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ESPDISK 5102CD
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$12.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/14/2025
Memphis, Tennessee quintet Deepstaria Enigmatica doesn't sound like your father's free jazz. It's spacier; it's moodier; sometimes it sounds like ambient drank a lot of expressos and got down; sometimes it sounds like one of Miles Davis' mid-'70s electric bands ate shrooms and got freaky while Miles wasn't around; sometimes it sounds like a funky lounge band from the Antares system. Deepstaria Enigmatica is a quintet of improvisers from Memphis, Tennessee dedicated to creating otherworldly soundscapes. Named for a rarely seen, bell-shaped jellyfish discovered by Jacques Cousteau, the group's every note is inspired by that famous ocean explorer's sense of discovery. But don't assume the five veteran musicians create only chaos: they are as attuned to melodies and harmonies as they are to fine gradations of noise. What emerges with each extemporaneous performance can range from dark swirls of frenetic fury to interplanetary hard bop, to sunlit ambient dreamscapes punctuated with snatches of folk song. The diverse experience of the players sets the tone for their deep dives: David Collins is the composer and guitarist behind Frog Squad, a Memphis group who have blended jazz improvisation with visionary music as disparate as that of Horace Silver and Erik Satie; he's equally at home playing simple, unfettered guitar lines or rocking, effects-drenched rave ups. Chad Fowler played alto saxophone with both Frank Lowe and George Cartwright in the 1990s, and now teams up with the likes of William Parker, Kidd Jordan, Ivo Perelman, Zoh Amba, Matthew Shipp, or Brian Blade for music released on the Mahakala Music label. Keyboardist Alex Greene first studied musique concrète and computer synthesis with composer Judy Klein in the 1980s, before playing in a variety of Memphis groups ranging from Alex Chilton to Big Ass Truck to Reigning Sound, not to mention over twenty years of work with New York composer Dave Soldier. Now he improvises with multiple keyboards simultaneously, including a vintage Roland Juno-106. Since completing his jazz studies at the University of Memphis in 2016, drummer Jon Harrison has cast a wide stylistic net with the groups he's joined, which include the Southern Comfort Jazz Orchestra, Frog Squad, Hope Calyburn's Soul Scrimmage, Joe Austin, Roderick Duran, PXLS, and the Church Brothers. Bassist Khari Wynn, best known as the guitarist for hip-hop sensations Public Enemy, regularly tests more unorthodox waters with groups such as Energy Disciples, often under the name Mysterioso Africano. Together, these five musos cohere with a surprising unity of purpose, as their listening and playing gel into what often sound like prepared compositions. Sharing an uncanny telepathy, they transport listeners to new worlds of musical possibility.
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ESPDISK 5111CD
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Rose Tang has previously been heard on ESP-Disk in the band ATTITUDE!, whose album Pause & Effect came out in 2021 (ESPDISK 5048LP). She writes: "There was a school of philosophy in ancient China whose core theory stems from a debate entitled 'A White Horse Is Not a Horse.' In a book by Gongsun Long (公孫龍 320-250BC, about 200 years after Confucius) in the Warring States Period, two persons argue if a white horse is a horse: the protagonist argues it is not, because 'white' is the color of a (particular) horse while a 'horse' is a shape and a generic term. It's a linguistic/logical paradox, or sophistry. Ridiculed by his contemporary philosophers and forgotten for centuries, Gongsun is now considered the only philosopher in ancient China who delved into logic and philosophy of language. I was about 12 when my artist father first told me about the debate. He's painted many horses, especially white horses. Long before I discovered I'm a Mongol, I had always loved horses. Funny, my high school politics (Maoism/Marxism) teacher nicknamed me 'Wild Horse Running off the Reins.' That's how I see myself when playing music. Music offers instant and countless ways of freeing myself and connecting with people and the multiverse. It's all about following the qi, the energy, the flow. It's like cooking or making love, with senses and feelings all out in the open, without thinking. Improvising in a group is the most democratic activity. And all sounds are equal -- birds, traffic, construction, the ocean, kids -- all music to my ear. All instruments are my toys (some are indeed my daughter's toys). For every instrument I play, I feel the physical and spiritual connections with them. Ask not what your instrument can do for you, ask what you can do for your instrument. I look for the sounds that an instrument isn't 'supposed' to make. Music is the most abstract art form and the closest to the truth, yet it's the most institutionalized. My slogan is 'Learn through play. Play by ear. Fuck the rest!' So here it is, just some Weird Shit, music that is not music. A white horse is not a horse." All music improvised by Rose Tang and Patrick Golden. Recorded by Jim Clouse at Park West Studios, Brooklyn, on August 28, 2024.
