All Categories — All Formats  

A fantastic package that explores the full range of genius on the legendary avant label BYG/Actuel – one of the most important European imprints at the end of the 60s! Actuel was home to some of the best avant garde jazz coming out of Paris in the late 60s and early 70s – an especially important document of the post-68 revolution in European music – at a time when so many American players where showing up in France, and finding great opportunities in the new freedoms of the scene! The package features seminal sides from US avant musicians – like Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Clifford Thornton, Don Cherry, Jimmy Lyons, Archie Shepp, Sonny Sharrock, Sunny Murray, Grachan Moncur III, and The Art Ensemble Of Chicago – and it also features work by European musicians like Claude Delcloo and Jacques Coursil, plus genre-busting work by MEV and Gong as well. The 3CD box features a 48 page book – with lots of great illustrations, and notes from Thurston Moore and Byron Coley – and the set features 26 long tracks in all!

One of the Art Ensemble Of Chicago's all-time classics! If you've ever bought an Art Ensemble album and said "Hmm, what's all the fuss about?", get this one. It'll change your mind. The band is in perfect form – and hits an incredible blend of free thinking modernism and soulful soloing, peppered with a healthy dose of humor. The tracks are shortish, and very tight – and titles include "Jackson In Your House", "Song For Charles", "The Waltz", and "Get In Line".

Wow! This is one of Sonny Sharrock's rare early recordings, recorded in France shortly after he had been playing with Herbie Mann. The groove's kind of crazy, and it's amazing that Sonny jumped out so soon after leaving the sort of pop-jazz environs he was in with Herbie – but hey, lots of players got to France in the 60s, and completely let their bag open up – so why not Sonny? Wife Linda's on vocals on the session, and they're backed up by Beb Guerin on bass and Jacques Thollot on drums. Titles include "27th Day", "Soon", and "Monkey Pockie Boo".

A rare live set – recorded in Algiers during the Panafrican Festival in 1969, featuring a set of work that is some of Shepp's rootsiest of the 60s! The recording features a core group of Shepp, Grachan Moncur, Clifford Thorton, and Dave Burrell – all joined by a host of Algerian and Touareg musicians – playing percussion in a way that creates a heavy drone-like quality to the record, expanding Shepp's jazz sound with a spacious ethnographic vision. The sound is haunting, and the record really stands apart from Shepp's other work of the time. Features the extended tracks "We Have Come Back" (Pts 1 & 2) and "Brotherhood at Ketchaoua".

Beautiful work from the Art Ensemble – and one of their undisputed classics! The record features some of the most perfectly realized moments the band ever cut to wax, with a blend of whimsical multi-instrumental improvisation, and a strong sense of the spiritual tradition in jazz. The album features one long piece – "Reese & The Smooth Ones" – and it's a stunning array of spontanteous instrumentation, with a jagged sound that never stops reinventing itself!

Silva leads his Celestrial Communication Orchestra, one of the best of the loose collectives playing around the Paris scene of the 1969/1970 era – and a group that includes Grachan Moncur III, Archie Shepp, Anthony Braxton, Malachi Favors, Dave Burrell, and Bernard Vitet. The group was one of the most successful meetings of the French and African-American avant gardes, as you'll hear on the album's one long track, "Luna Surface".

A rare session on BYG/Actuel – not jazz, but avant classical work, featuring two striking modern pieces! Side one features Terry Riley's "Keyboard Study 2" – performed by pianists Gerard Fremy and Martine Joste. Side two features Pierre Marietan's "Initiative 1" – performed by GERM, the Groupe D'Etude et Realisation Musicale, featuring a lineup that includes piano, cello, trumpet, violin, bass, and voice.

Some of Archie Shepp's most freewheeling material of the 60s – a long, extended, single-song album recorded at the Donaueschingen festival a few years before his classic work for BYG/Actuel – and very much in the same bold spirit as his recordings for that label! The single tune – "One For The Trane" – is opened up, stretched out, and run freely by Shepp on tenor, Roswell Rudd and Grachan Moncur on trombones, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Beaver Harris on drums – a very unique lineup that benefits not just from the presence of two trombones, which gives the record a very deep, rich sound – but also from the creative rhythms of Garrison and Harris, a really great team for a session like this! Shepp is wonderful – still with this inherent sense of soul that also ties the performance to some of his brightest moments for Impulse Records – this structure, even when blowing free, that creates an amazing sense of swing somewhere back in the music.

