaborated on the hugely influential solo piano album Facing You, eight short pieces which, in Eicher’s words, “hold together like a suite”. The album also prefigured the solo piano concerts which would be such a defining aspect of Jarrett’s career.
In 1973 ECM organised an eighteen-concert European tour, consisting solely of Jarrett’s solo improvisations. The Köln Concert (1975) has unsurprisingly passed into legend: a multi-million-selling album that has been the subject of books and a complete transcription. But Köln should not eclipse the achievement of the whole sequence of improvised concerts, a genre which Jarrett effectively created. After the success of that first solo tour, Jarrett has continued to pursue the improvised solo concert format, the decades of his career studded with records of his endlessly fertile imagination, usually referred to simply by where they took place: Paris, Vienna, Lausanne, Carnegie Hall, La Scala...
Jarrett has been a member of several outstanding groups. In the mid-1970s he began recording with his so-called “European Quartet” consisting of saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson and drummer Jon Christensen. Their recordings include Belonging, My Song, Nude Ants, Personal Mountains and Sleeper. No less essential is his contemporaneous “American Quartet” work with Charlie Haden (bass), Paul Motian (drums) and Dewey Redman (sax), whose output included The Survivors’ Suite and Eyes of the Heart (both 1976). The American Quartet extended the range of Jarrrett’s trio with Haden and Motian. The early trio’s work is documented on Hamburg ’72.
In the early 1980s Jarrett formed his “Standards Trio” with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette, which proved to be one of the most fertile and long-lasting partnerships in jazz history. Over the years they have toured and released an unparalleled series of albums of standards and freely improvised sets, including the 6-CD set At the Blue Note, an extraordinary record of three extraordinary nights in June 1994, about which the New York Times wrote: "Jarrett makes each new note sound like a discovery... The music whispered and glimmered, seeking a pure, incorporeal song.”
In 1987, Jarrett initiated a series of recordings of some of the great monuments of the classical keyboard repertoire with Bach’s Wohltempierte Klavier, Book I, which was followed by the Goldberg Variations (1989) and the second book of Wohltempierte Klavier (1990). For a pianist with such a fine command of voicing, Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87, was perhaps a natural next step: "It didn't feel like I was playing someone else's music," Jarrett said of his first encounter with these works. "[The pieces] are coming from some strange quirky place that I'm familiar with.” The New York Times was just one of many to hail this award-winning recording: no mere crossover curiosity, “Jarrett has finally staked an indisputable claim to distinction in the realm of classical music”.
40 years on from his ECM debut, Facing You, Rio (2011) blazed with as much energy and invention as any of his solo concerts from the past four decades, while his duet sessions with the late bassist Charlie Haden (Jasmine and Last Dance) reveal the players at their most intimate and introspective: “When we play together it's like two people singing,” Jarrett said of these recordings.
ECM marked Jarrett’s 70th birthday with two simultaneous releases, a mid-80s recording of Barber’s piano concerto and Bartok’s third, and Creation, a nine-piece suite drawn from concerts in the pianist’s 2014 concert tour. Creation is amongst the most strongly lyrical of Jarrett's recent solo releases, the choice of music emphasizing pieces in which there is a sense of song being born, voices striving to be heard. It also offers the most up-to-the minute account of Jarrett's uncanny capacity to construct compelling music in real-time: his melodic-harmonic imagination as an improviser and his ability to consistently find and shape new forms remain, after all these years of solo concerts, remarkable. - ECM Records
Item description:
Artist: |
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Title: |
The Köln Concert |
Label: |
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Format: |
2 × Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Gatefold Cover, 180 Gram |
Pressing: |
Germany |
Release Date: |
2010 |
Genre: |
Jazz |
Style: |
Contemporary Jazz, Avant Garde, Free Jazz, Post Bop, Piano, Live |
Catalog No: |
ECM 1064/65 |
Condition: |
New |