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ESPDISK 5079CD
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From Howard Mandel's liner notes: "Reut Regev is a boundary-crossing composer-trombonist born in Israel, living and active in New York City and its metroplex since 1998, noted for four previous albums with drummer and coleader Igal Foni (her husband), three featuring the quartet R*time, the last two co-starring electric guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly, all loaded with spiky, funky, free-wheeling originals, performed with a bang. Meeting Hammond after a concert in Austria, Regev and Foni were delighted to discover the man whose oeuvre they had long admired was equally enamored of their sound and attitude. Correspondence led to It's Now: R*time Plays Doug Hammond, a unique collaboration setting the eminence's mature reflections on life, love, and music with the energy to render them timeless. Doug Hammond is a veteran American composer, drummer, percussionist, bandleader, singer-songwriter, essayist, and educator who is not nearly as well known in the U.S. as his music warrants. That may be largely because he's been based in Linz, Austria since 1989 as a professor at Bruckner University, making only periodic visits back to his native Detroit. Hammond's sixty-year career, begun with bluesman Earl Hooker and the R&B duo Sam & Dave, comprises more than a dozen albums under his own leadership starting with Reflections in the Sea of Nurnen from 1975, on which he played melodica and ARP synthesizer as well as drumming, crooning, and directing an octet. Independence, originality, fundamental tunefulness, and a spirit of inquiry characterize those Reflections as well as his subsequent releases, which include an anthology spotlighting hometown colleagues and first recordings of singer Angela Bofill (Doug Hammond Special), Steve Coleman's nascent M-Base (Spaces), through-compositions for flute, piano, and cello (Pictures and Hues), trios with trumpet and bass (May Be Blue and Singing Smiles), an ambitious, eponymous (Tentette), live solo 'griot' shows (Be You). He's had professional associations with Smokey Robinson, Sonny Rollins, and Charles Mingus (who recorded 'Moves,' heard here with lyrics, as an album title track), among others. Musicians abroad regard him as a beacon.
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ESPDISK 5100CD
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"Duck Baker should be a national treasure. He should be an international treasure. Should be? In my book he already is. I first came across his work in the 1970s on early Kicking Mule LPs in my local library in the UK, which was his temporary base then, and is his permanent home now. Many years later I was astounded by Spinning Song, his CD of Herbie Nichols compositions. Around the same time, I made contact with him by way of thanks following a review he wrote of my work on Stuff Smith and, later, other historic violinistic books and CDs. Duck's knowledge and learning about the ancestry of so many musical genres is prodigious, whether jazz, avant-garde, improvisation in general, various forms of country music, Irish, blues, ragtime, swing, you name it. He draws on so much to make his own unique playing and composing. And none of it is to go by the troublesome term 'appropriation;' Duck absorbs, pays tribute, and is himself, wherever his fingers might move across his flamenco guitar, including, of course, its wood body. This previously unreleased collection consists of fourteen solos and two duos with Eugene Chadbourne. The performances are drawn mostly from demo sessions or live recordings, and were recorded at various locations between 1976 and 1998. They run the gamut of moods and tempos, from the reflective 'Peace' and brooding 'Like Flies' to burners that rank with Baker's most animated free playing on record, like the title track, 'No Family Planning,' and 'Buffalo Fire.' The only so-to-speak standards are Thelonious Monk's 'Straight, No Chaser' and Billy Strayhorn's 'Take the 'A' Train,' the latter featuring fascinating and humorous interplay between the two guitarists?. Duck's catalogue is now vast, including a recent CD release of Thelonious Monk compositions, which beautifully complements the aforementioned Nichols CD. As well as solo efforts, past records include collaborations with the likes of Chadbourne, Roswell Rudd, John Zorn, and John Butchers or, at the other end of the spectrum, Stefan Grossman, John Renbourn, Leo Kottke, Molly Andrews, and Maggie Boyle. I, for one, never tire of listening to Duck playing in whatever context. He is a master and every recording is a gem." --Anthony Barnett
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ESPDISK 5088CD
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Performed live by Thollem McDonas at Sala Perriera, Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa, Palermo, Sicilia, 13 May 2023. Recorded and mixed by Simone Sfamelli. Mastered by Sean Mac Erlaine at Studio Saile, Dublin. Design and artwork by ACVilla.
From the liner notes by Thollem McDonas: "My approach to the piano is unique, based on my lifelong relationship with the instrument. It is also universal, born out of the context of everything and everyone who came before and during. I have been influenced by my classical piano training, my pianist parents, growing up in the culturally diverse SF Bay Area, West Coast punk rock, Kuumbwa Jazz Club, The Cabrillo Music Festival, and my life of traveling and living without a homebase. This album expresses the culmination of my life's experiences in dialogue with the universe and my fellow human beings, including all the artists I've worked with over the years. Those collaborations have continuously helped stretch me into new shapes. An 'infinite-sum game' is the opposite of a 'zero-sum game' in that all of the participants benefit from each other, a symbiosis of sorts, biologically, culturally, financially, politically. It's the heightened state of mind of recognizing that our lives are better when others are also doing well and we put in the effort to facilitate this outcome. Since I was a child, the confluence between musics has been at the forefront of my curiosity. As a result, my music is genre-bending, code-switching, omni-idiomatic, and intersectional. Growing up, all of the composers I was studying were telling me to tell my own story. I was hyper-aware that 'Classical Music' was actually a constant revolution, and that this was the same for jazz and rock and roll too. The greatest way to honor the revolutionaries of the past is to respond to the dynamics of one's own time. I never set out to play a certain style of music, or to emulate anyone, but through my own particular explorational approach, sounds inevitably arise that conjure someone else's music, which is wide open for interpretation. Some of these comprovisations have been included on previous solo albums of mine. I see this recording as the ultimate, and final, document of these pieces. Thank you for listening!"
