Group Inerane - Live recordings from the one and only European Tour in November of 2011.Koudede Maman would pass a few months later, essentially putting this incredible band to rest.

One of the greatest, heaviest, and most sought-after guitar records from 1970s West Africa, available on vinyl for the first time in over a decade!!!Bamako, Mali, 1973: Rail Band, the official orchestra of the Malian state railway, drops their self-titled LP. It’s a relentlessly soulful and hypnotic blend of American funk, jazz horns, and Afro-Cuban music, reflected through centuries-old Mandé tradition and blasted at top volume by some of the continent’s greatest artists.Led by legendary trumpet and saxman Tidiani Koné and held aloft by the intricate web of Djelimady Tounkara’s rumbling, reverb-soaked guitar, Rail Band’s sprawling compositions embody West African storytelling traditions while exulting in the technology and modernity of a newly independent Mali. Vocalists Salif Keita and Mory Kanté, two heroes of African music who would achieve global fame as soloists, are endlessly emotive, oscillating between silky ballads and funk screams. The band’s sound is filled out by layers of percussion, rolling guitars, and melodic horns filtered through the Caribbean. Starting in 1970, Rail Band played five nights a week, from 2 pm til the early hours, at the Buffet Hotel de la Gare. Their audience was an international array of businessmen, young partiers, and people of the Bamako night. The band was incredibly versatile, switching genres, rhythms, and styles to meet their crowd. It was a volatile mix, one that would fall apart soon after these recordings were made, with Salif Keita’s departure to start the rival Les Ambassadeurs. Though Rail Band continued in many distinguished forms, the eight songs on this album reveal one of the greatest bands to ever exist, at the height of their creative powers.On “Duga,” a composition dating back to the 13th century and passed on through oral tradition by the jelis (griots), the Rail Band replaces balafon with the interplay of Cheick Tidiane’s speaker-rattling bass and Alfred Coulibaly’s tasteful organ. “Marabayasa,” with its iconic sax intro and Mory Kanté channeling James Brown, is a deep-cut favorite of DJs around the world. Part of a long and regal lineage of Malian guitar orchestras initially tasked with translating the region’s traditional music to modern instrumentation, Rail Band morphed and reenvisioned those traditions with a style and energy that has never been matched.High-quality black or translucent blue vinyl (limited to first pressing), old school jacket faithfully reproducing the iconic “mermaid” design from the 1973 release. Licensed from Syllart Records and Djelimady Tounkara.

Aboriginal Australian blues, country, and gospel by the great Kankawa Nagarra, Queen of the Bandaral Ngadu Delta. These intimate recordings introduce the world outside Australia to Kankawa Nagarra, a beloved Walmatjarri Elder, teacher, human rights advocate, and environmental activist. Recorded live near her home in Western Australia, these twelve acoustic guitar and vocal tracks offer a glimpse of Kankawa's far ranging humanity, humor, and lived experience. She shifts between musical styles and languages, backed by night bugs and the call of birds. Recorded by Kankawa's longtime friend Darren Hanlon, the sessions are relaxed and warm. It's a true gift - the experience of hearing Kankawa on her own land, in her own words. Born in the traditional lands of the Gooniyandi and Walmatjarri peoples of North Western Australia, Kankawa grew up with the tribal songs at cultural ceremonies. She was taken from her family to a Christian mission, where she was taught hymns and Gospel songs with the choir. On the pastoral lease where she was sent to work, Country music was everywhere. She first heard rock and roll on the station gramophone. But it wasn’t until many years later her musical journey truly began, when she stopped to listen to a busker outside a shop in Derby, Western Australia. It was the first time she’d heard the blues, and it awakened something in her. Through it, she found a medium to express all her thoughts and feelings, and it inspired her to turn these into songs. The empathy of her message extends from those she sees struggling around her to the entire planet being ravaged for profit. We are extremely grateful to release this record alongside Flippin Yeah Records and in collaboration with Kankawa Nagarra. High-quality vinyl comes with a four-page booklet featuring translations, stories, and track notes by the artist,

A sequel. An escalation. Pressure spikes from bar one: future-facing, low-latency. A firmware update for the body. Cuts bite into cuts. Fragments swarm, collide, die out. Drums stumble until they speak; samples crop up without names and leave without warning. Momentum is the one and only rule. Unpredictable, gridless, post-genre. From TikTok feed to vinyl: born digital, cut for the floor. The glitch grows a body, develops a nervous system. Match it or get out of the way. Damned be the ones that are stuck on tradition.

