This is the first LP release on Loren Connors’ and David Grubbs’ Arborvitae, originally released on CD by the Swedish label Häpna in 2003. Loren Connors and David Grubbs first performed as a duo on May 30, 2003 at the Green-Wood Cemetery Chapel in Brooklyn, N.Y. Green-Wood Cemetery is one of Brooklyn’s landmarks—it’s the highest natural point in the borough, and an unexpected expanse of tranquility in the midst of the city. The stone interior of the chapel makes the quietest of sounds audible, and Loren and David played a remarkably quiet yet extraordinarily varied hour of improvised music. Energized, they repaired to the studio to record Arborvitae. It certainly could have happened earlier. David first heard Loren’s In Pittsburgh LP (St. Joan) in 1990, and felt it a revelation. Loren’s example of creating silences, of singing—with the guitar—in silences, was crucial to David’s shift from the rock trio Bastro to the often percussionless Gastr del Sol. David and Jim O’Rourke reissued In Pittsburgh several years later on their Dexter’s Cigar label, and Loren and Gastr del Sol performed a number of shows on the same bill, including the 1996 Table of the Elements Yttritum festival in Chicago. Arborvitae opens and closes with the pairing of David on piano and Loren on an electric guitar played so quietly that at times his pedal-stomping is wondrously distinct. “Blossom Time” and the title track positively float, with Loren alternating between soaring single-note lines and playing the rough, barnacled anchor to David’s relentless tide. David’s approach to the piano recalls his playing on Palace’s Arise Therefore and his own Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange. Loren hypnotizes throughout. This is one of the rare instances up to this point in his career that he had recorded in a commercial studio, and his playing, time and again, rewards such a detailed recording. “The Ghost of Exquisite” and “Hemlock Path” are two slow-motion lockings of guitar horns. “The Highest Point in Brooklyn” isn’t the place to be in an electrical storm—but it rolled in all of a sudden and there we were, uncovered and open to the elements... “This studio meeting between avant garde guitarist Loren (Mazzacane) Connors and former Jim O´Rourke accomplice David Grubbs is a heaven blessed match. The music they make together is equally divinely inspired, although more small concert hall than full-on gospel choir. Recorded in June 2003 in Brooklyn, New York, Connors´s mournful, atmospherically drenched guitar rubs amiably against the side of Grubbs´s studied piano exercises in the opening Blossom Time.” At times, the drawn out process makes it feel as though a game of musical chess is in progress, with Connors and Grubbs carefully pondering each move in order to avoid creative checkmate. Grubbs also adds electric guitar to the session which, unlike Connors´s brooding spiderweb of sound harks back to the well spaced, sturdy chord changes that dominated the music of John Fahey during his final years. On “The Ghost of Exquisite,” a form of rock guitar can be heard echoing in the freezing mix, but for the most part Arborvitae slowly leaks into the higher church of contemporary classical in the lofty way it presents itself. Beautifully performed and recorded, this addictive music demands a rematch in the not too distant future.” Edwin Pouncey, The Wire 

Atrás del Cosmos have been called Mexico’s first free jazz ensemble. Founded in 1975 by pianist Ana Ruiz, saxophonist Henry West, and percussionist Evry Mann, the trio soon became a central force in Mexico City’s creative arts community, mentoring a generation of improvisers, incorporating a revolving cast of artists into their immersive happenings, and sustaining a scene through their legendary weekly performances at El Galeón theater. The group’s celestial name stems from the reality of these daily activities: untold hours spent living and rehearsing in a residential building behind (‘atrás) the Cosmos cinema, honing their improvisatory alignment with the kind of everyday intensity that animated the Arkestra pad in Philadelphia or the Tapscott houses in Los Angeles. In 1977, Atrás invited Don Cherry to play and instruct on his organic approach to music and improvisation, leading to new levels of national recognition for the group. Despite their catalytic creative presence in Mexico City between 1977 and 1983, Atrás never broke through abroad—not least because they were rarely recorded and only released a single cassette before their disbandment. Now issued on LP for the first time, the aforementioned cassette, Cold Drinks, Hot Dreams, is an exhilarating live recording documenting the core group plus double-bassist Claudio Enriquez performing in 1980—an expansive improvised journey marked by contrasting moments of explosive heat and cool hypnotic calm. Atrás skilfully lead the listener through this varied terrain, drawing seamlessly on their experiences of the New York loft scene, classical pianism, and the surrealistic theatrics of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Ruiz’s distinctive sound—recalling Cecil Taylor’s percussive touch, Mal Waldron’s blues minimalism, and Horace Tapscott’s meditative radiance, but remaining entirely her own—holds the session from first to last. Evry Mann’s broad palette of percussion adds a welcome element of surprise to the proceedings, enriching the music with a graceful balafon solo, sonorous hand drums, and bursts of high octane trap set playing. Henry West’s saxophone rides high throughout, weaving around the ensemble with a fierce elegance. Now finally available after forty years, the music of Átras del Cosmos will be sure to captivate spiritual jazz veterans and newcomers alike. 

