Dewey Redman (tenor sax), Charles Eubanks (piano), Mark Helias (bass), Ed Blackwell (drums).

‘Classic Vinyl Series.’

A terrific album by the Hen Ogledd conspirator, and collaborator with the likes of Derek Bailey, Bill Orcutt and Jon Butcher.
A telyn rawn is a harp strung with wound and pleated horse hair. (Tristram Shandy would have a field day.) It’s maybe a millennium old; passing into obscurity around two hundred years ago.
“All the music on this album is improvised. I designed and built a long forgotten instrument, engaged with historical texts and poetry, learnt the techniques and music from the Robert ap Huw manuscript and researched the importance of the horse and horse cults in Welsh culture. All these interventions were a means to improvise historically informed music and re-evaluate the legacy of the harp in Wales but ultimately served as a jumping off point so as to create new possibilities.”
The music is warmly compelling: polyphonic, convivial, rootsy, evocative, often mesmeric, sometimes banging.
Ancient Welsh folk veers into koto and kora, Appalachian dulcimer and Norwegian langeleik; the wheezing, wailing, rocking traditions of drones and sawing from Louisiana to Albania are streamed into the Valleys, and out again, changed.
Handsomely presented, too. Hotly recommended.

Terrific, grooving Black History from the Roy Ayers camp.
‘Remember to remember, to never forget. How long… how long… how long will it take?’

With Barry Guy and Tony Oxley in 1971. Gatefold sleeve.

Fresh from his stint for Miles, the saxophonist with Tony Williams, Ron Carter and Jaki Byard in 1964 — meshing the great jazz tradition and the avant-garde in his own path-breaking way.
‘Classic Vinyl Series’.

‘Classic Vinyl’ series.

‘Verve By Request.’

Legs eleven — Nicole Mitchell, Jeff Parker, Jaimie Branch, Joel Ross, Mikel Patrick Avery, Tomeka Reid, Chad Taylor, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, Macie Stewart, Angelica Sanchez, and John Herndon; with Damon Locks contributing lyrics and vocals.
‘Somehow swirling adventurous elements of avant-garde jazz and contemporary classical into the most universal attractors of pop music, the cosmic opera of Dimensional Stardust is a pure spiritual extension of the unifying ethos of the Exploding Star Orchestra.’

‘Dedicated to Jaimie Branch, this features a compacted version of Mazurek’s long-running Exploding Star Orchestra, including guitarist Jeff Parker, vocalist Damon Locks, drummer Gerald Cleaver, and pianists Angelica Sanchez and Craig Taborn.
‘Drop the needle and immediately find this crew deep in a chromatic funk fantasy of outer-space grooves and Bartokian riffs. MC Damon Locks brings the Deltron 3030 energy while pianist Craig Taborn and Angelica Sanchez face-off from behind Wurlitzer pianos and Moog synthesizers. Parker is in absolute space shred mode.’