New vinyl music by Joanne Robertson & Sidsel Meineche Hansen A limited edition 12” vinyl with 16 tracks in an edition of 250 copies with full colour sleeve. Joanne Roberston is a visual artist, musician and poet based in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Feels’, Edouard Montassut, Paris, 2021, and, ’Natural Behavior’, Svetlana, New York, 2019. Recent publications include 1971 (a year in record review poems) and 1979 Songbook, both in collaboration with writer Byron Coley, published by Tenderbooks and Bad Taste Press.‘With a lovely series of solo LPs, Joanne Robertson has become known for the lyrical drifting beauty of her music. The Lighter (Textile), Black Moon Days (Feeding Tube), Wildflower (Escho) and Painting Stupid Girls (World Music) have all been hailed as brilliant extensions of the avant garde wing of the femme-folk tradition. She has also remained active with her friend, Dean Blunt, issuing the Walhalla LP (Textile) as a duo, and appearing on his recordings, the most recent being Black Metal 2 (Rough Trade).’ Byron ColeySidsel Meineche Hansen is a London based artist. Her artworks vary in medium and form spanning wood, clay and metals through which crafted objects are made, to Computer Generated Imagery, Virtual Reality and other reproducible mediums. Her work also includes musical collaborations with musician Nkisi and the poet Lydia Lunch. She collaborates regularly with London-based Design a Wave and Copenhagen-based Brynje recently released on the LP sex robot from 2019. Joanne Robertson and Sidsel Meineche Hansen have previously collaborated together along with artist and writer Reba Maybury on the 2020 video 12 Rules for Life, a reinterpretation of Dies irae, the thirteenth-century sequence for mourning the dead. She has an upcoming solo-exhibition at Bergen Kunsthalle in November 2021.

The latest installment of Paradigm Discs’ incredible initiative dedicated to the work of Anthony Moore with the experimental filmmaker David Larcher during the 1960s and 70s. The collaboration between Anthony Moore and filmmaker David Larcher began in the late 60s, at the start of both their respective careers and lasted many years. Following on from last years release of the soundtrack to Mare’s Tail (the first collaboration with Larcher), this year sees the release of the soundtrack to his 2nd film, Monkey’s Birthday. This LP is a condensation of the essence of this 6 hour film. The sound is partly taken directly from the existing soundtrack and partly from stereo masters that have survived through the decades. Shot and edited between 1973 and 1975 this epic film moves through a variety of landscapes, both physical and abstract. It was filmed in various locations, starting in Germany and moving through Hungary, Romania and most substantially in rural Turkey. In large part this is a road movie that takes the filmed events and locations and uses them as sources for further experimentation. In much the same way, the location recordings made by Anthony Moore are used as raw material for creating much of the soundtrack, working from a battery powered studio in the back of his truck in this east bound convoy. The previously released excerpt, Plains Of Hungary (ReR Quarterly Vol.2 No.1) is included on this album in its rightful place among the collages of Islamic chant, field recordings, tape loops, jam sessions etc., alongside quotes from esoteric texts read by Heathcote Williams. We also hear, alongside various voices from the crew and general public, a repeated theme using the looped cut up voice recordings from the 2 other members of Slapp Happy (Dagmar Krause and Peter Blegvad), who also took to the road for part of this gruelling journey. Comes with large 4 sided insert. Numbered edition of 500.

If «Conversations» celebrates the memory, the artistic and spiritual heritage of bassist Fred Hopkins, - an historical member of the revolutionary AACM of Chicago - who died in January 1999, it also marks the amazing collaboration between the Ritual Trio of Kahil El'Zabar (with Ari brown and Malachi Favors) and the intrepid veteran Archie Shepp, the great voice of the '70 afro-free-jazz. Being a tribute that invites to an intimate memory, almost an antidote to exorcise the loss of a brother, the music is spiritual hymn to life. Between ballads, hard-bop and free-improvised accents, blow winds of vibrant pianistic chiaroscuros, which reminds the best Mccoy Tyner in the great blinding quartet of John Coltrane in the 60’s. Furthermore, when an angular rhythmic base decisively follows the typical hypnotic ostinato of the ancient tribal rituals, the voice is expressed in the purest black spirituals (Big Fred and Brother Malcolm), pervading some moments of that “Holiness” culture dear to the dawn of Afro-American identity. Here, Shepp brings back the flaming shivers of the golden age, when his message of freedom resonated the true spirits of primordial Africa.