The latest in a prolific string of solo and collaborative releases by James Rushford, Turzets collects a pair of new works primarily created and recorded last year while the Australian composer-performer was in residence at La Becque, an art center on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The side-length piece “Fallaway Whisk” explores hesitation in its many forms—reticence of speech, sonic restraint—using live, abstracted translations of text from English to German against a lush and swelling soundscape. On the flip side, “Quire” is a work in ten movements influenced by the composer’s study of late medieval repertoire on portative organ, weaving the instrument’s woodsy interlocking melodies with angelic Yamaha CS-80 synth sweeps and stuttering glitches. The combined effort is somewhat a departure for Rushford, working in traces of Klaus Schulze, concrete poetry, and ars subtilior into a precise and ever-unfolding tapestry. Rushford’s work draws from a wide range of collagist and improvisatory musical languages, staking out an idiosyncratic stylistic space that has been variously described as “electro-acoustic experimentation with a beating heart” (Boomkat) and “haunted Jacobean ASMR” (The Wire). Investigating the creases, cracks, and folds in traditions ranging from early music to New Age, Rushford’s work subtly exaggerates seemingly liminal aspects such as atmosphere and the bodily presence of the performer until these take on a weight equal to musical elements such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre. In recent years, Rushford’s solo work has been guided by his theorization of sonic images, particularly the shadow, which has inspired pieces as diverse as an hour-long companion to Federico Mompou’s 1959–67 piano cycle Música Callada (2016) and a sumptuous translation of the play of light across flat surfaces into synthetic sound (The Lake from the Louvers, Shelter Press, 2021). His long-standing performance practice for piano, portative organ, synthesizers, and electroacoustic devices, is constantly infused with a delicacy of touch and a harmonic sensibility in which unorthodox tunings coexist with influences from fin de siècle Impressionism, the twentieth century avant-garde, and popular musical structures. He has worked with a vast range artists including Klaus Lang, Annea Lockwood, David Behrman, Tashi Wada, Haroon Mirza, Dennis Cooper, Ora Clementi, crys cole, Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, Will Guthrie, and Graham Lambkin. He has performed as Golden Fur (with Sam Dunscombe and Judith Hamann) and Food Court (with Joe Talia and Francis Plagne). 