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ESPDISK 5096LP
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While their name may conjure images of avian origami, rolled cannabis, or cut-up 10th letters, Paper Jays are an instrumental music body from Rhode Island that became fully formed during the session for this eponymous release on ESP-disk. Previously, Jesse Cohen and Justin Hubbard's guitar duo (a trio, only if counting the unmanned feedback drone of a hollow-bodied Gibson) had been contentedly performing and apartment taping for a solid five years. But after witnessing drummer and percussionist Matt Crane back Linda Sharrock at the local House of Pizza, their vision for Paper Jays widened. The ensuing studio recording date with Crane yielded results that greatly pleased all three gentlemen, and a new Paper Jays began. When playing, Jesse and Justin bend, abstract, and honor world and domestic string traditions through their amplified guitars. Matt brings tight (and loose) syncopated rhythms with occasional freer excursions on his array of percussion instruments from varied folkloric sources. Overall, their output travels from intentional, pleasant figures merged with staggered but controlled phrasing to more extemporaneous, unsystematic, and liberated expressions.
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ESPDISK 5110CD
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Volume 2. One might think that an album titled Louis Armstrong's America is a tribute to the famed trumpeter, and certainly he's a focus here, but a normal tribute would feature compositions by him, or at least associated with him. Allen Lowe doesn't operate in the realm of the predictable, though; instead, the concept -- powered entirely by Lowe compositions -- takes in not just Armstrong's influence but also the evolution of jazz starting with influences (not all jazz) on Armstrong and continuing to the end of his five-decade career in 1971 -- which means that even Albert Ayler is touched on in this wide-ranging album (heck, even indie-rock icon Steve Albini is referenced). In his liner notes, Lowe quotes himself: "I think that Louis Armstrong may have been the first true post-modernist, picking and choosing between a hierarchy of personal and public musical sources and tastes, but without any concern for the way in which hierarchy acted on all of this in terms of class and even, ultimately, race (e.g.; think of Armstrong's reverence for opera and the way it effected his broad and classically expressive method of phrasing). So he fits all the definitions of post-modernism, even as a kind of anachronistic vessel for so much that was still to come not just in jazz but in all of American popular music, in particular but not only through the mediation of black life and aesthetics. Black song, vernacular and popular, is amazingly flexible it its ways and means of expression, lyrically, rhythmically, and sonically." Personnel includes Aaron Johnson, Frank Lacy, Ray Anderson, Lewis Porter, Ray Suhy, Will Goble, Rob Landis, Brian Simontacchi, Rob Landis, Loren Schoenberg, Ethan Kogan, Ursula Oppens, Nick Jozwiak, Colson Jimenez, Kresten Osgood, Matthew Shipp, James Paul Nadien, Jeppe Zeeberg, Marc Ribot, Huntley McSwain, and Andy Stein.
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ESPDISK 5109CD
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Volume 1. One might think that an album titled Louis Armstrong's America is a tribute to the famed trumpeter, and certainly he's a focus here, but a normal tribute would feature compositions by him, or at least associated with him. Allen Lowe doesn't operate in the realm of the predictable, though; instead, the concept -- powered entirely by Lowe compositions -- takes in not just Armstrong's influence but also the evolution of jazz starting with influences (not all jazz) on Armstrong and continuing to the end of his five-decade career in 1971 -- which means that even Albert Ayler is touched on in this wide-ranging album (heck, even indie-rock icon Steve Albini is referenced). In his liner notes, Lowe quotes himself: "I think that Louis Armstrong may have been the first true post-modernist, picking and choosing between a hierarchy of personal and public musical sources and tastes, but without any concern for the way in which hierarchy acted on all of this in terms of class and even, ultimately, race (e.g.; think of Armstrong's reverence for opera and the way it effected his broad and classically expressive method of phrasing). So he fits all the definitions of post-modernism, even as a kind of anachronistic vessel for so much that was still to come not just in jazz but in all of American popular music, in particular but not only through the mediation of black life and aesthetics. Black song, vernacular and popular, is amazingly flexible it its ways and means of expression, lyrically, rhythmically, and sonically." Personnel includes Aaron Johnson, Frank Lacy, Ray Anderson, Lewis Porter, Ray Suhy, Will Goble, Rob Landis, Brian Simontacchi, Rob Landis, Loren Schoenberg, Ethan Kogan, Ursula Oppens, Nick Jozwiak, Colson Jimenez, Kresten Osgood, Matthew Shipp, James Paul Nadien, Jeppe Zeeberg, Marc Ribot, Huntley McSwain, and Andy Stein.