in 2023, sound artist and composer Weston Olencki toured across the American South. Beginning in their hometown in South Carolina, they snaked a circuitous path from the mountains of West Virginia to the banks of the Mississippi River. As the miles accumulated, so did the initial seeds of new work. Instruments and artifacts they acquired hitched a ride in the backseat, while songs and sounds filled their portable recorder: water in its various states, the familiar insectoid buzz of those summer nights, trains cutting through the landscape, the traditional music that lived alongside the communities that kept it. Olencki took it all in, and over time, found ways that these experiences coalesced into a bramble-like perspective of time, where past, present, and future intersect in ways both barbed and beautiful. Broadsides, Olencki’s newest solo full-length is the multilayered result of this journey. The album follows their landmark release Old Time Music from 2022, which presented radical interpretations of traditional tunes from Appalachia and throughout the South alongside original compositions that drew significantly on archival recordings. On Broadsides, Olencki rejects delineations between the unmoored avant-garde and the rootedness of one’s cultural heritage, revealing their porous and intertwined nature. “My mother was a quilter. Her mother before that,” they write in the album’s liner notes. “Quilting, like music, is a practice of embedding knowledge and remembrance into the very core of the thing you are making. It’s not just about the materials, but how they’re reassembled, recontextualized, stitched, woven to form new patterns - the minutiae of craft holding significance to those looking to find it. Stories woven from stories, never told the same way twice.” Like all great road trips, Broadsides unfolds slowly and continuously, with moments of dramatic reverie punctuating the endless melt of highway in the rearview. We’re immediately confronted by the uncanniness of revisiting old haunts, as Southern storms break through the initial churn of the freight locomotives of Alabama. Olencki’s interpretation of the bluegrass standard “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” captures the euphoria of melancholy in motion. The permutational plucks of banjo are bounced around the frame by a computer, its pitches determined within algorithmic sequences and transcriptions of classic three-finger licks. The tonalities of old-time are smeared and stretched until all that’s audible is the insistence that Heaven might be real. In the album’s second half, “Omie Wise,” a murder ballad made famous by Doc Watson, follows an interlude recorded on the river in North Carolina in which the titular character’s body was laid. Ghostly echoes of a dozen other renditions float through the substrata as Tongue Depressor’s Henry Birdsey accompanies them on the pedal steel guitar. The album’s central composition, “all my father’s clocks,” is a profound meditation on entropy and impermanence. The sound of their father’s extensive clock collection ticks away as Olencki pulls a bow across the length of an autoharp sourced from a rural strip mall. The instrument was left as detuned as it was found, the resonance of its deep bass drone and clanging high-end the result of years of neglect and the warping effects of Southern humidity. Historically, broadsides were an early form of broadcasting, an often-musicalized telling of current news pasted in the public square. The name was later taken up by Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen in the 1960s, whose Broadside magazine published songs and social commentary when American folk music resurfaced as an urgent way of communicating the multifaceted politics of its time. Olencki borrows the phrase to recall both this old form of songmaking and that later prominent reexamination of traditional music’s role in modern life, but also to draw attention to the fragmented and machine-mediated way heritage is diffused in this very different, but no less pivotal, moment. As a sanitized past is used as justification for current violence and domination, we can turn to these artifacts to better understand the history of ourselves, but only if they are consciously pushed to evolve. Broadsides represents one personal, striking vision of what far-flung futurisms could be respun from these high, lonesome sounds: a reflection of the unbridled joy and deep sorrow inherent to living together through time, and a desire to push further into the untold and unknown.

For years, Jackson C. Frank was as ghostly a legend as they come. Even the relatively few record collectors who revered his work were only aware of the lone LP released during his lifetime. For all most listeners knew, Frank made an incredible album in 1965 and then vanished, despite that record having been produced by Paul Simon. 1975 Mekeel Sessions features six tracks recorded in the mid-'70s at a studio in Lake Hill, New York about five miles from Woodstock where Frank was living at the time. Only uncovered decades later, these recordings hum with the same mysterious warmth that defined Jackson at his peak. His guitar work, alternating between strummed and fingerpicking, is perfectly understated. His stark and somber voice, more weathered than the lighter tone on his debut. While the Mekeel tapes were intended for Frank's sophomore album, it never came to be. What one hears is not a singer-songwriter fading out of view, but rather a singular artist who never stopped trying to build his own world – even when no one was watching. For fans of everyone influenced by Jackson: from Nick Drake, Sandy Denny and Bert Jansch to more contemporary acts like Elliott Smith, Vincent Gallo and Iron And Wine who surely used Frank's sparse approach as a template.

Second LP of duets by these longtime VHF family staples, here delivering 2 side-long epics of “minimalist” bliss. Both sides feature Daniel on piano and Richard on zither, with rippling waves of sound recalling classics like Charlemagne Palestine’s “Strumming Music” (Dan is a frequent collaborator with C.P.) and Richard’s “Advent.” “Persian Carpets I” is a real-humans performance full of tiny variants in rhythm and attack, rising and falling in intensity – sometimes a rush of sound, sometimes a cloud of soft overtones and phantom notes. “Persian Carpets II” is more spare, with quiet and careful piano alongside Richard’s subdued accompaniment – a gorgeous bath of pointillist sound that rewards close listening. A glorious balm for dark and weird times. Superb, quiet pressing by Smashed in Chicago.

This vinyl release represents the second collection of music by TRABANT, following our 2024 release. The package contains extensive photographic documentation of the band by JÁNOS VETÖ, and new English translations of the song lyrics alongside their Hungarian language original.

The cult band’s cult band: TRABANT were formed in Hungary in 1980. The closest the group ever came to producing a record was in the form of a promotional 7” vinyl for a film in which the core members starred. At the centre of an anti-authoritarian—that is literally outlawed—underground music scene in Hungary, this film soundtrack represented an opportunity to distribute their music without acquiring the recording and distribution license demanded by the censorious Communist regime.TRABANT measured their own success through independence and fun, as a circle of artists recording a significant body of work with rudimentary recording equipment and instruments (much of which was purchased in a toy store), always behind closed doors. The band had an ever-changing line-up formed around co-founders GÁBOR LUKIN, MARIETTA MÉHES, and JÁNOS VETÖ, and latterly with MIHÁLY VÍG (of Balaton; soundtrack composer for BÉLA TARR). TRABANT shared some of these recordings through a clandestine cassette tape network, but resisted releasing an album… until now.This vinyl release represents the first collection of music by TRABANT, compiling some of their best known and loved songs, newly transferred and gently restored from the original tapes, in a package with extensive photographic documentation of the band by JÁNOS VETÖ, and new English translations of the song lyrics by GEORGE SZIRTES (best known as a translator for his work with LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI).

