From 1991, the debut, milestone release of this lineup featuring dual tubas and dual electric guitars.
A private press LP from early-eighties Youngstown, Ohio, featuring an absolutely killer Hammond B3 version of Chameleon, and an exceptionally funky The World Is A Ghetto, showcasing Lavorgna’s soulful saxophone, and more deep funk from David Thomas, on organ.
“An album of what one might consider Danish Spiritual Jazz, with songs inspired by and named for Pharaoh Sanders and Yusef Lateef” (Egon, Now Again).
“I’ve never come across an original of this Norwegian spiritual jazz masterpiece but happy enough with the reissue. They’ve put some work into it to make it sound and look good”
(Gerald Short, Jazzman).
“Killer spiritual jazz album from Denmark, superb repress” (Gilles Peterson, BBC Radio 6).
This quartet formed in 1969, and played for a while every Monday in the famous Jazzhouse Montmatre in Copenhagen. This is their sole record, released in 1970.
‘With Touch, the Tortoise bandmembers — Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and John McEntire — harness their collectivist songwriting approach, a slightly anarchistic but resolutely egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego towards an abstracted muscularity. While there are still excursions into the dusky, elegantly gnarled jazz ambience that flourished on landmark works like Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, Touch is perhaps most remarkable for Tortoise’s unapologetic embrace of grand gesture. Aerodynamically re-engineered Krautrock, hand-cranked techno rave-ups, and pointillist spaghetti western fanfares are all imbued with Tortoise’s now-signature internal logic — equally alluring and confounding, a puzzle to be savored rather than solved.’
Still sealed.
Reaching solo-piano explorations in blues, jazz and classical music by the Free Jazz pioneer, in 1970; inspired by the revolutionary spirit of the times, and — opening with a dedication to Don Cherry — the New Thing.
A second set of piano improvisations, one year after the first, now more extended, percussive, insistent, and tumultuous; explicitly enraged by the recent murder of George Jackson by a San Quentin guard, and the massacre at Attica Prison.
With Alice Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Gary Bartz, Ron Carter, Elvin Jones.
His 1963 recording with John Gilmore, Thad Jones, Frank Strozier, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones, and co. Firing Trane-style modal jazz, a waltz, Night In Tunisia, brilliant soloing all round — it’s a classic.
‘Verve By Request.’
Positioning him between Milford Graves and Morton Feldman, the New York Times reckons this is ‘Mr. Sorey’s best album… bereft of almost anything resembling a steady cadence. Instead, what’s inside the pulse — resonance, fluid, potential — comes to the fore. It’s not rare for recordings of improvised music to give a sense of the physical space between instrumentalists, but with Mr. Sorey’s trio, that air seems to be in a state of charged collapse, packed with magnetic density.’