t the beginning of the 1960s, at the Berklee College of Music, Byard Lancaster met some feisty friends: Sonny Sharrock, Dave Burrell and Ted Daniel. It is easy to see why he rapidly became involved in free jazz. Once he was settled in New York, he appeared on Sunny Murray Quintet, recorded under the leadership of the drum crazy colleague of Albert Ayler. In 1968, the saxophonist and flutist recorded his first album under his own name: It’s Not Up To Us. The following year he came to Paris in the wake of… Sunny Murray. He would come back to France in 1971 (again with Murray) and in 1973 (without Murray for a change). This is when he met Jef Gilson, the pianist and producer who encouraged him to record under his own name again. On Palm Records (Gilson’s label), he would release four albums: Us, Mother Africa, Exactement and Funny Funky Rib Crib. A few months after recording “Us”, Lancaster recorded “Mother Africa” along with Clint Jackson III, a trumpeter, partner of Khan Jamal or Noah Howard on other recordings. On march 8th, 1974, Lancaster and Jackson headed up a group composed of Jean-François Catoire (electric and double bass), Keno Speller (percussion) and Jonathan Dickinson (drums). Together, they create an immediate impression. From the first seconds of “We The Blessed”, they develop a free jazz which rapidly abandons any virulence under the effect of blues and soul based interventions. When Gilson’s composition “Mother Africa” begins, listeners are transported into the studio, listening to the musicians setting up: chatting and joking… Then comes the melody: a dozen or so notes of a repeated theme which is accelerated and deformed according to their whims… The jazz played by the association Byard Lancaster / Clint Jackson III is rare: creative AND recreational. “We the blessed”, is apt listening to this again today! This CD edition contains a bonus track, the magnificent “Love Always” that was originally released on the fourth (and last) volume of the Jef Gilson Anthology series released in 1975. Recorded on 8th March 1974, it is a beautiful 15-minute-long modal jazz piece. Four notes from the bass (the relentless Jean-François Catoire, who makes up the rhythm section alongside drummer Jonathan Dickinson and percussionist Keno Speller), and the group is up and running! On piano, Gilson shows the subtle tact of a sideman, leaving the lions’ share of the place to the horns. This allows us to hear the trumpet of Clint Jackson III and the alto (which sometimes sounds almost flute-like) of Byard Lancaster each staking their claim in a long hallucinatory march which moves from moments of direct exaltation to profoundly sensitive collective playing. 

At the beginning of the 1960s, at the Berklee College of Music, Byard Lancaster met some feisty friends: Sonny Sharrock, Dave Burrell and Ted Daniel. It is easy to see why he rapidly became involved in free jazz. Once he was settled in New York, he appeared on Sunny Murray Quintet, recorded under the leadership of the drum crazy colleague of Albert Ayler. In 1968, the saxophonist and flutist recorded his first album under his own name: It’s Not Up To Us. The following year he came to Paris in the wake of… Sunny Murray. He would come back to France in 1971 (again with Murray) and in 1973 (without Murray for a change). This is when he met Jef Gilson, the pianist and producer who encouraged him to record under his own name again. On Palm Records (Gilson’s label), he would release four albums: Us, Mother Africa, Exactement and Funny Funky Rib Crib. “Funny Funky Rib Crib” is an unforgettable recording (made up of several sessions dating from the middle of 1974) of creative jazz overwhelmed by funk and soul. If Lancaster had already made successful albums in the same genre – notably New Horizons, under the name Sounds Of Liberation which he co-led with Khan Jamal –, this one is an homage to James Brown and Sammy Davis enjoying the company of a host of guests including François Tusques (electric piano), Clint Jackson III (trumpet), François Nyombo (guitar), Joseph Traindl (trombone)… Funny Funky Rib Crib’s cover is a three-quarter profile portrait of the saxophonist (who can also be heard on flute, piano and even vocals), however, on the record, it is the whole group, inspired and frenetic, that tests the melodies of “Just Test”, “Dogtown” or “Rib Crib” – the two versions of which display leader Lancaster’s art of nuance. On both sides of the album, the group also moves into a calmer groove, infused by blues and soul, “Work And Pray” and “Loving Kindness” are meditative tracks where listeners can lay back and relax before asking for more: Funny Funky Rib Crib!!!   