Since the 1970s Mario De Leo works as a musician and visual artist. His mechanical paintings are hybrid works that reveal the cosmic spiritualism hidden in the meanders of electronics. With Riccardo Sinigaglia (Futuro Antico, Correnti Magnetiche, Doubling Riders) De Leo consolidates an artistic and human partnership with Lettera Cosmica, a work unpublished to date, produced and recorded in 1981. In a wacky electronic vision of the succession of time, the tracks trace the four seasons in a fine process of analog loops, prepared tapes of strings and piano, time and pitch shifts, filtering with Synthi Ems and Teac 3340 4-track recorder. On this seemingly cold palette, De Leo deploys his own personal Mediterranean fingerpicking, with vocal timbres peculiar to the music of the South of Italy, but no longer circumscribed to the origins of his Pugliese regionalism, as much as to an expressive range seasoned also with irony and avant-garde.The sound writing harmonizes with the evocative cover, in which emerges a warmest human note of "technological peasant”.

New Lp-edition of an obscure un-released library of the early ‘70s. Together with Florian Fricke, Peter Michael Hamel and Stephan Micus, Deuter is certainly the main responsible of a fruitful encounter between European sensibility and Eastern aesthetics in the German music of the 1970s. Soundtrack was originally produced by Kuckuck in 1973 not for an official and public release, but as a “library” to be used for films, TV and radio. As a library it respects the canonical and typological structure of the genre with 26 short sonic fragments, sequences imagined and conceived like fulminating illuminations. There's still a solid electronic vocation that, however, has put aside the most disruptive effluvia of D (1971) of pure “kraut” ancestry. In fact, the album is more like an ideal passing bridge between some ritual instances of the previous Aum (1972) and the following successful phase of Deuter during the period when he stays in the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's ashram in Poona realizing, in parallel to a renewed inner life, masterpieces like Celebration, Haleakala, Ecstasy and Silence is the Answer. Musically speaking, Soundtrack presents itself as a heterogeneous work with nocturnal, cinematic, galactic and atmospheric-environmental implications. Electronics remains the predominant factor but can vary from mantra drones of more ceremonial and meditative “space-relax” tones of some tracks (Triad, Deep Sea, Gothic Velvet or Evening) to the most amused formulations of pulsating analog synths that in the hands of Deuter become “toy-equipement” to modulate and explore (Desert Rock, Synth Effect, Flea Dance or Laser). There is no lack of acoustic moments more ethnically inspired with Arabian and Indian (Reed, Arabia) or devotionally solar themes (Tom Bombaddils Dance), so evoking an air of diffuse peace then completely conquered in the beloved India.