DINGGGDONGGGDINGGGzzzzzzz!!!!!!! In the newest record by the iconoclastic Brooklyn-born composer Charlemagne Palestine (b. 1947), find two mesmerizing works for carillon, the keyboard-controlled bell tower derived in the 16th century. On side A, a new piece recorded at the artist’s studio in Belgium—a high-ceiling, stuffed-animal-packed paradise he calls Charleworld—among friends and “divinities,” his name for the thousands of plush toys he’s amassed since the ’60s. On the flip side, Blank Forms Editions’ very first and long-out-of-print release appears on vinyl for the first time: a cathartic street recording of the maximalist composer’s 2018 musical eulogy for his late friend Tony Conrad, performed on the bells of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, where the two first met. Two mesmerizing “klanggdedangggebannggg” sessions in the Quasimodo of 53rd Street’s inimitable, trance-induced style. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries in the bustling, cross-disciplinary downtown New York arts scene of the ’60s and ’70s, Charlemagne Palestine (b. 1947) has embodied the notion of the artist as playful polymath, testing and transcending nearly every creative form imaginable in his more than six-decade career. Originally trained in Jewish sacred singing to be a cantor, he began his artistic life as a musician, studying piano and accordion, accompanying figures like Tiny Tim and Allen Ginsberg on percussion, using early synthesizers as an assistant to Alwin Nikolais, and eventually landing a long-running gig as the carillonneur at Midtown’s St. Thomas Episcopal. This libertine spirit of experimentation soon led to adventures in other aesthetic arenas: making kinetic light sculptures with Len Lye, devising choreographed performances with Simone Forti, and producing a series of visceral videotapes with the Castelli-Sonnabend collection. In the ’70s, he was particularly prominent on the burgeoning loft movement, becoming well-known for his sparse, intense, and exacting long-form piano concerts that seemed to bend the very nature of time and space. Beginning in the ’80s, he spent decades in self-imposed exile from the new music scene, living variously in Europe and Hawai'i and privately honing his hermetic sonic and visual practice. This was followed by a period of triumphant resurgence beginning in the mid-’90s, since which he has performed and exhibited globally. This release is on the occasion of Blank Forms’ sixth annual gala honoring Charlemagne Palestine. 

Preorder! Graham Lambkin (of Shadow Ring fame) returns with a long awaited epic double LP, Aphorisms, his first major solo outing since Community (Kye, 2016). Recorded mostly during the early winter months of 2022, in post-pandemic New York and post-Brexit London, Aphorisms assembles the sonic detritus of daily life into hauntingly intimate aural soundscapes. Made between Lambkin's residence in East London and Blank Forms in New York, Aphorisms superimposes the two spaces onto one another creating an imaginary stage where his musical dramas unfold. A transatlantic mediation on the rooms where Lambkin has lived and worked, Aphorisms summons up hallucinatory vistas by way of the composer’s collage technique, layering field recordings, piano, guitar, percussion, vocal fragments, and repurposed elements on top of one another in double, triple, and quadruple exposures. Like the Shadow Ring’s Lindus (Swill Radio, 2001)—recorded between Folkestone and Miami—Aphorisms ruminates on estrangement and displacement, catching Lambkin as he returns to London after two decades of living in the States, in his words, “leaving home to return home.” Aphorisms continues Lambkin’s synthetic-naturalist approach to sound-making, twisting disparate and unique elements together to create the sensation of a coherent sonic space. At the heart of his practice is the illusion of form, whereby Lambkin combines sonic elements, documenting the moment that they coalesce into music only to disintegrate back into incidental sound. The album is centered around two pianos, one in New York and one in London, sounding together as if through the ether, creating a spectral atmosphere that Lambkin fills with melodic snippets, fragments of songs, spoken-word musings, and guttural barks or “the animal purity of voice,” as he has it. The superimposition of the two spaces is maximized in the album's closing titular track, where, much like on earlier works such as Salmon Run (Kye, 2007) and Softly Softly Copy Copy (Kye, 2009) fragments of familiar melodies float through the mix as though being played from afar. Aphorisms is Lambkin at his best, extending methodologies only hinted at previously and taking his now-idiosyncratic mission statement to a new chapter. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. 

For her first album releases as a soloist, nomadic Australian cellist and composer Judith Hamann presents two collections of her sonic inquiries into shaking and humming. Her LP, "Shaking Studies," is a collection of iterative cello performance that foregrounds shaking as a generative subject. In addition to an arsenal of techniques for registrable shaking, Hamann’s conception of the term emphasizes micro and macro pulsing, including tremors, vibrato, wolf tones, and complex partial activity. Hamann begins with a sphygmological reading of the pulse of her cello, inciting it to shake audibly and visually as a symbiotic basis for determining the rate of her own left hand’s tremor and consequent direction of resonant frequencies. Following a thorough harmonic investigation of her shaking practice in two parts, she directs us to look outwards, combining beating chordal structures with electronics and recordings of real world shaking. From inner pulse to more macrocosmic quaking, Hamann’s alternative conception of shaking rejects measurement and regularity, order and control, instead alluding to a more responsive and intuitive mode of convulsive sounding. Judith Hamann undertook her doctoral studies with renowned cellist Charles Curtis, with whom she is currently engaged in a discourse based project, ‘Materialities of Realisation.’ She has additionally demonstrated a superlative capacity for improvisation and engagement with sonic arts through work with artists Dennis Cooper, Éliane Radigue, Áine O’Dwyer, Ilan Volkov, Toshimaru Nakamura, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Golden Fur, Jessika Kenney, Anna Homler, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Lori Goldston, among others. Her recorded appearances include Tashi Wada’s Duets, Graham Lambkin’s Community, Alvin Lucier’s Illuminated By The Moon, and Gossamers, with Rosalind Hall. released October 30, 202. Blank Forms EditionsAll music composed by Judith Hamann in collaboration with the cello.