At the beginning of the 1960s, at the Berklee College of Music, Byard Lancaster met some feisty friends: Sonny Sharrock, Dave Burrell and Ted Daniel. It is easy to see why he rapidly became involved in free jazz. Once he was settled in New York, he appeared on Sunny Murray Quintet, recorded under the leadership of the drum crazy colleague of Albert Ayler. In 1968, the saxophonist and flutist recorded his first album under his own name: It’s Not Up To Us. The following year he came to Paris in the wake of… Sunny Murray. He would come back to France in 1971 (again with Murray) and in 1973 (without Murray for a change). This is when he met Jef Gilson, the pianist and producer who encouraged him to record under his own name again. On Palm Records (Gilson’s label), he would release four albums: Us, Mother Africa, Exactement and Funny Funky Rib Crib. “Us”, the first of the four records was recorded on November 24th, 1973 with Sylvin Marc on electric bass (a Fender… Lancaster?) and the evergreen Steve McCall on drums. On the album, the trio works from the John Coltrane model; free jazz shook up by the timely contributions of the bassist, followed by a mesmerizing atmospheric music. Then, Lancaster delivers a sinuous solo path, which is a reminder of his unique tone. On the album’s companion single, the trio launches into great black music of a different genre which would lead the clairvoyant François Tusques to claim that Byard Lancaster is an “authentic representative of soul/free jazz”, to sum up this is Great Black Music! 

Monumental and blistering X5 CD box via Fönstret - the publishing arm of John Chantler’s, Stockholm based Edition festival - capturin  أحمد [Ahmed] - the (not so) best kept secret in the landscape of contemporary free improvistation, over the course of five consecutive nights during the summer of 2022. [Ahmed] is the quartet of Pat Thomas (piano), Joel Grip (double bass), Antonin Gerbal (drums) and Seymour Wright (alto saxophone). Together, the group re-arrange and re-imagine in real time the music of composer, bassist and oud player Ahmed Abdul-Malik (1927-1993). Listening, learning. In the summer of 2022 they played five nights in a row at the fifth edition festival for other music. Fylkingen sweltering under a rare Stockholm heatwave. A different tune each night. Nights on Saturn Oud Blues African Bossa Nova Rooh (The Soul) El Haris (Anxious) Five discs in a big box. Giant Beauty. Wrapped in excavated photographic detail from Stockholm’s legendary Golden Circle club. “Every night the quartet brings a new song, takes it apart, puts it back together again, follows the music on unknown paths, sometimes back, sometimes not, but always remains in motion, flowing like a river in flood.” — Silvia Tarozzi [Ahmed] have played some of the tunes on Giant Beauty multiple times before, and revisit them here, ‘versioning’. Antonin Gerbal kicks things straight into high gear with the propulsive snap of Nights on Saturn’s opening beat (a then recent, now out of print LP on Astral Spirits) and they close out on the fifth day with El Haris (Anxious), the tune they played and recorded at their first public performance in a rural Swedish barn for Joel Grip’s Hagen-fest in 2016 (and later released as the now out of print LP New Jazz Imagination on Umlaut). The second night they played Oud Blues. A tune they’d done just the one time before but under radically different circumstances — a heaving, 600 strong dancefloor for Glasgow’s spirited Counterflows festival. That recording is also coming out now on a double LP via Astral Spirits as Wood Blues — but here they trade the raucous, ragged energy there for something more chiselled and focussed. Traces linger (a perfume) of the spare concentration in Éliane Radigue and Magnus Granberg’s music heard earlier that night. We also hear two new tunes that appear on record for the first time — the vibrant swing of African Bossa Nova giving way to the zoned in drone of Rooh (The Soul) the following night. Rooh opens with Joel Grip’s bass channelling cellist Abdul Wadud who died the same week and the performance is dedicated to him. No discussion. No plan. No solos. The end goal for [Ahmed] is an open, ongoing learning. An ongoing excavation of the past and re-imagination of a future music. It’s jazz but also not (only) jazz, forged through a deep commitment to a variety of musical methods and an appreciation of how the context of the music’s making informs, shapes and becomes what it is. It always comes back to time and space. The five-night residency as idea, history and lived reality provides further cause for investigation, food for thought and prompts for action. You can read Seymour Wright talking through these implications in the extended interview with Edition festival director John Chantler in the accompanying book. The images that appear on the outer covers of the box, discs and book are details of photographs taken at the Golden Circle, Stockholm in the mid 1960s: the outer cover by Christer Landergren, and the others by Leif Wigh during a Dexter Gordon residency in 1965. Looking back into these images of Stockholm-space that the music [Ahmed] made at Fylkingen seemed rooted or seeded in, we discovered that, fascinatingly, plants — rubber (Ficus elastica) and Swiss-cheese (Monstera deliciosa) — were resident in the Golden Circle’s very modern concrete-curtained-glass-and-metal space. They lived on-stage and in-audience as the music took place and grew across nights, days and weeks around, and about them. This unusual and unexpected (to us) organic, holistic musical, architectural, botanical, volatile balance seems to resonate with something that Abdul-Malik told Bill Coss in a 1963 interview for Downbeat: Really, a musician should be in excellent condition, physically, mentally, professionally and scientifically […] I have studied all the elements: animals, insects, plants, space - the universe - old and new jazz but most importantly the Creator. How can you play beauty without knowing what beauty is, what it really is? Understanding the Creator leads to understanding the creations, and better understanding of what you play comes from this. How can you understand fully without knowing the start, the continuation, and the ending? 