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ESPDISK 5075CD
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Buck Curran says: "The foundation of this recording is the musical chemistry between Jodi Pedrali and myself. Jodi and I had been playing music together since 2017 and the band we assembled for this session, centered around the idea of having London native Dave Barbarossa play drums with us. Dave Barbarossa (Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant) was my favorite drummer during my formative years playing guitar in high school. Dave and I first met over a pint in London (in Soho) in April of 2022. We talked about fatherhood and life, but mostly about music. It was wonderful to discover that he shared my love for the music of Pentangle. Soon after that meeting, we started discussing the idea of recording a Live session in the manner of some of the performances of Pentangle that we had watched on my cell phone in the pub. And so, once Dave agreed to fly to Bergamo to record with me and Jodi -- to round out the session we recruited the brilliant Italian singer Adele Pappalardo and bass player Robert Frassini Moneta. 'Black Is the Colour' is quite a different arrangement of this traditional Scottish-American folk song and features Adele singing lead vocals. The arrangement started with the bass line I wrote (influenced a bit by Danny Thompson's work with Pentangle). This track is one of the cornerstones of the new record and was recorded mostly improvised in one take. The essence of what we documented on this record is the energy of a quickly assembled group who had never played together before, and due to time restrictions, we arranged parts and rehearsed for only a few hours the day before entering the studio. All the songs performed by the band were recorded in the studio by Marco Fasolo as a 'Live' session (4, 5, and 6 July 2022) -- the tracks we used were from first or second take performances (Jodi and I really wanted to capture the energy of playing music together Live in the same space). I can hear things got a little loose in places, but overall we were really happy with how we all played together and grateful for recording the energy of that moment during those fleeting summer days in 2022." This is a co-release by Curran's Obsolete Recordings and ESP-Disk.
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ESPDISK 5099CD
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Frank London writes in his liner notes: "Spirit Stronger Than Blood pays homage to some of the recordings that shaped my musical-spiritual aesthetic: Charles Mingus's Changes 1&2, Booker Little's Strength and Sanity, Pharaoh Sanders's Peace and Love, Clifford Thornton's Gardens of Harlem, Alice Coltrane's Ptah, The El Daoud. Each of these artists, as different as they are from each other, shared a commonality of intention that set me on my life and career path. Their music is spiritual, political, romantic, at turns angry and peaceful, and inspires us to transcend and challenge the inequities of quotidian existence in order to make the world a better place, to heal the broken world (tikkun olam). Some of the songs are inspired by Jewish texts -- 'Let There Be Peace' from the prayer Oseh Shalom, asking the Almighty to bring us peace; 'Abundant Love' is in the Jewish prayer mode, Ahava Raba, acknowledging God's infinite love for all of us. 'Poem for a Blue Voice' is a poem by Davida Singer, whose partner Isabel Deconinck never let her blood cancer quash her indominable spirit. 'Resilience and Resistance' are attributes that we need to get through the trials, tribulations, and indignities life can throw at us. Healing of course from disease, but also from trauma, from blind obeisance to dogma. I was recently diagnosed with myelofibrosis, an extremely rare and fatal blood cancer, and dedicate this recording to my dear friends and colleagues who have passed away from blood diseases and other cancers -- Lester Bowie, Thomas Chapin, Adrienne Cooper, Isabelle Deconinck, Jewlia Eisenberg, Ron Miles, and my namesake, Frank London Brown. Check out all of their work and be inspired." --Frank London, April 2024
The Elders are: Frank London, trumpet; Marilyn Lerner, piano; Hilliard Greene, bass; Newman Taylor Baker, drums; Greg Wall, sax (tracks 2,3, and 4). Produced by Frank London. Recorded and mixed by Andy Taub at Brooklyn Recording in July, 2023. Cover photo by Anna London.
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ESPDISK 5071CD
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Creativity is theoretically infinite. Just as improvisors can play the same song every night and have it sound different every time, existing recordings can have their materials combined in different ways, re-mixed, re-ordered, re-everything'd. Some people prefer the comforting solidity of a single version, unchanging, but that is antithetical to the jazz spirit. The infinity of creativity is being explored in two upcoming projects by Thollem (McDonas). Worlds in a Life, Two is the second of two albums that Thollem created using samples from all of the six Thollem/Cline Trio albums as the primary sound sources (including double bass, piano, organ, electric guitar, drums, MIDI-accordion, and voice). The approach developed naturally out of the process of creating The Light Is Real with Nels and Terry Riley on Other Minds Records. In 2012 came Thollem and Nels' first trio collaboration was with William Parker. The following albums include the Radical Empathy Trio with Michael Wimberly, and with Pauline Oliveros (Roaratorio). Worlds in a Life, Two was recorded in real-time on a Wavestate, with no overdubs, in January and February 2024. This music is a celebration of the limitless palette of sounds and the infinite, known and unknown, revealing discoveries made through intensive explorations over two months. Personnel: Thollem (composer, Wavestate); Nels Cline (guitars); Pauline Oliveros (MIDI-accordion); William Parker (double bass); Terry Riley (vocals); Michael Wimberly (drums).