the debut recording by the ancients, the intergenerational coalition of isaiah collier, william hooker, & william parker formed by parker to play concerts in conjunction with the milford graves mind body deal exhibition at the institute of contemporary art los angeles & now a working group. across x2LPs of side-length long-form improvised sets recorded at 2220 arts&archives; in LA & the chapel in san francisco, the ancients bring the free jazz trio languages first explored by the cecil taylor unit & ornette coleman’s -golden circle- band (expanded upon in later eras by sam rivers' trio & parker’s collective trios with charles gayle/graves & peter brötzmann/hamid drake) into their own unique & scintillating realms of expression. as we tumble further into the throes of history’s tides, people of hope & creativity rely on the works of our great artists to lift our spirits & focus our resolve. -ascension- was recorded less than a year after the passage of the civil rights act & four months after the assassination of malcolm x. -journey in satchidananda- was recorded the month reagan was re-elected governor of california. m’boom made its debut recording weeks after the watergate scandal broke & a couple months after the wounded knee occupation ended. the music of the ancients builds on these great musical legacies. it resounds with the pride of survival & the joys of making & sharing music. it delivers to us hope & balm. something real in you, real in history, & real in the music is shared, right on time. when eremite records commenced operations during the 1990s free jazz resurgence, heavyweight freedom-seeking tenor saxophonists such as fred anderson, peter brötzmann, charles gayle, kidd jordan, & david s. ware were at the height of their powers. isaiah collier’s tenor playing in the ancients is bracing testimony that the wellspring lives on. to hear the young chicago firebrand blowing freely with veteran improvisers in an entirely open-form group music is a revelatory study of his vast talent, personal voice, & the intensity of his expression —as well as a bold complement to his composition-based albums as a bandleader (including -the almighty-, a new york times' best albums of 2024 selection). i've admired drummer william hooker since first encountering his music in a hartford ct city park, early ‘90s (on a double bill with jerry gonzález & fort apache band). from the man himself right off the bandstand i bought his even-then rare 1st recording, the 1976 self-released x2LP opus -is eternal life- (reissued 2019 by superior viaduct). an imposing force on his instrument & an intrepid DIY cat, hooker’s been exuberantly swinging in&out; of free time for 50+ years. informed by the innovations of sunny murray & tony williams yet entirely himself, there is no other term for it than “pure hooker.” at age 78, with the ancients & everywhere else, THE HOOK is in peak form. with a discography approaching 600 entries & 50+ years working across the musical maps, including in the history-defining bands of don cherry, cecil taylor, bill dixon, peter brötzmann, in his own wondrous ensembles from small group to orchestra to opera, a bastion of compassionate leadership & a poetic champion of his musical community, in tireless service to what he rather egolessly refers to as “the tone world”, multi-instrumentalist, improviser & composer william parker is a living hero of the grassroots & the black mystery musics, not to mention one of the great bassists in the history of jazz. to quote george clinton, conquering the stumbling blocks comes easier when the conqueror is in tune with the infinite. free jazz is an enduring high art. its greatest expressions belong to their particular moment in history, & live on to transcend & refract in amaranthine ways. inside our present historical moment, we are fortunate to have the master musicians in the ancients bringing us their high level creation. concerts & album co-produced with the black editions group. 1st eremite edition of 1,299 copies pressed on premium audiophile-quality 140 gram vinyl at fidelity record pressing, from kevin gray/cohearent audio lacquers. live to 2-track concert recordings by bryce gonzales, highland dynamics. mastered by joe lizzi, queens, ny. 1st 150 direct order copies include a reproduction of zac brenner’s amtrak “fan art” flyer for the ancients 2023 west coast concerts. 1st 300 direct order copies include eremite’s signature retro-audiophile inner-sleeves, hand screen-printed by alan sherry, siwa studios, northern new mexico. "Eremite Records has just released an eponymous two-LP set by a band called The Ancients, made up of bassist William Parker, drummer William Hooker, and saxophonist Isaiah Collier. It reflects the label’s long-standing advocacy, begun in the 1990s, of free jazz, often in its most intense form. In the past three years, Michael Ehlers has been instrumental in releasing a series of recordings from Milford Graves’ personal archives, issued under the label Black Editions Archive, a new partnership between Peter Kolovos and Ehlers under the umbrella of Black Editions Group. Two of those recordings were trios with Parker and Graves, a giant of free jazz drumming. The first, a two-LP set, Historic Music Past Tense Future included Peter Brötzmann in a recording from CBGB’s 313 Gallery in 2002. The second WEBO, a three-LP set released last year, had Charles Gayle as tenor saxophonist in performances from 1991. As Ehlers describes the partnership, “Peter pitched me an idea to collaborate on a new historical free jazz imprint for his label Black Editions Group. The pitch was basically ‘bring me the baddest shit you’ve got that you don’t have the resources to produce on your own.’ I called Milford Graves the next day and spent the rest of 2020 on the phone with him discussing the acquisition of a substantial piece of his tape archive on Peter’s behalf.” Both sets spoke with incredible force. Graves in both instances was making rare appearances in public and on record, and laying down as much compound, liberating rhythm as anyone might conceive. Parker was similarly inspired, and the saxophonists were giving performances as powerful as they ever had, 25 to 40 years from the explosive dawn of the idiom as developed by Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders, the era in which Brötzmann had emerged in Wuppertal, Germany and Gayle in Buffalo, New York. Even at first glance, the two-LP release of The Ancients reveals an immediate closeness with those two other releases Historic Music Past Tense Future and WEBO. The Ancients, however, is contemporary, following Graves’ passing in 2021. It was recorded in California in 2023 by a band “formed by Parker to play concerts in conjunction with the Milford Graves Mind Body Deal exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.” It represents a special segment of the free jazz tradition, whether it’s called “spiritual jazz” or “energy music,” a branch that Ehlers has lovingly recorded and released since the 1990s. There’s something special about that name, The Ancients, which functions here to name the trio and the records and might name the genre, a wonderful turn on a music that was once called the “new thing.” It’s a music that is both tied to black cultural freedom, as Ehlers makes clear in the record’s info sheet, but also to an on-going cultural expression. Those previous releases with Parker and Graves, as different as they are, have been among the most powerful music released on record in recent years, further confirmation of Graves’ special power and the commitment of each of those musicians. Its ties to black expression and culture are central, and in each of these occasions has a kind of sacramental quality, born of a special intensity. If in its sixty five-year phase of jazz history, it has at times seemed bracketed out of much jazz dialogue and journalism, it may well be because of its special power, its centrifugal force. It’s one of the musics that mean the most, and its relationship to other jazz is tangential. My personal term for this music is eschatology jazz (jazz that expresses knowledge of the last days), and its companion term is jazz eschatology (the last days of jazz). It’s now built into jazz history, however uncomfortably, in the late work of John Coltrane and the music of Albert Ayler. Considered as a style, it's always the last word in jazz, and at times might even be considered the ritual sacrifice of the audience. It is both tied up with “knowledge of the last days” and a kind of “last days” jazz, that is, somehow, outside jazz as a progression of “styles” which jazz has sometimes become in a blandly sophisticated marketplace. It makes perfect sense that the one-time “new thing” would now reveal itself as The Ancients, music as old as the energies invoked in Randy Weston at a Gnawa healing ceremony. I discovered jazz as a child partly through television, most notably The Sound of Jazz and Miles Davis’ appearance Robert Herridge Presents. In the fall/winter of 1961-62, I both entered high school and discovered free jazz. I realize now that the mood of the times – the civil rights struggle, the cold war, and the Cuban missile crisis (just as immediate in Canada as in the United States) – and the music I discovered I needed had a special relationship. When you’re told to crouch under your desk, a 3/4” slab of wood between you and annihilation, Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, Charles Mingus’ “Haitian Fight Song,” and John Coltrane’s “Chasin’ the Trane” make perfect sense. The music would grow even more intense in the next few years, until it exploded with Albert Ayler’s Bells and Coltrane’s quintet with Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali. Both came with apocalyptic --religiously apocalyptic--imagery and force. It’s that spirit that inhabits the music of The Ancients, and it may feel even more insistently contemporary than it did when it was recorded in 2023. Parker’s strengths are even more prominent with The Ancients than on the discs with Gayle, Brötzmann and Graves, the latter a virtual drum corps rather than a single musician. An essential root and