VINYL IS DELAYED TIL NOVEMBER. CDS READY TO SHIP.  --- In the late 1960s, the American trumpet player and free jazz pioneer Don Cherry (1936–1995) and the Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry (1943–2009) began a collaboration that imagined an alternative space for creative music, most succinctly expressed in Moki’s aphorism “the stage is home and home is a stage.” By 1972, they had given name to a concept that united Don’s music, Moki’s art, and their family life in rural Tagårp, Sweden into one holistic entity: Organic Music Theatre. Captured here is the historic first Organic Music Theatre performance from the 1972 Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon in the South of France, mastered from tapes recorded during its original live broadcast on public TV. A life-affirming, multicultural patchwork of borrowed tunes suffused with the hallowed aura of Don’s extensive global travels, the performance documents the moment he publicly jettisoned his identity as a jazz musician, and represents the start of his communal “mystical” period, later crystallized in recordings such as Organic Music Society, Relativity Suite, Brown Rice, and the soundtrack for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. The musicians in Don Cherry’s New Researches, hailing from Brazil, Sweden, France, and the US, converged on Chateauvallon from all over Europe. The five-person band—Don and Moki Cherry, Christer Bothén, Gérard “Doudou” Gouirand, and Naná Vasconcelos— performed in an outdoor amphitheater and were joined onstage by a dozen adults and children, including Swedish friends who tagged along for the trip and Det Lilla Circus (The Little Circus), a Danish puppet troupe based in Christiania, Copenhagen. The platform was lined with Moki’s carpets and her handmade, brightly colored tapestries, depicting Indian scales and bearing the words Organic Music Theatre, dressed the stage. As the musicians played, members of Det Lilla, led by Annie Hedvard, danced, sang, and mounted an improvised puppet show on poles high up in the air. The music in the Chateauvallon concert aspired to a universal language that would bring people together through song. In a fairly unprecedented move, Don abandoned his signature pocket trumpet for the piano and harmonium, thereby liberating his voice as an instrument for shamanic guidance. The show opens with him beckoning the audience to clap their hands and sing the Indian theta “Dha Dhin Na, Dha Tin Na,” and the set cycles through uplifting and sacred tunes of Malian, South African, Brazilian, and Native American provenance—including pieces that would later appear on Don’s albums Organic Music Society and Home Boy (Sister Out)—all punctuated by outbursts of possessed glossolalia from the puppeteers. “Relativity Suite, Part 1” notably spotlights Bothén on donso ngoni, a Malian hunter’s guitar, prior to Vasconcelos taking an extended solo on berimbau. A vortex of wah-like microtonal rattling, Vasconcelos’s masterful demonstration of this single-stringed Brazilian instrument is a harbinger of his work to come as a member, with Don, of the acclaimed group Codona. The sounds of children playing on the ensemble’s achingly tender rendition of Jim Pepper’s oft-covered beacon of spiritual optimism, “Witchi Tai To,” lends the proceedings an especially intimate, domestic glow. Given the context of the star-studded international jazz festival, the concert’s laid back, communal vibe feels like an attempt by the Cherrys to show Don’s jazz audience that he was moving on. At the same time, however, Don was extending a warmhearted invitation for them to come along for the ride. --- With liner notes by Magnus Nygren. --- Blank Forms, 2021