X-Ray Hex Tet = Seymour Wright / Crystabel Riley / Edward George / Pat Thomas / Paul Abbott / Billy Steiger Reading Group is proud to present the debut album of a new ensemble of some of the most adventurous artists in and around London’s contemporary music scene. X-Ray Hex Tet is the confluence of Seymour Wright (alto saxophone), Crystabel Riley (drums), Edward George (words and recordings), Pat Thomas (piano and electronics), Paul Abbott (real and imaginary drums), and Billy Steiger (celeste and violin). Wright and Abbott, elsewhere as XT, have developed a private language in their uncompromising explorations of the “histories and logics of the saxophone and drum kit.” Wright and Thomas make up half of the extraordinary research ensemble [Ahmed], named after legendary oudist and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik. ([Ahmed]’s Giant Beauty is undoubtedly one of the best releases of 2024). Here, the music is transformed through the quasi-narrative presence of Edward George, the seminal scholar of dub and founding member of the great Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998). Artist and multi-instrumentalist Billy Steiger provides subtle textural sway beneath the chaos on the violin, as well as eerily unaffected punctuation on celeste, shimmering in the corners as if in the postapocalyptic final moments of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony. The percussive core of the group is carried by Crystabel Riley, frequent collaborator with Wright and formerly of the power noise trio Maria and the Mirrors. Her drums move through the storm with geological heft, rolling like a small avalanche. From the sound of this album, recorded live at the Taktlos Festival in Zurich in 2023, the music of X-Ray Hex Tet appears well-nigh impossible to represent. After ascending to its vertiginous heights, though, what comes to mind is a small undercanon of music about history: not in any facile programmatic way, but in its very logic, on the level of form. (Think of Matana Roberts’s Coin Coin cycle, Iannis Xenakis’s Persepolis, Morton Feldman’s Coptic Light.) X-Ray Hex Tet intends towards totality, as a striving, as a gravitational pull. Our feet are swept up in Riley’s cascading drums and we reach out for some resolution to ground us but grasp only shards of alto saxophone, a cacophonous web of samples, gossamer string textures, and electronic whirrs. George’s voice emerges out of this thicket and hovers above it, intoning the names of—or reappearing as—those who have most recently represented the violent threshold of history. From this angle we are both under the avalanche and being blown away from it like a composite recording angel of history: there is no place outside the storm from which to reflect upon it. 