foundation, the bassist comes rightfully to the fore in a sonic balance that foregrounds his essential component. No currently active musician more authentically channels the New York “new thing” of the mid-sixties than Parker, and in part it’s his relationship to the bass playing of Lewis Worrell, a rarely mentioned musician who Parker readily references. Lewis Worrell had a bass style all his own, no doubt developed far from any bass player’s academy, whether Koussevitsky’s, Jimmy Blanton’s, Paul Chambers’, or Scott LaFaro’s. Worrell might share the term “claw hammer” with five-string banjo, though it’s distinctly a bass, a swarming multi-string approach, out of which short melodic phrases erupt. Parker maintains both a fundamental pulse and a compound drone, each note resonating with the preceding and the fundamental, a thick, grouped thrum. Worrell appeared on both the New York Art Quartet’s eponymous ESP-Disk (with Milford Graves) and (less audibly) Albert Ayler’s Bells. It's this legacy that informs The Ancients and inevitably extends to Hooker, a veteran and contemporary of both Graves and Parker, whose forceful, propulsive drumming covers a substantial spectrum of densities from spare to thunderous. While one might expect inspired performances from Hooker and Parker, there’s undoubtedly something special here, both in the homage to Graves and the extraordinary performance of tenor saxophonist Isaiah Collier, a musician roughly fifty years their junior who is virtually channeling the authentic energy of the 1960s, finding his own voice that yet touches on Albert Ayler and Sonny Rollins (no easy range) and a few others. Each side of the two-LP set comes from a different performance, each fading out between 22 and 24 minutes. Sides A to C come from two days at 2022 Arts & Archives in Los Angeles; Side D from The Chapel in San Francisco. None of the performances is “complete,” eventually fading out, but one might consider that tacit recognition that one is listening to a record and is a reasonable compromise between fidelity and duration. True to the improvisers’ goal, the four performances are very different, from their opening premises and voices to their developing dynamics, evolution, and emotion. Each, as far as it goes, is a distinct, well-formed musical Odyssey, by a trio that manages to sound at once like they’ve just met and have been playing together for years. Each is also a study in transformation. Side A (2023-05-12 Set II) begins in gospel suffused reverie then passes through numerous evolutions to end in wrenching shout and thrashing percussion. Side B (2023-05-13 Set I) has stretches of remarkable minimalism, the trio reduced to single drum strokes, punctuating bass tones and saxophone yips, only to conclude with Parker playing hojǒk, a keening Korean woodwind. That feeling of immediate spirit-calling arises as well on Side C (2023-05-13 Set II). Collier demonstrates sustained development and expansion of materials, eventually relaxing the long tension curve before the side fades amidst a concluding melody. Side D (2023-05-15 Set I) stretches to musical riot, with dense bass, drums, and shouts eventually prodding Collier’s ultimate cataclysm of sound, beginning with a siren and eventually alternating (one assumes from the instrument list) Aztec death whistle and the squall of overblown tenor. It’s a series of memorable performances and fitting tribute to Milford Graves’ expansive art." -Stuart Broomer, Point of Departure "When I first heard about the trio documented on The Ancients, I was thrilled. Saxophonist Isaiah Collier has been making a lot of waves in the last few years, primarily as the leader of his group the Chosen Few (who made four albums, including two released in 2024, before disbanding), but also in the duo I AM with percussionist Michael Shekwoaga and on a direct-to-disc session released under his own name. His music is socially engaged spiritual jazz, a point on a line that runs from John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders to Gary Bartz to Charles Gayle to Kamasi Washington…and particularly through Roscoe Mitchell and Ari Brown and Fred Anderson, because Collier is emphatically a Chicago musician. What’s compelling about his approach is that he’s a synthesist who takes bebop, R&B;, soul, gospel and free jazz and combines them all in ways that showcase the best aspects of each. His playing is emotional, but grounded, and structured in a way that allows you to follow his musical statements from beginning to end. In an interview in the fourth volume of trumpeter Jeremy Pelt’s Griot book series, Collier says, “You can’t know freedom if you don’t know restriction. There’s a balance to all this stuff. Even playing free isn’t playing free. I learned that playing with Denardo Coleman. I learned that playing with William Parker. I learned that playing with Ernest Dawkins. I learned that studying with Roscoe Mitchell. There are prerequisites to this stuff.” And as that statement proves, Collier is someone who knows what he doesn’t know and seeks out opportunities to gain that knowledge, by playing with musicians generations older than himself, as he does here. Drummer William Hooker has been performing for almost 50 years, self-releasing his debut album, …Is Eternal Life, in 1977. His music spans free jazz, noise rock (he’s recorded duo albums with both Sonic Youth guitarists, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo) and indescribable zones of pure sonic exploration. Bassist William Parker is, of course, William goddamn Parker, a legend of avant-jazz who’s played with everyone you’ve ever heard of and led a thousand brilliant bands. This double live LP features recordings from three nights of shows — May 12 and 13, 2023 at 2220 Arts & Archives in Los Angeles and May 15 at The Chapel in San Francisco. It’s a breathtaking 90 minutes of three-way interaction, two ascended masters supporting a new but very promising disciple. Collier borrows from the AACM, from Pharoah Sanders, from Charles Gayle, and from bebop (I swear he quotes “Salt Peanuts”), while Parker makes his bass sound like a guembri, a donso ngoni, a guitar, and someone beating their palms against the inside of a wooden ship’s hold, and Hooker’s drumming is heavy foot and precise snare, plus some of the most amazing cymbal washes you’ll ever hear. This is “free jazz” as ancestral lore being passed down live in the moment. Forty years from now, Isaiah Collier will be teaching it to musicians in their twenties who heard these recordings and sought him out." -Phil Freeman, Stereogum "The Ancients is intensely focused 21st century free jazz via a shared and inspired bandstand consciousness. It exists without aimless noodling or egotism." -Thom Jurek, All Music "The minute that this record was announced it shot straight to the top of my anticipated list for 2025. Thankfully, the January release means that we don’t have to wait that long, and the arrival of The Ancients more than lives up to expectations. Anchored by jazz luminaries William Hooker and William Parker, themselves no strangers to collaboration over the years, the pair folds a slightly newer name into the mix. Isaiah Collier has already been on the radar here with his outfit The Chosen Few, backing Angel Bat David in Tha Brothahood, and as a guest with The Heavy Lidders at Milwaukee Psych Fest. Here, he proves more than capable of sparring with his more well-known partners, devouring styles that swing from soul jazz to the scars and squeals of the free set. The album’s main energy stems from Collier’s willingness to both give and receive energy from other points in the trio, scrawling his runs across the speakers in blood one minute and riding the rhythm like surf in the next. That rhythm is, as expected, completely hypnotic. At this point Hooker and Parker have spent years perfecting their way around and through the maelstrom, but it’s nothing short of amazing to hear the two of them work the rudder here. The record is comprised of two sets recorded at 2220 Arts & Archives in LA and one set from The Chapel in San Francisco. The former set dominates, a turbulent bout of avant-jazz that offers to turn sweat to steam in a matter of instants. Capped with a run at The Chapel, the closer is no calmer eddy, instead letting the marrow boil out of the listener with a swipe at Hooker’s noise-adjacent past. Eremite has had an untouchable run of late and this debut from The Ancients instantly lodges itself among the label’s highlights." -Andy French, Raven Sings the Blues "Free jazz trio spanning decades of interest, with recent Chicago tenor sax heatseeker Isaiah Collier merging against a rhythm section of Wm. Parker and William Hooker, recorded live by Bryce Gonzales (who engineered that marvelous Jeff Parker ETA IVtet record from a few months back) from sets in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Parker never stops, ever, but it’s been a while since Hooker’s entered my sphere (he’s truly something, humbled a bit but cracking off snare hits like rifle practice), and Collier’s fiery works like in his duo I AM have given rise to a new generation of sax deities, in the tradition of Fred Anderson (doesn’t come out to shred lungs, though it’ll happen; more focused on soulful tone and expression, and that jazz lives in space between the notes, too). This’ll peel paint when appropriate, but unlike the ‘90s output involving 2/3 of this trio, that’s not the primary target; incredible stretches of groove set in amidst these epic sides, all three participants not only loud/clear but in spatial relation to one another (Collier’s panned hard left, Hooker’s on the right, and Parker’s down the middle like the 7-10 split), every thwack, scream and valve slam rendered with the utmost clarity. LA gets the most of this album but SF gets the nut cracker on side 4, Collier playing with some sort of toy siren/ring mod in the home stretch that renders his instrument a high-tone belt sander alarm, something in my decades of enjoying jazz I’ve never heard before. Lots of reasons to lose faith these days but here, my friends, is belief restored." --Doug Mosurock, Heathendisco