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ESPDISK 5085CD
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This group evolves in leaps and bounds. You've never heard a jazz piano trio sound like this album -- not even this band on its previous album, the much-praised World Construct. That said, there is a through line from the first Matthew Shipp Trio album, 1990's Circular Temple (ESPDISK 4082CD, 2023 reissue) to New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz. Says Shipp, "Yes, we went there with that type of title this time. To anyone who thought the trio had reached its apotheosis on World Construct, you are in for a surprise -- this is light years ahead of World Construct. Of course each CD is its own world and valuable for that, but I am in complete and utter shock at what I am listening to. New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz sounds completely thoroughly composed and yet completely spontaneously improvised at the same time. This is a major album in jazz history. Newman Taylor Baker is one of the most profound percussionists ever. Michael Bisio sounds like God's angel on this album. He has dedicated himself to working in my vision for years now and I think this might be the ultimate of how we can read each other and hook up. This is one of the greatest trio albums ever. While creating a whole new cosmos we manage to escape every cliché that exists in jazz and in avant jazz. This really might be the last trio CD because it really cannot get better than this."
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ESPDISK 5047CD
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Guillermo Gregorio has been exploring space and form and gesture in music for a very long time. In 1969, with composers Norberto Chavarri and Roque de Pedro, he cofounded the collective Movimiento Música Más, which for a while staged public interventions, performances, and happenings even as the political skies were darkening again. He finally left Argentina in 1985, living in Vienna, L.A., and Cologne through the end of that decade, before settling in Chicago for the next 25 years. Already in Vienna, he began his fertile relationship with the Hat Art label, which eventually put out half a dozen records under his name, plus other sessions playing the music of Anthony Braxton and Cornelius Cardew, as guest soloist with Ran Blake, and a piece he wrote commissioned by the Makrokosmos Quartet. The present record reflects a sort of pivot to his new home, New York, where Gregorio moved in 2015. For the trio that performed at Edgefest -- the festival's 22nd edition in 2018 focused on the Chicago connection -- he reached out to close associates from two decades earlier, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Carrie Biolo, neither of whom live there anymore either. That trio was the most productive and enduring group he ever played with, and their nuanced rapport, the fine weave of their sound, the mutual instincts, seem but a continuation without pause of their past work together. Chicago also proved highly receptive to the fruitful convergence of free jazz and twentieth-century European music that allowed him to flourish and become a recognized figure there in the nineties. Concurrently, by the time of the festival, Gregorio had been performing with Nicholas Jozwiak in different settings around Manhattan and Brooklyn, as they did at Downtown Music Gallery in 2020 just before the world locked down. DMG, Bruce Gallanter's friendly institution packed into a tiny space, has for decades seen fit not just to sell records but to host weekly concerts of improvised music and Gregorio has played there on many occasions since well before he left Chicago. On this late date, the trio was completed by one of his newest collaborators, Iván Barenboim, like Jozwiak a couple generations younger and like Gregorio a porteño (native of Buenos Aires).
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ESPDISK 4084CD
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Look at those players Alon Nechushtan brought together for this gig! The late, great Roy Campbell; reed masters Daniel Carter and Sabir Mateen; mayor of the NYC avant-jazz scene William Parker; versatile drummer Federico Ughi. Then listen: they all live up to their reputations. And then there's Nechushtan himself, born in Tel Aviv and long a thriving presence in New York as both composer and improviser. This concert happened at a time of considerable ferment on the NYC scene, with established virtuosi meeting the next generation -- often, as was the case this night, in Brooklyn and specifically Williamsburg venues, of which Zebulon was one of the greatest supporters of the improvisation scene documented so well in Cisco Bradley's recent book The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront.
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ESPDISK 5083CD
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ESP-Disk presents They Tried To Kill Me Yesterday. Frequently lyrical, sometimes hard-hitting, nostalgic for jazz and R&B, proud of African-American heroes, Paul r. Harding has been around, has seen and heard things he reflects on and refracts to us with vivid words. Based in upstate New York, he's joined by bassist Michael Bisio (Matthew Shipp Trio) and, on half the tracks, by percussionist Juma Sultan (who played with Jimi Hendrix).
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ESPDISK 4082LP
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LP version. It has become clear that Matthew Shipp is the most interesting and important jazz pianist of his generation, the most continually evolving and pushing forward. Now that he's in his sixties and something of an elder statesman of the art form, he's overdue for a retrospective look at his catalog, and to help make that happen, ESP-Disk' will be reissuing some of his great early work that's gone out of print. The 1990 trio recording Circular Temple (originally self-released on Quinton, then reissued in 1994 by Henry Rollins on his Infinite Zero label) is now reissued in 2023. Circular Temple has marked many firsts for Matthew Shipp: his first CD release, first piano trio album, first of many times on record with Parker and Dickey, first album to be reissued, and on ESP-Disk's reissue of it, first CD-only album to finally appear on vinyl and first album to be released by three different labels. And, more trivially, the first Shipp album that current ESP head/reissue producer Steve Holtje acquired, back when the only choices were that and a 1988 LP-only duo by Shipp and saxophonist Rob Brown on the Cadence label.