Beautifully produced X4CD Box set / First ever release dedicated to seminal British experiental ensemble Intermodulation via Paradigm Discs Having releasing a box set of works by Gentle Fire it felt necessary to do the same with Intermodulation and thus complete the other half of this missing chapter in British experimental music. Intermodulation have a quite different line up to Gentle Fire, most notably with Peter’s percussion, Robin on bassoon and soprano sax, and the shared use of VCS3’s and electric keyboards. Nonetheless both groups covered similar ground, appeared at the same European festivals, travelled together with Stockhausen to Iran, and they were generally concerned with a similar repertoire of experimental scores. Although Intermodulation released no records during their existence (and Gentle Fire only the one LP), both groups did appear side by side on the recording of Stockhausen’s Sternklang. This 4CD set aims to cover a wide range of their work. CD1 contains the entirety of their 1971 concert at Ely Cathedral (a 6 minute excerpt of which appeared on the 2CD ‘Not Necessarily English Music’ compiled by David Toop). CD2 focuses on their BBC recordings including excerpts from 2 Prom performances, one of which is the famous 1970 Prom which had Soft Machine taking the stage in the second half. CD3 features material held in the archives of 3 German radio stations and the fourth disc consists of one work; World Music by Tim Souster, the 72 minute opus written for the four players plus tape. In summary, we hear Intermodulation play 5 Stockhausen pieces (4 of which are realisations of his intuitive text pieces), 2 Terry Riley pieces and one by Cardew. They also play 2 compositions by Tim and one by Roger as well performing 2 group improvisations. The set comes with a 48 page booklet detailing the groups history. This is a numbered edition of 500. 

You may have heard of Gentle Fire, but could be forgiven for not knowing much about them. They were a 6, then 5 member group of composers/improvisers/performers based in London and Yorkshire. Most of the writings that cover the pioneers of experimental, electronic and improvised music have given them scant attention. In addition to this, their recorded output is slim, the main item being a long out of print LP (for EMI Electrola), featuring their interpretations of graphic scores by Cage, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff. Despite recordings for BBC Radio 3 and many German radio stations, it seems extraordinary that there were no other substantial releases of their repertoire, or any of the 6 Group Compositions they created. Most of the existing Gentle Fire archive was kept privately by Hugh Davies. After Hugh died in 2005 it was shared between various institutions. This release owes much to Hugh’s meticulous record keeping as well as the archives at the British Library and Special Collections at Goldsmiths, University of London. Listening sessions at the British Library were a revelation, it was like discovering a missing link in the evolution of experimental music, but above all it sounded so undated and fresh. The release is divided into 3 sections. The first CD, recorded between 1970 and 1971 contains 4 studio and 2 concert recordings of graphic and text scores: 2 parts of Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen, and one piece each by Earle Brown, John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi and Christian Wolff. Gentle Fire were active between 1968 and 1974 and were especially active during the early 70s, appearing at numerous European avant garde festivals, playing their own Group Compositions and a wide variety of experimental scores. They even ended up in Iran playing in Stockhausen’s Sternklang, and improvising at dawn at Hafez’s tomb. The text and graphic scores that they were innately drawn towards have large elements of interpretive freedom to them, where the composer provides a skeleton and steps back allowing the players to give it flesh. They were in regular communication with the composers of these piece, so it’s no surprise that their interpretations were sought after by concert organisers and composers alike. There are very few examples of groups working at this time with direct contact to the composers, which makes these recordings especially precious. CD2 and 3 focus on their own works, CD2 dates from 1973 and was recorded during a 2 day residency at Radio Bremen. The 5 pieces on this disc cover a wide variety of styles and include a 23 minute version of Group Composition VI which is their only text based piece and uses processed and filtered speech. CD3 is a recording of their appearance at ICES 72, a legendary festival that took place at the Roundhouse in London. Over the course of 2 chaotic weeks a vast number of the world’s experimental musicians took to the stage. Miraculously the whole of the Gentle Fire concert has been preserved. It consists of a performance of their Group Composition IV, centred around a large metal sculpture that all members of the group could play at the same time. The piece actually had its première the previous year on the original pyramid stage at the first Glastonbury Fair. There are several photos of the event included in the booklet that accompanies the CDs. At last it is possible to assess the importance of this group’s work, both their own work and their interpretations of scores, and to give them their proper place in the history of live experimental/electronic music as well as indeterminate and intuitive composition. Released in an edition of 500 with a numbered 48 page booklet.

