Iain Ballamy and Thomas Strønen, joined by Christian Fennesz. ‘Powerful grooves, evocative textures and exploratory improvisation, sometimes hypnotically insistent, sometimes turbulent.’
‘Heavier, drier, connecting more with how we actually sound live,’ says Strønen.

Ravishing, melodic and lyrical, but also poised and alert piano-playing.

In 1979, just after the release of Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo, Messina was asked to perform at the Teatro Quartiere in Milan.
‘Due to the limited availability of key technical features, ’ he recalls, ‘it would have been too complicated to perform Prati Bagnati, and therefore I opted for these three pieces instead. We had never actually tried them all together, so I thought about renting a recording studio the previous afternoon. In that way, we could rehearse in a suitable place and use the opportunity to record the music on tape.’
The music has an unadorned, almost improvisational feel, skewered by passages of arpeggiated, meditative piano. Its chords layered and unfurled in real time via a reel-to-reel tape machine, the track Reflex recalls Steve Reich’s mesmeric phase-shifting works of the 1960s.

Janneau contributed to François Tusques’ 1965 landmark Free Jazz sessions. He was a stalwart of Jef Gilson’s big band in the years leading up to this first album as leader in 1975, with Jenny-Clark on bass and percussions, Bernard Lubat on drums, and Michel Grailler from Magma on spaced-out synths. The compositions are all FJ originals: check the monumental Droit d’Asile, the spooky Theme For An Unknown Island, and the homage Mr J.C. For Ever.

‘A soundtrack for being unstuck in time, if just for an hour. It is a glide through a rich past and present, with glimpses of a future worth reaching.’

One seventy-minute outernational septet excursion, with notated intervals: guitar and home-made instruments with tablas and guzheng, drum-kit, electronics, trumpet.

Their first LP, released in 1973 after six years together, with the first drummer Pierre Guyon having been replaced by Christian Rollet in 1970. Brilliant, roiling and free, with a celebratory lyricism to its grapplings with Cecil Taylor, Gary Peacock, Milford Graves and co, and a wheeling melancholia straight from Ornette.

His lovely, lyrical jazz trumpet-playing blended with the Corsican polyphony of A Filetta, and the bandoneon of Daniele Di Bonaventura, in the tradition of Miles’ take on Rodrigues’ Concierto de Aranjuez.

‘The trio’s sensitive interplay and attention to detail are now unrivalled in jazz… They have developed a naturally cinematic quality that draws on the sense of unease that lurks beneath the everyday’ (Mike Hobart, Financial Times).
It opens with a version of Boubacar Traore’s Baba Drame, and ends resonantly with We Shall Overcome, taking in Bacharach & David and Billy Strayhorn, Monk and Delta Blues along the way.

Gibson semi-acoustic and double-bass duets — a Fats Domino, a Konitz and a Motian, various originals, Goldfinger, Carter Family Americana — recorded live at the Village Vanguard in 2016.