Unbegrenzt is the third in an ongoing series of archival records of the unheard music of Swedish composer Catherine Christer Hennix, co-released by Blank Forms Editions and Empty Editions. It follows Selected Early Keyboard Works and Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku (named the #1 archival release of 2019 by The Wire), in addition to a two-volume collection of Hennix’s writing titled Poësy Matters and Other Matters. Recorded in February of 1974 and featuring Catherine Christer Hennix (recitation, percussion, and electronics) and Hans Isgren (bowed gong), Hennix’s realization of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Unbegrenzt” (German for “unlimited”) from Aus den Sieben Tagen is an elaboration both rigorous and radically different from the canonical 1969 recording issued by Shandar. The collection of 15 text pieces written in Paris during May of 1968, Aus den Sieben Tagen, denies its performers notated direction and instead provides poetic cues that hinge upon Stockhausen’s conception of “intuitive music,” a Eurocentric perspective on improvisation antithetical to the vernacular forms Hennix had engaged with as a young drummer performing in Stockholm jazz clubs with musicians like Bill Barron, Cam Brown, Hans Isgren, Lalle Svenson, Allan Vajda, Bo Wärmell, and many others. While both Hennix and Isgren saw the formal prospect of Aus den Sieben Tagen as a productive development of and beyond La Monte Young’s event scores, she here steadfastly counters his rationalization of intuition with the Principle of Sufficient Reason. (Cf. Brouwer’s Lattice.) Eschewing the busy, conservatory-addled lapses into idiomatic citation of Stockhausen’s 1969 recording, Hennix’s alternative realization of the “Unbegrenzt” score’s instructions to “play a sound with the certainty that you have an infinite amount of time and space” is based on her concept of Infinitary Compositions, the trademark of her ensemble The Deontic Miracle which, at one time, considered adding Stockhausen, La Monte Young and Terry Jennings scores to its repertoire. Taking a mature, minimal iteration of Stockhausen’s compositional method of “moment-forming” to heart, her version’s dark, controlled feedback and amplified bowed gong subtly shift through an immanent sequence of formative moments, step by step. Its bubbling computer noise, percussion, and repeated ominous transient sounds of temple blocks over the bowed gong terminate with the integrated recitation of exotic text fragments from Hevajra Tantra which faithfully take Stockhausen’s score into deeper vistas of the unconscious and a more devastating opening to the unlimited time and space of a dreaming mind. Audio restoration and mastering by Stephan Mathieu, with an essay by Bill Dietz as well as a conversation between Dietz and Hennix. Catherine Christer Hennix (b. 1948) started her creative life playing drums with her older brother Peter, growing up in Sweden where she heard jazz luminaries, such as John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor perform from 1960 to 1967. Directly after high school, Hennix went to work at Stockholm’s pioneering Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), where she developed early tape music, incorporating computer generated speech done at the Royal Technological University (KTH), where she was an undergraduate student. After traveling to New York In 1968, she met artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles who invited her to stay at the Something Else Press Town House where she had the opportunity to meet, among others, composers John Cage, James Tenney, and Phil Corner. During the following years she developed fruitful collaborative relationships with many composers in the burgeoning American avant-garde, including, most significantly, Henry Flynt and La Monte Young. Young introduced Hennix to Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath and she would later study intensively under him as his first European disciple. While Hennix continued to make music performing alongside Arthur Russell, Marc Johnson, Henry Flynt, and Arthur Rhames, she also served as a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at SUNY New Paltz and as a visiting Professor of Logic (at Marvin Minsky’s invitation) at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In recent years Hennix has led the just-intonation ensemble the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage, which has featured musicians Amelia Cuni, Amirtha Kidambi, Chiyoku Szlavnics,  Hilary Jeffrey, Amir El-Saffar, Benjamin Duboc and Rozemarie Heggen. She currently resides in Istanbul, Turkey pursuing studies in classical Arabic and Turkish makam.

Beautiful, insurgent, fabulously danceable jazz music from South Africa, flowing out of the penny-whistle kwela bands of the 1950s. (Kwela means ‘get moving’, in Xhosa.) Bra Gwigwi played alto and clarinet alongside Hugh Masekela and Kippie Moeketsi in The Jazz Dazzlers; also in The Jazz Maniacs and The Harlem Swingsters. He came to the UK from Johannesburg as an actor and clarinettist in King Kong — a musical about a Zulu boxer — which opened in London in February 1961.Recording in January 1967, at Dennis Duerden’s Transcription Centre, he is joined here by Dudu Pukwana, Chris McGregor, Laurie Allan, and Ronnie Beer, all from The Blue Notes. Ladbroke Grove legend, and mainstay of our London Is The Place For Me series, Coleridge Goode plays double bass. No less than sixteen shots of jubilant, jump-up mbaqanga. Check the Ethiopian vibe of Mra (which became core repertoire of The Brotherhood of Breath). Listen to Nyusamkhaya, and try to get it out of your head. Impossible. Lovely notes by Steve Beresford, too.

Before any instrumentation, Francisco Mela addresses his fellow musicians, pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist William Parker, with a sense of anticipation and affirmation, “Okay guys, ready? Rolling!” The sense of camaraderie and his artist-focused approach is heard throughout the album’s majestic improvisation—as well as in its inspiration, dedicated to Mela’s longtime musical partner, the legendary jazz musician McCoy Tyner. Tyner was well-known for his boundless musical talent, and perhaps best-known for playing in John Coltrane’s quartet, which revolutionized the jazz world and reverberated through the music world at large. But it was his mentorship that truly touched Francico Mela: Tyner encouraged him to explore the boundaries of both his personal expression and his musical ability, affirming the philosophical conviction that music was a gateway to liberation. That pursuit of freedom was a lifelong aspiration, and one borne from community. Mela recalls performing at New York City’s Blue Note with McCoy Tyner, on a specific night when maestro Cecil Taylor came to listen to McCoy’s trio. Tyner and Taylor shared a conversation, and afterwards Tyner returned backstage, gently confiding in Mela, “I wish I were that free. We play music to free our souls.” Likewise, Tyner encouraged Mela to pursue his broadening interests, inspiring Francisco to embrace experimentation and musical freedom. In Music Frees Our Souls Vol. 1, Mela, Shipp and Parker compose an album that is equally innovative and welcoming, offering the best of experimental jazz and paying homage to McCoy Tyner’s indelible creative influence. This is the first chapter of Francisco Mela’s Music Frees Our Souls trilogy dedicated to McCoy, always featuring William Parker on bass but with different piano players on each volume. The album, Francisco Mela’s second from 577 Records following MPT Trio (2021), will be available on limited edition blue vinyl (100 copies), black vinyl, CD, digital. Music Frees Our Souls Vol. 2 & 3 will be released in the near future. 

Can music liberate us? Francisco Mela, who worked and partnered with the legendary jazz musician McCoy Tyner, believes so. On this album, the second volume of Music Frees Our Souls, Mela collaborates with pianist Cooper-Moore and bassist William Parker to build a 2-part extended track project of advanced dialogue between 3 of the genre's most important instruments. Tyner was well-known for his boundless musical talent, and perhaps best-known for playing in John Coltrane’s quartet, which revolutionized the jazz world and fundamentally influenced the music world at large. Despite his indelible, wide-reaching impact on experimental jazz, it was Tyner’s mentorship that truly touched Francisco Mela: Tyner encouraged him to explore the boundaries of both his personal expression and his musical ability, affirming the philosophical conviction that music was a gateway to liberation. This album is again dedicated to Tyner’s mentorship and encouragement, suggesting we all embrace experimentation and musical freedom. This second volume/album will be available on limited edition burgundy red vinyl, black vinyl, CD, or download in January 2023. Music Frees Our Souls Vol. 3 is also planned for release in the near future. Cooper-Moore - Piano William Parker - Bass Francisco Mela - Drums Recorded November 13, 2020 by Jeremy Loucas at Douglass Recording, Brooklyn, New York

eo Genovese - Piano, sax William Parker - Bass Francisco Mela - Drums Recorded November 13, 2020 by Jeremy Loucas at Douglass Recording, Brooklyn, New York

Are you ready for magic? The master musicians Daniel Carter, Matthew Shipp, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver will provide access with this album, the first they have released after playing together for decades. Daniel Carter has been collaborating with William Parker since the early 70s and with Matthew Shipp starting in the mid 80s. This trio has played together on many recordings but by adding legendary drummer Gerald Cleaver to the mix they have created a masterpiece combination; a supergroup of sorts. This all-star project is presented in two parts/LPs. This is the first volume - with volume two scheduled to be published in the near future. Listen to Welcome Adventure! and experience the mystical journey of these masterful artists as they guide you through the realm of magic. Daniel Carter - Tenor Saxophone, Trumpet, Flute Matthew Shipp - Piano William Parker - Bass Gerald Cleaver - Drums

Issued on vinyl for the first time, Outernational Sounds proudly presents a monumental spirit music document from the Los Angeles underground – Jesse Sharp’s slept-on deep jazz classic Sharps And Flats. He became the Ark leader…he was hardcore. They’d all be quiet and listen to him when he talked. Horace Tapscott, on Jesse Sharps You could be forgiven for not knowing how important saxophonist, bandleader and composer Jesse Sharps is. After all, the only album to come out under his name, Sharps And Flats, was recorded in 1985, and wasn’t issued on CD until 2004. But despite this seemingly small recorded footprint, Jesse Sharps is a major figure in the history of jazz music in Los Angeles. As the bandleader for Horace Tapscott’s Pan-Afrikan People’s Arkestra (P.A.P.A.) – the Marshall Allen to Tapscott’s Sun Ra – he led Tapscott’s seminal music community through its most cohesive phase. And, after a hiatus living in Europe, his return to Los Angeles in the 2000s saw him build a new group, The Gathering, which linked original heads including acclaimed singer Dwight Trible and legendary trombonist Phil Ranelin with a new generation of LA jazz voices, including none other than Kamasi Washington. Sharps has been around, and he’s made an indelible mark. Born in Los Angeles in 1953, Jesse Sharps spent his childhood in Watts. He first encountered the visionary pianist Horace Tapscott when he was still at high school – the Arkestra were performing on 103rd Street, and when Sharps heard them he knew what his future would be. Tapscott soon invited the young Sharps to rehearsals, where he played baritone. At college, Sharps studied under Cecil Taylor. When he came back to LA he rejoined the Arkestra on flute and reeds, and eventually took over band-leading duties from the great altoist Arthur Blythe. Trusted completely by Tapscott, as bandleader Sharps turned the Arkestra into a well-drilled unit. This was the time of the classic P.A.P.A. recordings Flight 17, Live at I.U.C.C, and The Call, and Sharps also wrote for the band. The funky, deep spirituality of compositions like ‘Desert Fairy Princess’, ‘Macramé’ and ‘Peyote Song III’ has made his tunes among most celebrated in the whole P.A.P.A. catalogue. Sharps And Flats was recorded in 1985 for Tom Albach’s legendary Nimbus West imprint, a label Albach had founded specifically to document the work of Horace Tapscott and his circle. Featuring a quintet of P.A.P.A. regulars at the height of their game, Sharps And Flats is one of the great lost Nimbus sessions – it lay unissued until 2004, and never saw a vinyl press. In line with the original Nimbus CD release, this edition of Sharps And Flats includes ‘McKowsky’s First Fifth’, a stunning 16 minute bonus cut by the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra featuring Horace Tapscott, recorded in 1979. A lost classic of the LA underground, on wax at last! Sharps And Flats is released as a limited, 2LP vinyl-only edition on a 180g pressing. Fully licensed from Tom Albach. --- side one: The Goat and the Ramjam / Question / Macrame side two : Mike’s Tune / As a Child / Carnival Jesse Sharps : reeds / Joel Ector : bass / Nate Morgan : piano / Steve Smith : trumpet / Carl Burnett : drums / Alippa : Percussion / Horace Tapscott : piano / JJ Kabasa : percussion edition of 500

Reissue of Horace Tapscott's amazing album 'The Call' from 1978 which was recorded by the 16-piece ensemble the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. A four track delight of spiritual jazz from the pioneering conductor, arranger, pianist and composer at the heart of the Los Angeles jazz scene.