“Ideas about exploratory behavior, Neuro Music and Transcultural Music have been the basis for many of my works over the last 20 years. Exploratorium is an album of some of those works and a space of exploration. Indeed, all the works on this album are examples of Neuro Music, which is the fundamental connection point across these compositions.” 
— Gene Coleman, from the CD bookletGene Coleman is a composer, musician and video director, who has created over 70 works for various instrumentation and media. Central to his work is the inventive use of sound, image and time, and the desire to create experiences that expand our understanding of the world. Since 2001 he has explored the global transformation of culture and music's relationship with video, science and architecture.Gene has been developing a series of works around concepts of Neuro Music and Transcultural Music, some of which are collected for the first time on Exploratorium, which is also the first album exclusively dedicated to Gene’s compositions.Gene defines Neuro Music as “an area of research and creation based on the study and application of models and concepts from Auditory Neuroscience, as a form of musical composition. … The Neuro compositional methods I have developed are modeled on the auditory pathway of the brain … including the three mechanical stages of hearing (outer, middle and inner ear functions), the auditory nerves and the various stages of auditory information processing, ending in the neocortex and so-called frontal networks.”Neuro Music concepts are explored across various works on the album, including string quartet, and pieces which combine voice, electronics, shamisen and/or ensemble.Gene defines Transcultural Music as “an area of research and composition based on the integration of music from different cultures and traditions”, and has been exploring how musical styles and traditions might meet and combine in new ways for over 20 years. Models of Neuro and Transcultural Musics have been combined in the longest piece on the album, Across Time (Transonic Symphony #1), which explores new possibilities for what a symphony can be in the 21st century and features musicians from many different places and traditions. The musicians featured on the album:-- RITORNO: The Hemmi Quartet.-- Kokhlos I: Nicholas Isherwood, Adam Vidiksis.-- Kokhlos IV: CumTempora Ensemble (coordinated by Virginia Guidi), Adam Vidiksis.-- Vidrone: Sansuzu Tsuruzawa, Toshimaru Nakamura.-- Across Time (Transonic Symphony #1): Transonic Orchestra, Directed by Gene Coleman: Shinjoo Cho, Ko Ishikawa, Sansuzu Tsuruzawa, Thomas Kraines, Naoko Kikuchi, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M., Jonah Rosenberg, Yasutaka Hemmi, Marino Nagira, Yuta Tsubonouchi, Yasunori Onishi, Marcus Weiss, Jean-Michel Goury, Pierre-Stephane Meuge, Serge Bertocchi, Aya Motohashi, Sasamoto Takeshi.The album also foregrounds Gene’s integration of material from the writer Lance Olsen’s novel Dreamlives of Debris.This is Gene’s second album on the False Walls label: Storobo Imp., a set of improvisations with Uchihashi Kazuhisa, was released in 2004. --- Mastering by Stephan MathieuProduced by CJ Mitchell and Gene ColemanDesign by David Caines 6-panel gatefold sleeve, with 24 page booklet and CD sleeveBooklet includes sleeve notes by Gene ColemanAll Compositions, 2023 Gene Coleman / Lontano Music (ASCAP)

Black Truffle is thrilled to present “Reservoir 1: Preservation,” a gorgeous new piece by American composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies. Sarah's work explores a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. The “Reservoirs” are a series of three one-hour pieces based on the relationship between the conscious and unconscious human mind. Jung and Freud described the unconscious mind as a reservoir, a repository for memories that we don’t readily need access to, yet are kept forever somewhere in our minds. Specifically, Freud believed that one function of the unconscious mind is to store traumatic memories, filed away so that we don’t have to confront them every day. The conscious mind has no direct access to the unconscious, yet the unconscious is a constant yet mysterious presence in our lives. “Reservoir 1: Preservation” is scored for piano and three percussionists, performed by Phillip Bush and Meridian, the long-running experiment in percussion, improvisation, and interpersonal relationships that includes Tim Feeney, Sarah Hennies, and Greg Stuart. In “Preservation” the piano functions as a constant, pervasive, but almost subliminal murmur amid the percussion playing that cycles through a variety of timbral and gestural areas, including gentle droning, frenetic scraping, and bricks violently dropped into metal buckets. The percussion group never interacts with or responds to the piano, while the piano subtly absorbs aspects of the trio. “Preservation” was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jeff Francis at the University of South Carolina and performed by Meridian: Tim Feeney, Sarah Hennies, Greg Stuart (percussion), and Phillip Bush (piano). Released in a CD digipak with design by Lasse Marhaug. Cover photo from Abby Grace Drake’s photo series, “Shopping Carts of Southside Ithaca. 

Please note this edition is in FrenchTwo revenant stories by Léon Bloy, with music by Nurse With Wound. Léon Bloy (1846-1917) was a French novelist and pamphleteer, friend and disciple of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, close to Paul Bourget, François Coppée, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Jean Richepin, and famous for his partly autobiographical novel "Le Désespéré". A British music project formed in 1978 by Steven Stapleton, John Fothergill and Heman Pathak, Nurse With Wound (now Stapleton's variable geometry project) is an essential figure of English experimental and industrial music since the early 80's. With more than 150 releases, alone or with other musicians, Stapleton has swept widely different musical styles, from industrial music to mambo, through electronics, improvisation, electroacoustics, with a lot of humor.

Dorothy Iannone tells her Fluxus Story in a Berlin recording from 1979. “There, Maciunas and I looked deeply but impassively into each other's eyes, not knowing then that we would meet again on these pages. Perhaps he was thinking, ‘Who is this woman?'. Perhaps it might even have amused him, somewhere far back in his mind, to know that I am she who is the Fluxus woman artist who is not the Fluxus woman artist.”Dorothy Iannone Limited edition of 270 copies.   For more than six decades, American artist Dorothy Iannone (1933, Boston–2022, Berlin) attempted to represent ecstatic love, the union of gender, feeling, and pleasure. Today her oeuvre, which encompasses painting, drawing, collage, video, sculpture, objects, and artist's books, is widely recognized as one of the most provocative and fruitful bodies of work in recent decades in terms of the liberalization of female sexuality, and political and feminist issues. As Fluxus artist Robert Filliou declared as early as in 1972, "She is a freedom fighter, and a forceful and dedicated artist, skillfully blending imagery and text, beauty and truth. Her aim is no less than human liberation." A narrative element fed with personal mythologies, experiences, feelings, and relationships runs through all of her work, unified by her distinctive colorful, explicit, and comic book style.Active from the 1960s to the early 2020s, her work has been recently exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2022); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); the Serpentine Pavilion, London (2018); the Swiss Cultural Center, Paris (2016); MAMCO, Geneva (2017); the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunt, Zurich, and the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2014); the New Museum, New York (2009).

Katalyst Entertainment presents Kabalaba, a live album by the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1974 and originally released on their AECO label in 1978. It features performances by Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Malachi Favors Maghostut, and Don Moye along with Muhal Richard Abrams.