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ESPDISK 4082CD
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It has become clear that Matthew Shipp is the most interesting and important jazz pianist of his generation, the most continually evolving and pushing forward. Now that he's in his sixties and something of an elder statesman of the art form, he's overdue for a retrospective look at his catalog, and to help make that happen, ESP-Disk' will be reissuing some of his great early work that's gone out of print. The 1990 trio recording Circular Temple (originally self-released on Quinton, then reissued in 1994 by Henry Rollins on his Infinite Zero label) is now reissued in 2023. Circular Temple has marked many firsts for Matthew Shipp: his first CD release, first piano trio album, first of many times on record with Parker and Dickey, first album to be reissued, and on ESP-Disk's reissue of it, first CD-only album to finally appear on vinyl and first album to be released by three different labels. And, more trivially, the first Shipp album that current ESP head/reissue producer Steve Holtje acquired, back when the only choices were that and a 1988 LP-only duo by Shipp and saxophonist Rob Brown on the Cadence label.
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ESPDISK 5041CD
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There are some jazz musicians long known by cognoscenti for a mere handful of recordings: Dupree Bolton, Earl Anderza, Hasaan Ibn-Ali, Alan Shorter, Dewey Johnson. Add saxophonist Mark Reboul to that list. Before the release of this album, his discography consisted of four tracks on three albums on which he was a sideman. On Higher Primates' Environmental Impressions (GM, 1987), he plays sax on two of the percussion-heavy album's five tracks: a fragmentary track, and a sixteen-and-a-half-minute improvisation; he has a percussion cameo (playing waterphone) on Bill Gerhardt and Cotangent's Stained Glass (SteepleChase, 2007); and on Gaelen McKenna's self-released 2004 album Woodbach, a Reboul improvisation is manipulated and looped. ESP-Disk is a label with a history of albums by under-documented musicians (Byron Allen, Lowell Davidson, Marzette Watts, Nedley Elstak) and thus the perfect label to redress the situation. The other musicians in the trio heard here have been more prolific in the recording studio. Piket, daughter of a classical composer and a standards singer, got a degree from the New England Conservatory, studied with pianists Richie Beirach, Stanley Cowell, and Fred Hersch, and was a finalist in the Thelonious Monk BMI Composers Competition. She has a baker's dozen albums as a leader, a smattering of collaborative projects, and work as a sideperson stretching back to a 1995 Lionel Hampton album. Mintz is Piket's husband (they married well after this recording was made). Three years ago, she made a solo piano recording of an entire CD's worth of his compositions. He also has a fascinating bio: already a gigging musician at the age of fifteen, and in his twenties recorded with Lee Konitz Nonet, Perry Robinson, and Gloria Gaynor, among others; during a period living in Los Angeles, he worked with an equally eclectic range of musicians, from Vinny Golia to Mose Allison to the Merv Griffin Show band. The style is free improvisation, but a quieter and more subtle form of free jazz than ESP is famous for. Reboul is a unique player, and that's why ESP considers this an important release that adds to fans' knowledge of the NYC free scene.
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ESPDISK 5062CD
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The most well-informed aficionados of NYC's jazz avant-garde speak of pianist John Blum with reverential respect, yet his discography is shockingly small for someone with a three-decade career: five albums as a leader, four as a sideman. Blum studied piano with seminal avant-gardist Cecil Taylor and ambidextrous master Borah Bergman, and it shows, yet his style at its most intense is more thickly textured than even theirs, and fully individualistic. Blum's left hand recalls James P. Johnson: energy, power, rock-solid rhythm driver of the improvisation's engine. And speaking of engines, some of Jimmy Yancey's locomotive motion is there as well. Blum is actually a very melodic player, but the melodies are short and fast and may not be repeated more than once, so that's not the quality that the average listener might take away from the experience. Nonetheless, in a 20-minute solo improvisation, he creates enough catchy motivic material that a dozen or more songs could be woven from it. Another of Blum's teachers was Milford Graves; they share the sense of music as a journey to a higher understanding and a life-altering and life-enhancing practice. Blum looks more like an athlete than a musician, but then, the way he plays piano is athletic and requires a lot of muscle and stamina. The power of the concert performance on this album (performed collaboratively with video) is a revelation. "Explosive Pianism!" --Nate Chinen, New York Times
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ESPDISK 5082CD
