Jazz | Fusion Preorder 397 Items

Sun Ra Arkestra, Live in Japan! Recorded at Shinjuku Pit Inn on August 8, 1988, this recording has undergone fresh remastering from the master tape, marking the first reissue in 36 years!!

Vibey, soulful and genre-bending, Sun Ark weaves together electronic, hip-hop, Brazilian and jazz influences to create a lush, colourful and orchestral sound. Dreamy and complex, Sun Ark founder and songwriter Johannes Mann describes their self-titled debut album (Berlin’s Xjazz Music, February 2024) as ‘exploring a landscape’; a sonic story with a bright, springy opening track that bends into a red-hot, experimental arc. In Sun Ark’s performances, the band’s beat-driven grooves drift from produced compositions penned by Mann into skillful ambient and collaborative improvisations, creating a sound that is effervescent and entirely unique. Two of the band’s in-studio improvisations are excerpted in Sun Ark: fragile, droning ‘Photon’ and delicate ‘Fear’ both stem from the same 25-minute improv, and are sampled at opposite ends of the album. From Sun Ark’s light, breezy opening track ‘Sun’ to a lush, groovy ‘Arden’ sunset,this exploratory and masterful debut album paints a strange other world, which drip from the trippy and psychedelic to the dark, droning and angular. Listeners tumble into Sun Ark’s shimmery, fluid moods, which reach a crescendo at the album’s midway point, ‘Moon.sun’, a rich, ambient inverse of the album’s opening track, featuring a vocal sample from Charles Mingus’s ‘Eclipse’. Composer Mann and his band of skillful improvisers eschew categorization, leading the listener boldly from contemporary jazz to avant-garde and experimental (‘Ai Ai’ and ‘ArkOne’), lo-fi and guitar-forward (‘Shuggie’) and daydreamy melodies in acoustic Instrumentation (‘Crepuscule’). Sun Ark bridges the gap between electronically-produced music and acoustic jazz ensemble playing, with tracks that highlight the skilled musicianship of each of the band’s players. Melancholy, hungover-feeling ‘Walk’ highlights a stand-out bass solo from Thorbjörn Stefansson (on double bass), while Bene Jäckle (flute) provides sparkly, sunny intros and outros to ‘Arden’ and ‘Onfym’. ‘ArkOne’ and ‘Crepuscule’ feature confident performances from Povel Widestrand, playing on the Fender Rhodes and grand piano, and guitarist and composer Mann leans into an ‘80s synth sound in ‘Shuggie’ utilizing a Casio Midi-Guitar. In ‘Ai Ai’, Marius Wankel’s performance on drums is unmistakable, providing a complex rhythm that oozes between fast and slow, while Mann shows his guitar skills improvising over the complex set of Chord Changes of the song. Mann, Nissen, Widestrand, Stefansson, Wankel and Jäckle have played in venues around the world, from Bahia, Brazil’s Festival de Jazz do Capão to Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center, and across a number of local venues, including the Jazzexzess Concert Series, A-Trane and Donau115. In SUN ARK they join forces to improvise and experiment collectively to create a current Sound that aims to have a profound spiritual and emotional Impact. Sun Ark was recorded by Piotr Zegzula at RecPublica Studios in Lubza, Poland and Mixed & Mastered by Martin Ruch at Control Room Berlin. Additional Overdubs and Postproduction were done by Johannes Mann in his Studio in Berlin-Neukölln. The album’s retro futuristic artwork and visualizers are by Ben Luu, with trippy, mind bending videography by Ada Grueter for “Moon.Sun”.