Drums – Han Bennink Piano, Electronics [Toy Electronics] – Steve Beresford   Tracks 1 & 4: recorded 24 February 2000 live at Mahogany Hall, Edam Tracks 2 & 3: recorded 17 February 2000 live at Bimhuis, Amsterdam  

Bass Mamer Percussion Erik Recorded Zhang Dong

Constellazione Seconda is the follower of  the Lombardi 1978 "Costellazione" a piano sound exploration based upon a map of sky constellation, planned as the first step of a large work focused on the exposition and 'performance' of constellations maps, planetaria and maps of the heavens. This new work breaks up into 21 short piano movements, concentrating on incredibly short staccato notes that sting violently between fractured harmonics leaving plenty of momentum-puncturing silences to really heighten the sense of disorientation, as well as two long (over 20 minutes) piano excursions

Mutual Aid Has A History It points to the concept of community action and the human drive to provide succor to our fellow humans. Mutual aid is the primary ethic of an anarchistic utopia in which each knows what they have, is honest about what they need, and is prepared to give and receive accordingly. Every human want is met by a commensurate surplus and all are lifted equally above suffering. The music on this disc is, to a degree, about this political conception of mutual aid history but, rather than celebrating its primary act of what to give, it concentrates on the decision of how to give it. It asks the musicians to take stock of their gifts and to ask themselves, in each moment, how their use of that gift will affect the community (ensemble) of which they are currently a member. Will their addition provide: 1. A refined musical gesture that simply makes the group sound better 2. A raw idea that opens new sets of possibilities for the other musicians, or 3. The inspiration to others of making the difficult, selfless musical choice. This set of eight ensemble concertos sprouts from a compositional system that asks musicians to question what they add to the ensemble as human beings first and musicians second. Rather than the traditional aim of faithfully reproducing a score through its mastery, the members of the ensemble are prompted to make decisions that purposely force the music away from facsimile and toward a spontaneity that may feel awkward and uncomfortable. Each supports each in the search for something new and interesting; a music that is not only greater than the compositional whole, but has the potential to recast the way we think about the balance of virtuosity and improvisational spirit in our practice. After all, if we, as an ensemble can enjoy jumping off musical cliffs together within the relative safety of this compositional system, then what’s to stop us from trying to find that same exhilaration in the other music we make?    Nate Wooley - Trumpet Ingrid Laubrock - Sax Joshua Modney - Violin Mariel Roberts - Cello Sylvie Courvoisier - Piano Cory Smythe - Piano Matt Moran - Vibraphone Russell Greenberg - Vibraphone and Percussion

Alto Saxophone – John Zorn Artwork, Design – Karen Brookman Bass – Paul Rogers (2) Electronics, Keyboards – Pat Thomas Guitar – Buckethead, Derek Bailey Percussion – Paul Lovens Photography By – Martin L McGain Post Production – John Hadden Producer – Derek Bailey Recorded By – Matt Saunders, Paul Wilson (4) Trombone – Yves Robert Violin – Alexander Balanescu Voice – Vanessa Mackness Company Week is a celebration of freely improvised music and in 1991 musicians came together for five days improvising, most of them meeting for the first time.This CD is taken from the final two days (Friday and Saturday).The titles are derived from the initials of the musicians.

Alto Saxophone – John Zorn Artwork, Design – Karen Brookman Bass – Paul Rogers (2) Guitar – Buckethead, Derek Bailey Percussion – Paul Lovens Photography By – Martin L McGain Piano, Electronics, Keyboards [Keyboard] – Pat Thomas Post Production – John Hadden Producer [Production] – Derek Bailey Recorded By [Recording] – Matt Saunders, Paul Wilson (4) Trombone – Yves Robert Violin – Alexander Balanescu Voice – Vanessa Mackness Company Week is a celebration of freely improvised music and in 1991 musicians from the USA, Germany, France and Britain came together for five days improvising, most of them meeting for the first time.This series of three discs reflects the music developed over this period.Volume 2 is selected from the middle period (part Wednesday, Thursday, part Friday).The titles are derived from the initials of the musicians.