Your basket is empty
The Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra was created in 1971 by the legendary pianist François Tusques. L’Inter Communal compiles extracts from concerts given between 1976 and 1978, revelling in the political engagement which lit up free jazz and popular music in that period.
According to Tusques, the Spanish singer Carlos Andreu was a griot ‘who created of new genre of popular song improvised with our music, based on events going on at the time.’
The opener Blues Pour Miguel Enriquez invokes Thelonious Monk in an uproarious homage to the Chilean revolutionary. Another song is entitled L’heure est à la lutte’... The time to fight is now.
From 1981, the further excursions of ‘the people’s jazz workshop’, in the words of founder Francois Tusques.
Le Musichien is an Afro-Catalan adventure, free as a bird, headed for the outer spaceways. Tusques sings together with the Spaniard Carlos Andreu, riding the grooving bass-playing of Jean-Jacques Avenel, percussion from Kilikus, the saxophones Sylvain Kassap and Yebga Likoba, and Ramadolf playing trombone.
Les Amis d’Afrique was recorded the following year, at the Tombées de la Nuit festival in Rennes. Tusques and bassist Tanguy Le Doré weave the backdrop of an explosive new brotherhood of breath, in the tradition of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders: Bernard Vitet on trumpet, Danièle Dumas and Sylvain Kassap on saxophones, Jean-Louis Le Vallegant and Philippe Le Strat on… yes… cannons.
Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, drummer Tcheser Holmes, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and bassist Luke Stewart.
Raw, organic punk-jazz, trying out electronics and synthesizers for the first time.
‘Irreversible Entanglements’ fearless music takes to task the police, American politics, capitalism, and racism (The Nation).
‘The jazz ensemble evokes our American topography, both physically and psychologically, by capturing what’s in the news and what’s underneath that surface’ (Pitchfork).
From 1972, taking time out from the Nina Simone band to cut this funky Black-Jazz-style set for his own label, with Horace Silver’s ‘personal seal of approval’. Includes Mr. Clean and Sister Sanctified.
‘The sublime Time Capsule remains Weldon Irvine’s most fully realized and influential recording… unerringly soulful, spiritual, and funky. Assembled as a kind of musical scrapbook documenting the thought patterns and belief systems of the early ‘70s, it nevertheless boasts a surprising vitality and timelessness thanks to luminous funk grooves that anticipate the latter-day emergence of acid jazz. Irvine also rhymes over several tracks, further cementing his influence on successive generations of hip-hop. A profoundly righteous spirituality winds through all eight performances… deftly balancing between beatitude and bitterness. For fans of funk, soul and jazz, it doesn’t get much better than this 1973 classic’ (Jason Ankeny, AMG).
‘Documenting a 2023 West Coast tour, this double LP goes deep. On 2023-05-12 Set II, the rhythm section gives Collier plenty of space to develop long, soulful saxophone lines that are full of invention and dynamic variation, culminating in a climax of squawking multi phonics, woody bass runs and multi-directional drumming. Best of all is a riveting set dedicated to Don Cherry, where Collier vocalises freely through a megaphone, setting off its alarm at key points’ (The Wire).
Brilliant piano-trio jazz; warmly recommended.
‘Break Stuff’: what happens after formal considerations… a time for action… breakdowns, breakbeats, break dancing…
Hood is a humbly bamboozled tribute to Robert Hood. Work is for Iyer’s beloved Thelonious Monk. Countdown sets Trane to a West African rhythm. Mystery Woman is driven by the compound pulses of South Indian drumming. There’s a desolate, barely-there solo version of Billy Strayhorn’s Blood Count…
With Tyshawn Sorey and Linda May Han Oh, exploring Iyer originals, Geri Allen’s Drummer’s Song and Cole Porter’s Night and Day.
‘Heartbreaking clarity and economy of expression… to the accompaniment of pianist Iyer’s wistful melodic fragments and pregnant clusters. Smith can project a tender fragility through a single lingering note, reminiscent of Miles at his most thoughtful and noirish circa Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud’ (The Wire).
A scorcher.
Rawly emotional, politically charged drums-saxophone duets, with a rough-and-ready, carnivalesque, spirited energy. McLean is in full flight.
The closer Deicomahleeah has been reissued by both Floating Points and Jazzman, in the last few years.
Carvin is the percussionist on Expansions; the drummer on Pharoah’s Elevation and Doug Carn’s Infant Eyes.
Reduced LP price, briefly.
Quintessential NYC loft action from 1977, with such a killer line-up: Julius Hemphill, Abdul Wadud, and Pheeroan aKLaff.
‘For those of us into the obscure, lively corners of free music, it’s an essential gem,’ says Foxy Digitalis.
“These guys are all heroes of mine. I’ve learned so much (still learning) from all of them. To hear them all together like this is a real gift. What a combo! I can’t believe this happened more than forty years ago. It sounds like the future. I’m so thankful the tape was running to document this extraordinary moment” (Bill Frisell).
‘Four years after a first album on the Futura label in 1971, Jacques Thollot returned, this time on the Palm label of Jef Gilson, still with just as much surrealist poetry in his jazz. In thirty-five minutes, the French composer and drummer, who had been on the scene since he was thirteen — recording Gilson LPs when he was just sixteen — established himself as a link between Arnold Schoenberg and Don Cherry. Resistant to any imposed framework and always excessive, Thollot allows himself to do anything and everything: suspended time of an extraordinary delicacy, a stealthy explosion of the brass section, hallucinatory improvisation of the synthesisers, tight writing, teetering on the classical, and in the middle of all that, a hit, the title-track — which Madlib would one day end up hearing and sampling.
‘In a career lasting half a century, centred on freedom, Jacques Thollot played with a roll-call of key experimental musicians (Don Cherry, Sonny Sharrock, Michel Roques, Barney Wilen, Steve Lacy, François Tusques, Michel Portal, Jac Berrocal, Noël Akchoté...) who all heard in him a pulsation coming from another world.’
