Gorgeous, direct duets, love songs, close in spirit to The Melody At Night With You.

With Joshua Abrams, Hamid Drake, Jonathan Doyle, and Josh Berman.

‘At the beginning of 2017, Chicago vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz brought a quintet into the hallowed halls of Electrical Audio, Steve Albini’s legendary studio, to record the soundtrack for a new film, Roy’s World: Barry Gifford’s Chicago, a documentary by Rob Christopher based on the Roy’s World series of short stories by Barry Gifford.
‘It’s really an ensemble effort, the spotlight on the gorgeous compositions and spacious sensibility, a perfect complement to Christopher’s fascinating, beautiful film, which has a noir vibe set in a fifties version of the Windy City conjured by means of vintage found footage, narration by Willam Dafoe, Matt Dillon, and Lilli Taylor, and Adasiewicz’s score. Check the balafon-led groove of Blue People, nodding to Fela… and bluesy, swinging charts throughout, with elements that might recall the post-hard-bop Blue Note records of folks like Andrew Hill, Sam Rivers, and Grachan Moncur III, Roy’s World is more than a great soundtrack record, it’s a killer programme of new tunes played by a monstrously strong band recorded and mixed at one of the world’s finest studios.’

Featuring Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes, from 1958.

Duets by Anouar Brahem’s accordionist and the classically-trained guitarist Seddiki, ranging from Greensleeves through Faure to their own improvisations and compositions.

The fabulous, legendary LP originally issued by Lumen in 1972, born out of several visits to Madagascar by Gilson and fellow musicians from Paris, and their collaborations with musicians on the island.
Fittingly the first trip was on May 13 1968, the day of the general strike in France: this is tumultuous, insurgent, joyous, blisteringly swinging, outernational Malagasy jazz, including a a charged, unmissable The Creator Has A Masterplan, and Avaradoha, a composition by Madagascan saxophonist Serge Rahoerson (who leads this recording), which was the anthem of the rotaka protests in 1972, bringing down the neo-colonial First Republic of Madagascar. The closer showcases various traditional Madagascan percussion instruments, played by the same trio which that year recorded Le Massacre Du Printemps, Gilson’s avant-noise homage in memoriam of Stravinsky.
Hot.

Jef Gilson, Sylvin Marc and his cousin Ange Japhet, Del Rabenja, Gérard Rakotoarivony and Frank Raholison, blending together bebop, sub-Saharan roots and electric funk.
Requiem Pour Django, Dizzy 48 and Anamorphose — renamed Salegy Jef after this re-routing via Madagascar — rejuvenate Gilson compositions from the previous couple of decades. Newport Bounce is a reworking of Interlude, recorded by Gilson in 1969 with Philly Joe Jones. Le Newport was a club in rue Grégoire de Tours, Saint Germain des Prés.

A bouquet featuring interpretations of Joe Henderson’s Black Narcissus and Trane’s After The Rain, plus nine originals, performed by the New Breed, and dedicated by the guitarist to his mum.
“I used to deejay a lot when I lived in Chicago. I was spinning records one night and for about ten minutes I was able to perfectly synch a Nobukazu Takemura record with the first movement of A Love Supreme and it had this free jazz, abstract jazz thing going on with a sequenced beat underneath. It sounded so good. That’s what I’m trying to do with Max Brown. It’s got a sequenced beat and there are musicians improvising on top or beneath the sequenced drum pattern. That’s what I was going for. Man vs. machine.
“It’s a lot of experimenting, a lot of trial and error. I like to pursue situations that take me outside myself, where the things I come up with are things I didn’t really know I could do. Patchwork quilting. You take this stuff and stitch it together until a tapestry forms.”

Flexidisc.

‘2 LPs of long-form, lyrical, groove-based free improv recorded live at a bar in LA’s Highland Park neighborhood with just enough space in the back for Parker, drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, & alto saxophonist Josh Johnson to convene in extraordinarily depth-full & exploratory music making. Gleaned for the stoniest side-length cuts from 10+ hours of vivid two-track recordings made between 2019 & 2021 by Bryce Gonzales, Mondays at The ETA is a darkly glowing séance of an album, brimming over with the hypnotic, the melodic, & patience & grace in its own beautiful strangeness. Room-tone, electric fields, environment, ceiling echo, live recording, Mondays, Los Angeles. It belongs in the lineage of such canonical live double albums recorded on the West Coast as Lee Morgan’s Live at the Lighthouse, Miles Davis’ Friday & Saturday Night at the Blackhawk & Black Beauty, & John Coltrane’s Live in Seattle.
‘While the IVtet sometimes plays standards &, including on this recording, original compositions, it is as previously stated largely a free improv group — just not in the genre meaning of the term. The music is more free composition than free improvisation, more blending than discordant. It’s tensile, yet spacious & relaxed. Clearly all four musicians have spent significant time in the planetary system known as jazz, but relationships to other musics, across many scenes & eras — dub & Dilla, primary source psychedelia, ambient & drone — suffuse the proceedings.’

