Featured

The story of Perception takes root in a series of chance meetings, which seem at first glance unlikely, between musicians from differing horizons, be they geographic or esthetic. Jazz Magazine was spot on with an article from the period entitled, "Perception, four conceptions", before detailing the origins of the musicians (Hungarian for saxophonist Yochk'O Seffer, German for pianist Siegfried Kessler, French for bassist Didier Levallet, Franco-Vietnamese for drummer Jean-My Truong). It then looked at their varying backgrounds (classical academic training for the first two, an improvised apprenticeship on the jazz scene for the third), in order to point out the seemingly contradictory and perhaps complementary directions which would unite in a singular identity. None of this, however, was clear from the start as the group began as a trio with a different saxophonist, before stabilising to the first core quartet.

Having been remarked on in 1970 by Gérard Terronès, who was already producer of the cult Alors! (Michel Portal), Célesphère (Burton Greene) and Basse Barre (Barre Phillips), Perception was thus given a timely opportunity to record their first album on his Futura Records label. This eponymous opus, illustrated with a drawing by Yochk'O Seffer, is the first of a fascinating trilogy. It puts the seal on those complementary contradictions with a lyrically incandescent free jazz, made up of startling interactions between complex harmonies and disjointed rhythms. - SouffleContinu Records

A highly-influential figure in American music and black consciousness, Archie Shepp has been a bold, soulful innovator in his time and Fire Music, just reissued on vinyl, exemplifies that fiery, gutsy spirit. For his peculiarly astringent but soulful brew, Shepp drew on African music, New Orleans jazz and rhythm and blues and the musician was vocal in the struggle against racism and the colour bar in the 1960s. Civil rights were always to the fore as an element in his cutting edge music, as evidenced by Fire Music which first appeared in 1965.

Malcom, Malcom - Semper Malcolm features the saxophonist leader reciting a short poem in honour of the slain Malcolm X before taking up his sax for the music, accompanied by double bass player David Isenzon and the drumming of J.C. Moses.

The album is not an easy listen for the fan who likes tunefulness and smooth rhythms, it must be said. Shepp is more in a Charlie Mingus groove, with little of the accessibility of, say, Miles Davis. In fact, just to cheekily send up any suggestion of prettiness or shimmer, he takes all the sensual sway out of of Girl from Ipanema in his bonkers version which features here. It runs to eight minutes and 33 seconds which may prove a little long for you.

The album, however, opens with Hambone, all free-ranging bittersweet horn harmony riffing across 12 minutes and 28 seconds, led by Shepp's tenor, with Marion Brown on alto sax, Reggie Johnson on bass and Joe Chambers on drums. The same appealing line-up delivers track two, Los Olvidados, a tribute to the 1950 film directed by Luis Buñuel, dealing with the lives of poverty-stricken children in contemporary Mexico. - RTE

This work was originally used as music for the choreographed piece by Merce Cunningham entitled Second Hand, with stage decors and costume design by Jasper Johns. It is a work for piano derived from a 1918 dramatic composition by Erik Satie entitled Socrate, itself originally conceived for voice and orchestra. Cage’s original transcription (of one movement) of Satie’s score served as “accompaniment” for Merce Cunningham’s solo dance entitled Idyllic Song, first performed in Richmond, Virginia, on Nov. 20, 1944. In 1968 Cage wished to complete his transcription (of the other two movements), but was forbidden by Satie’s publisher, Salabert. His inventive solution was to compose a new work that perfectly matched the phrase structure of Satie’s music (and thus of Cunningham’s dance, which was already well underway). His technique was simple: he took only the vocal line of Socrate (or occasionally the prominent orchestral melody) and systematically transposed it up or down and into different modes. In the 1st movement, every pitch is transposed separately, but in the 2nd and 3rd, the transpositions occur only at every half-bar. In short, the result is a music that has the same phrasing, rhythms, and even some of the general contours of Satie’s music, but which is otherwise completely distinct. This solved Cage’s copyright problem, and he playfully named his modified new work Cheap Imitation. – John Cage

BBE Music presents the seventh release in its highly acclaimed J Jazz Master Class Series: ‘Evolution’ by Shintaro Quintet. Recorded in 1984 and originally released on the private label Streetnoise Records, ‘Evolution’ is a perfect example of stately modal jazz with every one of its five tracks composed by band leader and bassist, Shintaro Nakamura.

A cut from the album, ‘A Blind Man’, was included on the BBE Music compilation ‘J Jazz – Deep Modern Jazz from Japan 1969-1984’, and it’s a track that’s indicative of the album’s graceful blend of spiritual jazz and gently swinging minor blues waltzes, a style favoured by Nakamura that allows the band to stretch out and explore the strong melodic themes, lush arrangements and seductive rhythms.

Recorded in New York, ‘Evolution’ features the great Japanese trumpet player Shunzo Ohno alongside a mixed Japanese-American band: pianist Jeff Jenkins, who brings a touch of McCoy Tyner’s percussive blues to the album, has worked with many jazz greats including Freddie Hubbard, Eddie Harris and Clark Terry; US-born Saxophonist Bob Kenmotsu, one- time member of Jack McDuff’s band has also recorded and performed with jazz guitarist Pat Martino; and drummer Fukushi Tainaka, who studied under Philly Joe Jones, completes the solid rhythm section with Nakamura and Jenkins.

‘Evolution’ is reissued as a double 45rpm 180g LP, cut by the Grammy-nominated Carvery Studio. The BBE Music edition features exact reproductions of the original artwork and super-rare diagonal obi strip. It also comes with the original notes fully translated plus a new extended essay and interview with band members by Tony Higgins. ‘Evolution’ is also available as a CD and across digital formats.

The BBE J Jazz Masterclass Series is personally curated by Tony Higgins and Mike Peden and is dedicated to presenting the very finest in Japanese modern jazz. The series features rare material, presented in the highest quality reproductions of the original releases, fully licensed and authorised by the artists and labels.  – Bandcamp

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.

-

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.

-

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.

-

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.

“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.”

-

“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.

-

“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.

-

“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

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

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

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

 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)

 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 

 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

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

"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: