“Tuned metal percussion figures prominently in the sound universe of Roscoe Mitchell. Many of Mitchell's early compositions for the Art Ensemble of Chicago feature xylophone and tuned bells, and his immersive set-up known as "The Cage" arranges an array of percussed instruments in a circle around him, including all sorts of metallophones and gongs. On Roscoe Village, Chicago-based improvisor Jason Adasiewicz has transcribed and arranged a selection of Mitchell-penned pieces, performing them all on solo...

“In the winter of 1980, Chicago tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson (1929-2010) brought his quartet to Milwaukee, where they were recorded live in concert. These tapes were first plumbed for The Milwaukee Tapes Vol. 1 on the Unheard Music Series in 2000.
Anderson's group featured his long-time trumpeter Billy Brimfield (1938-2012) as well as his protege and percussionist Hamid Drake, then known as Hank, and bassist Larry Hayrod. Finally, after another couple of decades during which both Anderson and...

Billy Bang, violin
"The long out-of-print first solo record by American violinist Billy Bang (1947-2011), recorded in 1979 and first released on Hat Hut Records, featuring his own compositions, extrapolated at length in the intimate live concert, as well as traditional and improvised material. Remastered from original tapes and augmented by newly discovered recordings from the same concert. Part of the large cache of historical Hat Hut records that Corbett vs. Dempsey continues to release. Original...

Peter Brötzmann, tenor saxophone
Fred van Hove, piano
Han Bennink, drums, percussion
"Recorded at the height of their powers as the leading free jazz trio in Europe, 1971 includes some of the hottest and heaviest music ever made by Brötzmann, starting with an inflammatory, incandescent 26-minute live track recorded at the New Jazz Meeting auf Burg Altena. Only available on a nearly-impossible-to-find LP sampler issued at the time by the festival, this marks "Just for Altena"'s first...

Peter Brötzmann, tenor saxophone
Mars Williams, tenor and soprano saxophones
Ken Vandermark, baritone saxophone
Mats Gustafsson, alto saxophone
Joe McPhee, valve trombone
Jeb Bishop, trombone
Fred Lonberg-Holm, cello
Kent Kessler, bass
Michael Zerang, drums
Hamid Drake, drums

“In the first years of its existence, starting in 1997, the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet worked as a collective, inviting all and any of its participants to contribute composition

Rüdiger Carl – clarinet
Joel Grip - double bass
Sven-Åke Johansson – drums

“Recorded a few months before the pandemic clampdown, in November of 2019, at Berlin's Au Topsi Pohl, the music is exploratory and swinging, with Carl's viscous clarinet and a brilliant rhythm team steeped in time-based feel but loose and sometimes ambling.
Johansson was part of the first Peter Brötzmann Trio to commit music to wax, on For Adolphe Sax (1967), and he was on the legendary Brötzmann Octet date..

"This is a reissue of Eugene Chadbourne's album, first released as a cassette on No Prestige Records in 1988.
Dateline: Christmas Day, 1977, San Francisco. On an ailing quarter-track tape deck, in a marathon session, Eugene Chadbourne recorded a series of slide guitar solos playing compositions by the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman, along with a few standards and originals.
Although the recording quality was imperfect, the playing was absolute...

“In 2013, Claire Chase instigated a project designed to cultivate an entirely new body of work for flute. A MacArthur Fellow, Harvard professor, and indomitable musical force who cofounded the International Contemporary Ensemble, Chase began commissioning work, with the idea of doing so until the centennial of Edgard Varèse's seminal flute solo "Density 21.5," in 2036. This deluxe four-CD set is the first fruit of these commissions, realized in the first three years of the project, featuring 18 works...

Maya Magdas : piano
Mazen Kerbaj : trumpet
Mike Majowski : bass
Tony Buck : drums

“Taking structural and dynamic cues from the classic John Coltrane record A Love Supreme, Das B totally reinvents the music, and in the process meticulously subverts the notion of the tribute or songbook.”

Tony Buck is unmistakeable, and this is very much in the vein of The Necks, but not exactly!

“One of the towering creative musicians of our time, a master drummer and percussionist, Hamid Drake has anchored innumerable bands. As a hard-working player, constantly touring the globe, he's collaborated with most of the major figures in improvised music and contemporary jazz, from David Murray and Peter Brötzmann to Pharoah Sanders and Don Cherry.
Along the way, Drake has never had an opportunity to stop and make a solo record. Indeed, he's only performed solo on a few occasions. John Corbett...

“The second release in an ongoing series that will reconstruct the legacy known and the legacy damned of the most overlooked and under-documented American free rock unit, Dredd Foole and the Din.
During an era of peak corporate control on popular music, when guitars were in the closet, improvisation was in retreat, and the flames of fire music were dimming, Dredd Foole and the Din emerged as part of a new underground kicking against the pricks, holding the line with the firmly clenched spirit of...

“Two brilliant improvisers, two distinct generations, one close-listening encounter. Swedish guitarist (and, elsewhere, banjo player) Niklas Fite brings a flinty intimacy to his playing, a dry punch that reminds us that the guitar is a percussion instrument. One of the great figures in European improvised music, based in Hannover, Germany, Günter Christmann gained notoriety as a trombonist starting in the very early 1970s, but he was equally engaged in playing double bass and cello and has in recent...

Wendy Gondeln - violin, electronic treatments, and more
Mats Gustafsson - piano mate, saxophones, and live electronics
Wolfgang Voigt - editing and mix (track 3 and 8)
Martin Siewert - guitar and lap top guitar (track 1 and 7)

“In 2018, Mats Gustafsson provided raw saxophonic material for the elusive Wendy Gondeln, who sometimes applied a scalpel, sometimes a pneumatic drill, to rework, remix, reimagine all the Swede's squeaks, pops, blats, and tones. In some places, Gondeln adds....

“For a performance at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in spring of 1966, percussionist Milford Graves invited pianist Don Pullen to play duets. The two musicians had worked together in a band fronted by saxophonist and clarinetist Giusseppi Logan, with whom they had recorded two LPs in 1965 for ESP-Disk'. Graves was already a daunting presence in free music. One step at a time, he was busy transforming the role of drumming in jazz, introducing a new way of dealing with unmetered time and...

David Grubbs – guitar
Mats Gustafsson - flute, fluteophone, baritone saxophone, live electronicsr
Rob Mazurek - piccolo trumpet, wooden flute, electronics, percussion, voicer
“An übertrio drawn from distinct parts of the creative music spectrum, The Underflow was recorded during a sizzling two-night stand in May 2019. In a series of duets and trios, guitarist David Grubbs, saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, and trumpeter Rob Mazurek met headlong for the first time, converging not only their...

"One of the most celebrated folks in improvised music, Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson made three ultra-limited edition vinyl LPs, each featuring a different dedication to a favorite musician from the past. Released in batches of 99, these records found Gustafsson playing compositions by Duke Ellington, Albert (and his brother Donald) Ayler, and the important post-bop baritone player Lars Gullin. Long out-of-print, these priceless slabs of free music have quickly become sought after collector’s items...

Beaver Harris, drums
Don Pullen, piano
Hamiet Bluiett, baritone saxophone
Ricky Ford, tenor saxophone
Buster Williams, bass
Francis Haynes, steel drums
Candido, percussion (1)
Sharon Freeman, Willie Ruff, Bill Warnick, Greg Williams, french horns (1)

"Of all the never-issued-on-CD items in history’s dustbin, A Well-Kept Secret is perhaps the most egregious. The beautiful studio recording, made under the watchful ear of über-producer Hal Willner, was first issued o

“The untold early history of Amsterdam's seminal collective. Founded in 1967 by three of European free music's leading lights -- pianist Misha Mengelberg, drummer Han Bennink, and saxophonist and clarinetist Willem Breuker -- the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) was simply one of the most important vehicles for experimentation and improvisation in the history of creative music.
Culling ideas and materials from jazz, modern and contemporary classical music, Fluxus, traditional music from the Balkans and...

"Commissioned by Experimental Sound Studio in 2000 to create a radio work for the Outer Ear Festival, Kapsalis and Corbett returned to their investigation of film noir and pulp fiction, creating a half-hour work of non-narrative radio theater featuring music and text collage, as well as Kapsalis on violin and Corbett on analog synthesizer. Drawing on writers like Jim Thompson and David Goodis, as well as a lexicon of criminal terminology, it offers a Dada roller-coaster ride through diners, speakeasies...

"In 1998, at WNUR Radio, Evanston, the legendary German bassist Peter Kowald met two Chicagoans in the studio for a brisk set of string trios. Fellow-bassist Kent Kessler and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, essential members of the Chicago scene, are well known as international improvisors too, and the threesome dug in for a fierce face-off. The session was closely recorded in the studio’s intimate confines, which could barely contain their energy. Kowald proposed a set of six miniatures, all ranging around...

“What could possibly happen when two ultimate masters of soprano saxophone square off for their only recording of duets? Chirps is the only place to find out.
Steve Lacy -- the one who planted the flag for soprano saxophone in the ground of modern jazz, who established its iconic status, who devoted himself to the axe with monkish devotion, who brought shakuhachi breath and stairstep melody into its upper-register antics.
Evan Parker -- arguably the one who pushed the instrument the furthest...

“Okkyung Lee's is perhaps the most harrowing of the Black Cross Solo Sessions stories. At the onset of COVID, the cellist was called to travel to Korea to be with her dying father. The trip was sudden and didn't allow her to bring her instrument, but once there she was unable to return to New York because of the stringent lockdown. For months she was stranded without her cello, unable to practice or make any music. This intense alienation took a long time to lift. Indeed, even after she made it back to...

“One of the architects of no wave with his band DNA, a pioneer of noise guitar, sublimely inventive producer, and slinkily seductive songwriter, Arto Lindsay has worn countless musical hats.
Invited to make a solo record for the Black Cross Solo Sessions, Lindsay boiled it down to essential ingredients, waxing a collection of bristling new songs and works for solo guitar; on six of a baker's dozen tracks, his angelic voice offsets the bracing dissonance of his acidic electric.
Recorded at...

“In 1981, British percussionist Paul Lytton and German guitarist Erhard Hirt met and recorded for a couple of days in Belgium. This explosive, ahead-of-its-time first encounter, which had been planned as a release on the legendary Po Torch label, has remained dormant for over four decades.
In that period, Lytton and Hirt teamed up often, joining forces with saxophonist/clarinetist Wolfgang Fuchs and bassist Hans Schneider as the quartet X-Pact, a group that has recently reformed -- several years...

"In July 2013, a few months after the passing of his mother, cornetist Rob Mazurek performed solo at Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery, in Chicago. Mazurek is one of the highest profile figures in contemporary creative music, leading bands like the Exploding Star Orchestra, Skull Sessions Octet and Starlicker. On this occasion, he brought a box filled with various implements – his cornet, naturally, but flutes, bells, books, maracas, apples, and little electronics. This box became an inexhaustible resource...