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Allen Lowe writes: "America: The Rough Cut is my statement not only on American music and American song, but also my commentary on the way American musicians of all styles handle that old-time music and those old song forms . . . The old things -- not just the blues, but gospel music and pre-blues shouts and language, plus hillbilly/minstrel song and medicine show irony -- reflect a disinterest in the polite trappings of (primarily but not only white) society, an implicit rejection of basic tonal, sonic, and harmonic rules. 'Noise' has, over a long time, come to be an accepted creative strategy for many musicians, with diminishing results. What is missing is...funk? Maybe, but not in that slick, drum machine, '80s way (the 1950s and 1960s, not to mention the 1920s, are another matter). What is missing is the funk from Funky Butt Hall of New Orleans, the sweat of the churchgoing gyrations of white and black Holy Rollers and the eccentric movements and sounds of attendants of the Pentecostal Church; not to mention the religious screams of white and black folk in the throes of post-rational bursts of tongues and trembling worship; or the ecstatic eternal protest of the Church of God in Christ . . . I live in a musical world (mostly in my head) in which the sacred and the profane are two sides of the same coin, and in which the blues is more effect than cause. As for most revivalists and folkies, well, they tend to sound (like most but not only jazz musicians) overqualified; there are some very satisfying exceptions to these rules, and I have tried to reflect that in America: The Rough Cut. So here we have gospel formulations ('Damned Nation'), pre-blues ruminations ('Full Moon Moan'), a little bit of Hank Williams-directed honky tonk ('Cheatin' My Heart'), heavy metal ('Metallic Taste', 'Blues in Shreds'), 'Poor Mourner's Serenade' (hail, hail Jelly Roll Morton), 'Hymn for Her' (to my savior, and wife, Helen); a little bit of my own statement on the fallibility of free jazz, dedicated to a certain guitar player who shall remain nameless ('Blues for Unprepared Guitarist') in which, overdubbed on guitar, I make a personal appeal for a MacArthur, while daily sitting by the door, waiting for that envelope. There's also 'Old Country Rag,' an evocation of the old-time hillbilly rag; 'Eh Death,' a variation on an old fear; 'It's the End,' a bit of autobiography; 'Cold was the Night, Dark Was the Ground" (and I was the first, back in the 1990s, to reference Blind Willie Johnson in a jazz way; here is my update); and 'At a Baptist Meeting,' recorded in concert some years ago with the late, great, grievously missed Roswell Rudd.
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3CD
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ESPDISK 5080CD
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Allen Lowe writes: "In the Dark is a commemoration (sic) of the worst time of my life -- a period during which, having been operated on to remove a cancerous tumor in my sinus, I slept for only brief periods of time. Sometimes I made it as long as two hours continuously, but most often I dozed off for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe an hour -- encamped as I was on my couch, trying not to wake my wife as I wandered in the dark contemplating the long night ahead. Sometimes I turned the television set on and slept fitfully to the sound of the late news shows. Most often I slept most peacefully at about 5 am, only to be awakened an hour or two later by the light that flooded my living room, even with the curtains closed. I could barely breathe through my nose, or any other place; my face had been carved up by the surgeons who saved my life, and I sometimes did mad circles in the dark to see if I could exercise and avoid collisions with inanimate objects like chairs, doors, stairways, tables, etc. I have never before (or since) felt that desperate about anything. For a little while, in the late stages, I was able to breathe better, but then something called neuropathy set in, as what felt like a low-level electric current seething through my left foot. So -- at this point I would go to bed at 11PM, and at 1AM, like clockwork, that left foot began to vibrate, which it would continue to do for five or six hours, leaving me, at 6 or 7AM, with the very temporary relief of sleep -- all the while trying to ignore the sunlight that tormented me like a celestial alarm clock that never stopped ringing. At some point during this ordeal, I started composing again. To my surprise -- because I felt blank and near-death -- the music poured out of me, and the result is this recording (and its ESP companion, America: The Rough Cut (ESPDISK 5082CD)). I don't why it all happened like this, but I am reasonably sure that I will never be this prolific again, that I will never again produce this much good music this quickly. The music is sometimes structured, sometimes free-improvised, sometimes blues and American song form; Ken Peplowski is let loose to play free jazz on some tracks; Aaron Johnson shows himself to be one of the best and most creative saxophonists playing today; Lewis Porter is a phenomenal pianist, adept at all forms and musical structures. Anthony Braxton has said 'Allen Lowe is the tradition,' and I am honored to accept his recognition."