His first solo recording, in 2013-14; on top-quality vinyl, in a flipback sleeve.
‘Parker combines the dark tonal palette & percussive attack he’s long been known for with real-time processing elements & field recordings, deftly crafting a unique world of solo guitar music — multilingual, mysterious, alive with extraordinary sonic events, with a sturdy intelligence in charge & a raw homestyle vibe. The title composition sets the album’s cavernous mood. Terse lines & ricocheting loops morph into a gnarly ambient section that resembles Neil Young droning out over a vg+ copy of Discreet Music. Parker creates a different sort of ambient space in his take on Frank Ocean’s Super Rich Kids, bending the melody around a bossa nova rhythm into a moodsville tone poem. Parker makes an extraordinary long-form statement out of Chad Taylor’s Mainz, a piece he first recorded with Taylor & Chris Lopes on the album Bright Light In Winter. Twice the length of the trio recording, the multi-layered soliloquy finds Parker leaping from the high rung to damn near orchestral heights, pushing his techniques & concepts to the breaking points. To say Lush Life comes with formidable baggage is an understatement. Parker achieves instant classic status with a rendition that sounds beamed-in from a decommissioned satellite — burned out, covered in space grit, yet still formally nuanced & beautifully reflective of Strayhorn’s world-weary lyrics… An artist who’s clearly taking his music to the next level.’

Organically funky, laced with avant-garde synth textures, and studded with breakbeats, the second Outernational is Jeff Resnick’s unique, ultra-rare, 1978 promotional recording for the School for American Craftsmen, at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Five tracks of soul jazz and modal fusion — re-modelling Trane, and opening with a variation of Norwegian Wood — by a local group including trumpeter Jeff Tyzik and pianist Sonny Kompanek; then Resnick mostly solo for the second side, when the money ran out, multi-tracking synthesizers on his home set-up, in an engrossing blend of reflective abstraction, grooving electro and spiritualised fourth-world tropicalism.
Bim!

Intensely evocative, meditative duets by modular synthesizer and viola, interwoven with field recordings — birds, the sound of forests — encapsulating sojourns on the Åland archipelago in the Baltic Sea, between Sweden and Finland.

‘Quietly multi-rhythmic, modular-trance-meets-processed-and-unprocessed-chamber strings, bewitching and bewildering field recordings all knitted tightly, an LA patchwork.’

“Our studios are side-by-side. When we were writing this album, you might have found us tracking viola stacks in one studio while, in the other, we were writing through-composed themes and rearranging the material. Granular synthesis and tape manipulation are key tools we use to create variation and movement in a composition. This process often yields surprising results, capturing the emotion but expressing it in unexpected ways. It feels essential that we embrace a bit of chance.
“In contrast to our first album, Recordings from the Aland Islands, we wanted this music to feel very present. Where Recordings was intended to transport you to another place, Different Rooms is meant to meet you where you are. It’s a decidedly urban album. The field recordings were captured on rain platforms, in city streets, in rooms at home, and intentionally paint a quotidian sonic image, blurring the line between what you hear in your own environment and what is on the record.”

Featuring Jeff Parker.

The flautist’s one BN as leader, from 1970, with Eddie Gomez, Don Alias and Sam Brown, produced by Sonny Lester, mixing funk, jazz, Latin, rock, improv… and a John Jacob Niles. Great stuff.

Quartet and sextet sessions led by the flautist and saxophonist: Midnight Oil, Roamin’ With Richardson and HJ favourite Going To The Movies, plus the rare and interesting 10” album Meeting In Studio, recorded in Belgrade during Quincy Jones’ 1960 European tour, by a mix of American and Yugoslavian musicians.

The saxophonist Jesse Sharps took over from Arthur Blythe as leader of Horace Tapscott’s Pan-Afrikan People’s Arkestra. ‘He became the Ark leader…he was hardcore,’ the pianist recalls. ‘They’d all be quiet and listen to him when he talked.’
This was the period of such classic PAPA recordings as Flight 17, Live At IUCC and The Call; lit up by the funky, deep spirituality of Sharps compositions like Desert Fairy Princess, Macramé and Peyote Song II.
His own Sharps And Flats album was recorded in 1985 for Tom Albach’s legendary Nimbus West imprint, adding a stunning sixteen-minute bonus cut by the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, featuring Horace Tapscott, recorded in 1979. 
A lost classic of the Los Angeles jazz underground, on wax at last!

Cecil Taylor collaborators Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray alongside the String Trio of New York bassist John Lindberg, giving the Willisau jazz festival what for, in August 1980.