Tracklisting: 1. Carminative - 11:30 2. I Soon Learned To Know This Flower Better - 07:15 3. Ja Ja - 07:30 4. Dart Drug - 25:30Another essential Incus reissue by Honest Jon's.  "Percussionist Jamie Muir was a member of King Crimson during the recording of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, in 1973. Staying less than a year with Robert Fripp, the Scot had already cut his teeth with another master guitarist, Derek Bailey, as part of the Music Improvisation Company, along with Evan Parker, Hugh Davies and Christine Jeffrey, whose eponymous 1970 album was one of the first releases on ECM. Muir and Bailey recorded Dart Drug eleven years later, in 1981. There’s no shortage of great percussionists in the brief history of free improvised music but on the strength of Dart Drug alone Jamie Muir deserves a place at High Table. Unlike for example Han Bennink and John Stevens, though, you can’t hear echoes of any particular jazz drummer in Muir’s playing, even if he has expressed appreciation for Milford Graves (who himself sounded like nobody else who’d come before him). What on earth did Muir’s kit consist of? Some instruments are clearly identifiable (bells, gongs, chimes, woodblocks); others could be… well, anything. Old suitcases thwacked with rolled up newspapers? Tin cans and hubcaps inside a washing machine? Who cares? It sounds terrific – but if you’re the kind of person who faints at the sound of nails scraping a blackboard, you might want to nip out and put the kettle on towards the end of the title track. Dart Drug is consistently thrilling, and often very amusing – but it’s certainly not easy listening. In music we talk about playing with other musicians, whereas in sport you play against another opponent (or with your team against another team). Why not play against in music, too? That’s precisely what happens very often in improvised music, and Bailey was particularly good at it. How can a humble acoustic guitar hope to compete with a Muir in full flight?  Sometimes Bailey’s content to sit on those open strings, teasing out yet another exquisite Webernian constellation of ringing harmonics and wait for the dust to settle in Muir’s junkyard, but elsewhere he sets off into uncharted territory himself. “The way to discover the undiscovered in performing terms is to immediately reject all situations as you identify them (the cloud of unknowing) – which is to give music a future.” Bailey evidently concurred with this spoken statement by Muir, including it in his book Improvisation.Derek Bailey is no longer with us, of course, and Muir gave up performing music back in 1989. All the more reason for seeking out this magnificent, wild album. Very hotly recommended." - Honest Jon's