Words by Eliza Levinson

Fire! have always been about finding the essence by getting to the core of the music. Their 8th album sees the trio - for the first time on record - stripped down to the bare-bones essentials; with no flutes, no electronics, no guests and no extras, recorded live in the studio to analogue tape - the Steve Albini way - with the master himself at the controls in Electrical Audio in Chicago. Thus, this album stands as a true testament to the group´s expressive power and glowing intimacy. Musically, Testament can be seen as an extension of their previous full length album Defeat, released two years ago, to the month. A solitary bass figure from Johan Berthling, quickly joined by a stout drum groove, gets it all going in a familiar fashion before Gustafsson adds desolate cries and whispers from his baritone sax. This approach is even more honed on the second track, with the most simplistic groove you´re likely to hear in jazz and Gustafsson shifting between extended, lonely, tortured lines, only once abrupted by a series of short bursts. The third track starts with loose and relatively lively drums that continue throughout, but the mournful saxophone maintains a subdued atmosphere. Track four is a real beauty with the trio slipping into a trance-like dream state before shifting gear halfway into its nine minutes. The final track is the most dynamic of the lot, shifting between bursts of energy and lyrical beauty.

"The Night is The Night is the ambitious follow-up to singer, pianist and composer Rotem Geffen’s seminal debut You Guard the Key. For this new recording she’s been collaborating with producer Alex Zethson (keyboardist with Sven Wunder, Mariam the Believer, Goran Kajfes Tropiques, Angles 9, Fire! Orchestra) and co-producer/mixing engineer Anton Toorell (Dammit I’m Mad, Invader Ace), and together with some of Stockholm’s finest musicians they’ve created an irresistible masterpiece.

The instrument setting varies, but the piano and voice form a common thread. However, on 'Ich vermisse dich,' the piano sound is abstracted by a felt-covered tone, while on 'River,' the spoken voice is intertwined with Hernandez's violin. 'I Always Know' stands out as the only song with a clear percussive rhythmic element, skillfully crafted by percussionist and sound artist Henrik Olsson. Unlike her debut album, this release prominently showcases the harmonium as a recurring instrument in its sound palette. Additionally, the album introduces the flute as a new element. Isak Hedtjärn, a longstanding collaborator with Rotem Geffen, expands beyond playing clarinet and bass clarinet. Notably, on 'I Beg,' Hedtjärn's flute and Leo Svensson Sander's cello elegantly spiral upwards, as if entwined in each other.

The lyrics, written in German, English and Hebrew, explore themes of memoring, love, grief, loss, and the night as a vibrating room. The ”I” and the ”You” are drawn as relational organisms, with boundaries that shift, blur and are redrawn in the encounter with each other. With a varied and dynamic instrumentation, the songs are imbued with a naïve shimmer that is balanced by darkness, depth and a low-key intensity – in both lyrics and music. This work is certain to resonate with fans of artists such as Julee Cruise, Björk, Nico, PJ Harvey and Fairuz, to name a few."

The music Charles Mingus and his group recorded during his landmark 1960 sessions for Candid Records produced three of the most revered jazz albums of the era. Incarnations is a new masterpiece thoughtfully assembled from rare and unreleased material from those sessions that stands proudly in the Mingus canon of masterworks.

All but one of the tracks here are from the November 11th, 1960 sessions Mingus and producer Nate Hentoff put together. The date was split into two halves: one a pure Mingus-led date, featuring a six-piece band that expanded into an octet for two additional tunes, and another, a partial reunion of a collective that had assembled in opposition against George Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival that past July. (That collective, calling themselves The Jazz Artist Guild, would release the album Newport Rebels, on Candid in 1961.)

Of special note here is the one track recorded during the Mingus October 20th 1960 sessions. It is a previously unreleased track titled “All The Things You Are (All.)” Found on a tape that contained material from both of these fall 1960 dates, the piece has its roots in an Art Tatum rendition of “All the Things You Are,” which Mingus had recorded before in various settings.

Featuring Booker Ervin, Eric Dolphy, Charles McPherson, Ted Curson Lonnie Hillyer, Roy Eldridge, Jimmy Knepper, Britt Woodman, Tommy Flanagan, Paul Bley, Dannie Richmond and Jo Jones. With audio restored and remastered by Bernie Grundman, and liner notes by Pitchfork and New York Times contributor Hank Shteamer, this album is a must have for any Mingus fan.