A striking session from Steve Lacy – one of his most powerful albums from 70s Paris! We're tempted to think that this one was called "wordless" because Irene Aebi's on the record, but doesn't sing – and instead plays cello with a quintet that includes Lacy on soprano, Ambrose Jackson on trumpet, Kent Carter on bass, and Jerome Cooper on drums – and the record is a very early realization of Lacy's European sound, more tied to the BYG/Actuel years than later recordings. The album's quite free overall – pretty fierce stuff, especially as the performance moves on – and titles include "Name", "The Breath", "Prologue A Life On Is Way", "Bone", and "The Way".

An incredible collection of revolutionary jazz album cover art from the 60s & 70s – bold, vivid and unforgettable art for bold, vivid and unforgettable jazz – compiled and edited by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker! It's a snapshot of an era in jazz music when cultural and stylistic boundaries were besting wide open – and many of the ones documented are the holy grails of the era – pressed in small quantities and firing up the rare crate diggers since! Iconic art for labels such asa BYG/Actuel, Strata East, Nimbus, ESP and many more, and artists including Sun Ra, Phil Cohran, Pharoah Sanders, Prince Lasha, Hannibal Marvin Peterson, and Marcus Belgrave to name just a few. Gilles Peterson, Stuart Baker and Soul Jazz have done an exceptionally great job with the notes and text, too – much better than other books of its kind! Heavy duty, large format hardcover, to give you true-to-life-size cover art – as it was meant to be seen! 179 pages.

One of the boldest albums ever recorded by trumpeter Dizzy Reece – a session recorded in Paris in 1970, with some amazing tenor sax from the great John Gilmore! The pairing of Reece and Gilmore is a bit of a surprise – a strikingly avant choice for the former, and a rare date away from Sun Ra for the latter – but the album really has the players coming together wonderfully, in ways that really spark a whole new sense of sound from Dizzy! The trumpeter's solos are filled with fire and imagination – really stretching out here in ways that aren't as totally free as the BYG/Actuel French work of the time, but which definitely leans that way in spirit. Other players include Siefried Kessler on piano, Patrice Caratini on bass, and Art Taylor on drums – and the tracks are all long, and plenty darn driving! Titles include "Summit", "Krisis", "Communion", and "Contact".

A 2CD collection that features both of Frank Wright's albums for ESP, plus a selection of additional interview material! 1965's Frank Wright Trio is a freewheeling workout in the classic ESP mode – tenor saxophonist Wright's first album as a leader, and a majestic little session that easily stands alongside the best from Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp at the time! The format here is a bit like that of Ayler's ESP work – as Wright's hard tenor is set against the bass of Henry Grimes and the drums of Tom Price – but the difference here is that Wright's sharply-bitten, angular lines on tenor are at the forefront of the record – leaping ahead from the rest of the group and almost standing on their own as if Frank were recording solo! Titles include "The Moon", "Jerry", and "The Earth". Your Prayer is a bit more of a group effort than his first – recorded with an expanded lineup that points the way towards some of the French scene on BYG a few years later – with Jacques Coursil on trumpet, Arthur Jones on alto, Steve Tintweiss on bass, and Muhammad Ali on drums. There's a tight formation at the head of some of the tracks, with freer breakout solos as the tunes go on – very much in the BYG/Actuel mode. Titles include "Fire of Spirits", "No End", and "Your Prayer".

Sharp sounds from the French scene at the start of the 70s – played by a group that mixes some of the free energy of the BYG/Actuel crowd with the more playful styles of the other side of the post-68 underground! The group's a quartet – with Partrick Vian on guitar, Jean Claude Cenci on sax and flute, Daniel Geoffroy on bass, and Philip Barry on drums and guitar – and all players vocalize a bit on the record, mixing sensitive lyrics in with more adventurous music – in a style that reminds us of the brilliant energy heard on some of the best Saravah Records sessions of the time. Cenci's reeds are a real delight – and the guitar lines shift from jazzy to more rockish, depending on the tune. Titles include "Cosmic Toilet Ditty", "Caka Slow", "Vertebrate Twist", "Red Noise Live Au Cafe Des Sports", "Obsession Sexuelle No 2", "20 Miror Mozarts Composing ON Tea Bag & 1/2 Cup Bra", and "Sarcelles C'Est L'Avenir".

One of the best-ever BYG/Actuel sessions, and one that has the unlikely pairing of east coast avant players Sonny Murray and Byard Lancaster with Art Ensemble bassist Malachi Favors. Murray plays drums, and reads a bit of poetry, while the band wails behind him in powerful turgid lines of hard free jazz. 4 long tracks – "Invisible Blues", "Complete Affection", "Giblets – Part 12", and "An Even Break".