Side 1 1. "Paris" (19:35) Side 2 1. "Niigata Snow" (6:54) 2. "An Echo In Another's Mind" (14:08) Side 3 1. "Introductions" (12:05) Side 4  1. "Inaudibles" (14:41)"At last, the vinyl reissue of this masterwork, adding two hitherto unreleased gems recorded solo for Charles Fox’s Radio 3 programme Jazz in Britain, in the same few months of 1980 as the stunning Aida performances. The phrase ‘in the moment’ is often bandied about with reference to free improvisation, and indeed there’s no better way to describe Derek Bailey’s playing. The acoustic guitar is notoriously lacking in natural reverberation — notes barely hang in the air for a couple of seconds before they disappear — which explains the almost non-stop flow of new material in these stellar performances.  Bailey knew from one split-second to the next exactly where to find the same pitch on different strings, either as a stopped tone or a ringing harmonic, and there’s never a note out of place. ‘He who kisses the joy as it flies,’ in the words of William Blake, ‘Lives in eternity’s sunrise’ — and this music is forever in the moment, constantly active but never gabby, kissing the joy. One of the special pleasures of the BBC set is the guitarist’s own laconic commentary, a deliciously deadpan description of what he’s doing while he’s doing it — “I like to think of it… as a kind of music” — and the interaction between words and music is a particular delight. “You may have noticed a certain lack of variety,” he quips, while unleashing a furiously complex volley. Is it a coincidence that the final seconds recall the famous cycling fifths of the coda to Thelonious Monk’s Round Midnight? Surely not — for Bailey, like Monk, was a note man par excellence. And they’re both still alive and well in eternity’s sunrise." - Honest Jon's

Sung Tieu employs sound as a critical tool to dissect how social and political power manifests within sensory realms. Through layered compositions, the artist examines the emotional and psychological effects of controlled environments, transforming space into an immersive auditory experience that highlights the structures of surveillance, bureaucracy and institutional design. Civic Floor examines the evolution of prison architecture, tracing the shift from the radial model developed in Britain in the 1840s to the emergence of galleried and courtyard layouts in the 19th and 20th centuries. It also explores more contemporary approaches, including the “new generation” prisons of the 1990s, which prioritised control through sophisticated spatial and psychological strategies. Tieu’s soundscape mirrors these architectural developments, blending mechanical rhythms, bodily sounds, ambient drones, and distorted frequencies to evoke the alienation and rigidity inherent in such systems. The work’s immersive soundscape disorients while enveloping the listener, amplifying the psychological weight of these spaces and their design principles. Sung Tieu (b. Hai Duong, Vietnam) is an artist based in Berlin. Her work draws on her personal experiences and research into global capitalism and its impacts, addressing themes of imperialist violence, class divides, and displacement. She often reflects the voices and experiences of Vietnamese diaspora communities in Germany. Together with Henrike Naumann, Tieu will represent Germany at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026.