Sounds from the Great House! Outernational Sounds proudly presents a Nimbus West spirit jazz essential: the Creative Arts Ensemble’s classic debut One Step Out. Mastered at 45rpm on double vinyl for enhanced sound, this release features all tracks at full length for the first time on wax. One of the most sought after and highly regarded titles to have appeared on Tom Albach’s celebrated Nimbus West imprint, the Creative Art Ensemble’s One Step Out is a timeless work of spiritualised jazz. A true gem from the Los Angeles jazz underground, the album was pianist and composer Kaeef Ruzadun Ali’s first recording as leader of the Creative Arts Ensemble, the only large ensemble group that emerged directly from Horace Tapscott’s legendary Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra community jazz group. A Los Angeles native, Kaeef was introduced to the Tapscott circle in the late 1970s. His first experience of the Arkestra’s ethos was through PAPA tenorist Michael Session, who took him to the famous ‘Great House’ at 2412 South Western Ave., LA – a large mansion house which members of the Arkestra had taken over as a space for communal living. Life in the Great House was a continuous stream of music, dance and community events. ‘When I walked in there,’ recalled Kaeef, ‘it was like this whole rush came over me, just from going in the front door…It was like a very, very warm feeling of love. I went and I came out with ‘Flashback of Time’, and that was my first arrangement.’ Kaeef quickly became a significant contributor of compositions to the Arkestra’s songbook – his piece ‘New Horizon’ would be recorded by Horace Tapscott for the latter’s Tapscott Sessions series. But ‘Flashback of Time’ would eventually appear on One Step Out, played by the new group he had put together from stalwart Arkestra members. Inspired by both Tapscott’s example and by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Kaeef had wanted to follow their lead by assembling a larger unit. ‘I would like to form a group that would be an extension of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra,’ he told Tapscott. The group was to be known as the Creative Arts Ensemble, and One Step Out, released in 1981 by Nimbus West, was their debut. Featuring seasoned Arkestra regulars including reedsman Dadisi Komolafe, drummer Woody ‘Sonship’ Theus and altoist Gary Bias, with veterans Henry ‘The Skipper’ Franklin on bass and George Bohannon on trombone, One Step Out is a key document of the Los Angeles radical jazz underground. Featuring the sanctified vocals of Kaeef’s sister, B. J. Crowley, the album is a tour de force of spiritually energised independent jazz music. Community uplift and sacred vision straight from the Great House, back on vinyl for the first time since 1981! One Step Out is released as a limited, 2LP vinyl-only edition. 180g pressing, mastered at 45rpm for enhanced sound. Fully licensed from Tom Albach.

Outernational Sounds present a reissue of Nate Morgan's Retribution, Reparation, originally released on Nimbus West Records in 1984. A core member of the circle around Horace Tapscott, pianist Nate Morgan was a key member of the Pan Afrikan People's Arkestra, known as The Ark. Here is the second of his two LPs for Nimbus West. His first, Journey Into Nigritia had been a declaration of arrival laced with energies drawn from Cecil Taylor and Coltrane. One year later, in 1984, with nods to Herbie Hancock ("One Finger Snap") and Ellington ("Come Sunday"), Retribution, Reparation was a confident statement of purpose. Politically charged with pan-Africanist Black nationalism, and titled with uncompromising directness, the album focusses the sound world of the Ark into a surging, restless masterpiece of spiritualized modal jazz. Danny Cortez on trumpet and Jesse Sharps on saxophones comprise an explosive frontline. Fritz Wise and Ark regular Joel Ector hold down the rhythm section. Morgan's forceful, Tyner-like chords and virtuosic solos bind the music together. From the poised drama of the opening dedication to Tapscott's U.G.M.A.A. organization, through the propulsive militancy of the title track, "Retribution, Reparation" spreads the word: "Advance to Victory, Let Nigritia Be Free!" Fully licensed from Nimbus West founder Tom Albach.

These are recordings from the Berlin club Au Topsi Pohl where [ism] played 4-nights in a row, May 18-21 2022. For the concerts a Bösendorfer grand piano was brought in to the small club - the trio barely fit on stage, but the acoustic sound, all the more omnipresent and precise, was embraced by a highly crafted and risky playing evoking notions of dreams, form and human vibrations.  Maua means flowers in Swahili.