Two From Circum-disc Records

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos
Improvising drummer and composer Peter Orins is the main man behind the small, but significant in adventurous musics of today, label called Circum-disc. The following two releases are, certainly, two of the best I’ve listened to the whole year, pushing the envelope of improvisational music a little further. Like all releases from the label, both CD’s (even though Circum-disc is...

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Allen Lowe & The Constant Sorrow Orchestra - Louis Armstrong’s America (ESP-Disk’, 2024)

By Lee Rice Epstein
Let’s start with the hyperbole: Allen Lowe’s massive, five-hour opus may turn out to be one of the most important recordings of the 2020s, if only more people well spend time with it. Lowe’s music is personal, deeply thoughtful, and addictively listenable. Lowe spends a great deal of time reading, writing, and thinking about jazz and the blues, their intersection, the influences that birthed rock and...

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Barre Phillips (1934 - 2024)

Photo by Didier Bonnet / ECM RecordsBy Martin Schray
Sometimes you play music and it wasn’t planned to release it as an album. That’s what happened with the first bass solo album in jazz. Barre Phillips, the man who made that record, was asked by a friend of his, Max Schubel, to record some bass sounds. Schubel wanted to use these sound for “mixed music between tape and live“. Phillips agreed and played for probably...

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Ingrid Schmoliner - I AM ANIMAL (Idyllic Noise, 2024)

By Sarah Grosser Composed in the week leading up to the 2024 Artacts festival in St Johann in Tirol, Austria, and performed in the Dekanatspfarrkirche (deanery parish church) Ingrid Schmoliner’s epic I AM ANIMAL is presented in two parts, averaging around 20 minutes each. This release on Idyllic Noise is a recording of the performance commissioned by the festival, which debuted on March 10, 2024. Although the organ is notoriously...

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Nathan Hubbard/Kyle Motl – Obsidian (Confront Recordings, 2024)

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos
A whole bunch of great releases came out from the vaults of Confront this year (have you checked the Derek Bailey/Simon H.Fell vinyl by the way?) but this one stands out a bit more and goes straight on my best of list for 2024. Kyle Motl is a double bassist that I really enjoy listening to. The dynamics of his playing are always grasping my attention. He is always energetic but low key...

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Janel Leppin, Jon Irabagon, Peter Evans ... urgent, restless and (in a good way) relentless

By Paul Acquaro
Janel Leppin Ensemble Volcanic Ash - To March is to Love (Cuneiform, 2024) You cannot say D.C. based cellist Janel Leppin didn't try to sound the alarm, that she didn't try to put into her music into the service of delivering an important message. Released in June of 2024, To March Is to Love is intense, infused with an urgency of that moment. On her Bandcamp page, Leppin underscores this, saying "This is the...

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Sentient Beings - Truth Is Not the Enemy (Discus Music, 2024) *****

By Don Phipps
Strikingly intense, no quarter given – all hands on deck. The music on the Sentient Beings album, “Truth Is Not the Enemy,” is simply a roller coaster of highs and lows (or hills and valleys if you will), which, whether slow-burn or rip-roaring, maintains its intensity from start to finish. Recorded live at The Vortex in London on February 8, 2024, “Truth Is Not the Enemy” features the quartet...

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Trance Maps large and small, near and far

By Stuart Broomer
Evan Parker and Matt Wright have been working together since 2008. Wright initially contacted Parker to explore his extensive collection of ethnographic field recordings and it eventually evolved into a duo in which Parker improvised on saxophone and Wright improvised with turntables and samples. The two have since added other musicians to the project (their presence signalled by a “+”), resulting...

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Free Jazz Collective's Top Albums of 2024

Drawing by Anjali GrantDear readers, Thank you for another year of being a part of the Free Jazz Collective! According to our statistics, we have been lucky to see continued readership growth, with a rather noticeable jump in pageviews starting in October and running through November, which peaked at rather jaw-dropping number of 47,906 views in one day! The numbers have settled, but we're still seeing daily pageview count of around...

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John Zorn - New Masada Quartet, Vol. 3 (Live) (Tzadik Records, 2024)

By Lee Rice Epstein
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE John Zorn’s inaugural 1990s Masada songbook ranks as one of the most iconic books of compositions in modern jazz, alongside equally recognizable and influential songbooks of that time, like Anthony Braxton’s collage music, Henry Threadgill’s Very Very...

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