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ESPDISK 5058LP
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Normal Street is another salvo in ESP-Disk's drive to revive weird rock! Writer/musician/film maker Chris Shields says: "Near the DIY venue, cooperative, and punk/freak haven, The Firehouse, in Worcester, Mass, there's a street ironically named 'Normal St.' I was lucky enough to be playing a gig with Painted Faces there a few years back. Driving up the steep, labyrinthine roads we spotted the green sign, had a laugh owing to some solid riffing by all present, and then, moved on. The gig was good, the people great, and the memories, the stuff that makes time on earth meaningful. Little did I know Normal Street would return. Considering David Drucker's body of work and his unique brand of free form expression and clever pastiche, I shouldn't have been surprised. When you listen to Painted Faces what you're hearing is a mind at work. When Drucker begins to write and record, every dumb sign, bad horror movie, seemingly innocuous turn of phrase, petty embarrassment, transcendent joke, and musical influence are drawn together like iron filings to a magnet. What results is a document of a particular point in time for the artist. There are infectiously haunting hooks and raw atonal passages, cheap synths (and as time goes on less cheap ones), simple but effective chords, ramshackle percussion (a plastic toy maraca passed among audience members that refuses to die), and a host of other elements that all add up to something very special and deeply personal. It's a portrait of the artist as a freak . . . Normal Street is a fractured collection of songs, sounds, ideas, sometimes brief and other times delicately sustained; its stream of consciousness mischievousness bringing to mind Zappa and the Mothers filtered through the angst of bedroom pop and tape label minimalism. Many artists hope to embody Drucker's "Outback Steakhouse" approach ("No rules. Just right") but few have achieved such consistently fun results..."
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ESPDISK 5081CD
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Bára Gísladóttir is an Icelandic composer and double bassist based in Copenhagen. She is an active performer and regularly plays her own music, mostly solo or with her long-time collaborator Skúli Sverrisson. Additionally, she is the double bassist of Elja Ensemble. Occasionally, she performs as a soloist with ensembles or orchestras, most recently in her own double bass concert, "Hringla," with the Copenhagen Philharmonic. Every sound on SILVA is of the double bass, processed to various degrees (with MAX/Live) and layered into a mass of noise. Gísladóttir describes SILVA as "a work for processed double bass built on the idea of a downward growing forest, living its own secret life of underground raves and meditative cohesiveness." She continues: "I like to think of different movement and direction in the musical form and was intrigued by the thought of something that would otherwise naturally grow upwards, in reach for light and surrounded by air, rather being drawn in the opposite direction where darkness and solid form serve as the source of gleaming luminosity and breezy surroundings. Both in my compositional and instrumentalist work, in every nook and cranny I've been driven to dig as deep as I've been able, with SILVA perhaps quite literally so. Although growing up in classical music and predominantly working and living in an environment of classical contemporary/avant-garde music, I've been very much into other genres as well; alternative, experimental, heavy metal, noise, drone, techno, and electronica, and I believe SILVA is the byproduct of all of that." SILVA is a joint release by Sono Luminus and ESP Disk'. Personnel: Bára Gísladóttir - double bass, effects, composition.
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ESPDISK 1023LP
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Limited restock; reissue, originally released on ESP Disk' in 1966. Frank "The Reverend" Wright was one of the most powerful saxophonists to pick up on Albert Ayler's freedom and ferocious playing. Born in Mississippi and raised in Memphis, TN and then Cleveland, OH, he started in music as a bassist in blues bands but switched to tenor sax under the influence of his Cleveland friend Albert Ayler. Wright's "energy music" approach to tenor saxophone was influenced by Ayler but at the time in the '60s Wright's intensity was unmatched and utterly distinctive. He followed Ayler to New York City, arriving in 1964 and fitting into the scene right away John Coltrane offered him a spot on his album Ascension in early 1965, though Wright demurred. ESP Disk' owner Bernard Stollman signed Wright on the spot upon hearing him sit in with Coltrane, and on November 11, 1965, Wright went into a New York studio to record his debut album, considered a free jazz classic. Wright's influence can be traced down to Charles Gayle, Sabir Mateen, and other hard-blowing tenormen, but even so, he remains unique. Personnel: Frank Wright - tenor saxophone; Henry Grimes - bass; Tom Price - drums. "Wright was throwing together ideas in a spirit of jubilation." --Clifford Allen, All About Jazz "... easily recommended to open-eared listeners who enjoy hearing fiery sound explorations." --Scott Yanow, AllMusic
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ESPDISK 1053LP
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Reissue, originally released in 1967. Frank Wright returned to the studio in May 1967 to make his second album using a quintet of players little-known at the time but now legends to free-jazz cognoscenti. Trumpeter Jacques Coursil, who almost made an album for ESP-Disk' himself, went on to the greatest fame of the players besides Wright; alto saxophonist Arthur Jones was not recorded nearly as often as his talents deserved; Steve Tintweis's stint playing with Albert Ayler raised the young bassist's profile; Muhammad Ali was Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali's brother. Together they raise the roof on a free-jazz marathon that still stands as Wright's magnum opus. "Your Prayer finds Wright refining the bag his solos come from, yet maintaining a firm hold on the ecstatic free-blues shout that makes up most of his solo language... Your Prayer is a rather lengthy slab of high-energy grit, but its unified forward and upward motion make for a firmly rooted sonic liberation." --Clifford Allen, All About Jazz "Rather intense at times, these emotional performances... still sound groundbreaking three decades later." --Scott Yanow, All Music Personnel: Frank Wright - tenor saxophone; Arthur Jones - alto saxophone; Jacques Coursil - trumpet; Steve Tintweis - bass; Muhammad Ali - drums.
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