Limberly pulsating, dubwise and warmly intimate, open to the heavens but twinkling with avian detail, deftly shuffling melody and dissonance, rhythm and pause — and lit up up by the woody, breathy timbres of Clive Bell’s shakuhachi playing — this is life-affirming, smart, deeply pleasurable music, easy to dance to, with everything from Lee Perry to Noh Theatre via Karlheinz Stockhausen and King Sunny Ade in the electro-acoustic mix.

Benjamin Kilchhofer’s artwork peers through the vacuum of space, catching a rare glimpse of the mysterious alien biomes, fossils and silhouettes generated by dwarf planets, asteroids, Kuiper belt, and other trans-Neptunian objects.
Buckle up… needle to the groove… take the tour!
Warmly recommended.

‘Smalltown Superjazzz was a free-jazz subsidiary label of Smalltown Supersound from 2005-2012. Dormant then till 2019, it is now reborn as the AFJ-Series, named after a recording by Don Cherry & Krystzof Penderecki’s The New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra.
‘AFJ-Series is proud to release this compilation of music from forty releases, spanning almost twenty years of Smalltown Supersound, Superjazzz and AFJ. The idea is to bring the Superjazzz era into the AFJ-Series, but also to leave it behind — and start fresh. A requiem and rebirth combined, inspired by the 1964 ESP Disk sampler (also by its hard editing).
‘Lasse Marhaug spent months ploughing through the entire catalogue. Whilst the main goal was to survey Smalltown’s wide range of releases in the improvised/jazz/free music field, his choices and juxtapositions almost play as a new piece of music.
‘So here it is — forty tracks of total freedom. The universality of improvised music, as Derek Bailey called it.’

Even at the age of eighty — Nation Time is fifty years old — Joe McPhee refuses to stand still or bask in nostalgia. For all its lovely strangeness — for a start, besides playing, he sings and recites — this LP elaborates lineages in his oeuvre initiated with John Snyder in the seventies, and sustained with Pauline Oliveros.
Lasse Marhaug is an old hand, young at heart, too. After thirty years of making electronic music — hundreds of releases, collaborations and projects — his name is synonymous with Norwegian noise music.
A one-of-a-kind, highly enjoyable, compelling mixture of free jazz and electronics, inspired by science fiction and early electronic music.

His startling 1970 comeback for Reprise, recorded at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. A blend of blues, Sly Stone and country rock loaded with the Richard scream, rollicking piano and booting saxophone. ‘He was just singing his booty off,” recalled Travis Wammack (who wrote Greenwood, Mississippi for the session).
The title track kicks off side two with a staggering dollop of super-heavy funk: ten increasingly frazzled minutes of breaks-and-beats heaven pilfered by everyone from Big L and Lord Finesse to Prodigy.

His 1966 debut (with Henry Grimes on bass), after ESP founder Bernard Stollman saw him play as John Coltrane’s guest at the Village Vanguard.
Clifford Allen commented in All About Jazz: ‘Wright was one of the forerunners of the multiphonics-driven school of saxophonists to follow the direction pointed by Ayler, but with a more pronounced bar-walking influence than most of his contemporaries. Whereas Ayler’s high-pitched wails, wide vibrato and guttural honks all belied an R&B pedigree, his solos still contained the breakneck tempos and facility of bebop… Wright, on the other hand, offers his honks and squawks with a phraseology derived from the slower, earthier funk of R&B and gospel music… The opening The Earth starts with a brief vibrato-heavy and bluesy slow theme on unaccompanied tenor that quickly erupts into a frantic screamer of a solo, a mix of buzzing upper-register cries and low bleating honks, occasional recognizable stock R&B phrases making their way into the melange… Unlike Ayler, there is not a significant amount of solo construction, for it appears Wright was throwing together ideas in a spirit of jubilation.’

Highly sought-after French jazz fusion — blending in West Coast funk, gentle blues, sketches of Andalusia — with John Hicks, Jerry Goodman from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Jean-Marie Fabiano from the Fabiano Orchestra.

‘A gorgeous soul-jazz organ quartet album that hearkens back to the early-mid ‘60s; fully revitalized by William Parker’s indelible compositions and the generous musical gifts of Darryl Foster, Cooper-Moore, and Gerald Cleaver. A straight-up joy. This very special project was produced by William Parker for his own Centering Records imprint, and dedicated to his Aunt Carrie Lee and Uncle Joe (pictured on the cover). It was created to celebrate the occasion of their 65th wedding anniversary on August 6th, 2010.’
A one-time-only LP pressing, remastered and re-sequenced, including a download card for the album as originally released on CD, adding three tracks.

The Beaters started out amidst the Soweto Soul explosion, inspired by the music of Stax and Motown. They supported the likes of Percy Sledge and Timmy Thomas. During a three-month tour of Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), they were inspired by the strengthening independence struggle, and musicians such as Thomas Mapfumo, drawing on African musical styles and traditions. Back home in Johannesburg, they swapped their Nehru jackets for dashikis, and grew Afros. Their new Afro-centric rock and funk transformed the SA scene. Black Power in music, to get you on the good foot. ‘During apartheid times we made people laugh and dance when things weren’t looking good,’ remembers drummer Sipho Hotstix Mabuse.
Here, Love Love Love retains the influence of US soul, whilst Harari, Inhlupeko Iphelile, Push It On and Thiba Kamoo encapsulate the new direction; with a bump-jive workout, fired up by Kippie Moeketsi and Pat Matshikiza, to close.

‘Classic Vinyl Series.’