A 1984 live recording from Carla Bley captures her ten-piece ensemble in a vibrant NDR Jazzworkshop performance, blending sly humor, unconventional harmonies, and inventive orchestration, as a stellar lineup channels tightly focused interplay and exuberant energy into a richly expressive, witty, and dynamically charged large ensemble set.

A Norwegian quintet led by Håvard Wiik, bringing together Eivind Lønning, Espen Reinertsen, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and Hans Hulbækmo in a dynamic set that balances composed structures with free improv, blending post-bop lyricism, intricate ensemble interplay, and spacious, timbre-focused passages into a fluid and contemporary jazz expression.

Led by Headhunters drummer Mike Clark and bassist Henry Franklin, this richly orchestrated large-ensemble session blends jazz, funk, fusion, Afro-Latin rhythm, and chamber textures through ten original compositions featuring vibrant arrangements, fluid improvisation, and an expansive Bay Area ensemble including violin, cello, trombone, saxophone, guitar, piano, percussion, and French horn.

A wide-ranging solo and collaborative release from Amy Denio, this eclectic set blends voice, accordion, clarinet, guitars, bass, percussion, electronics, and field recordings across composed, improvised, and live performances, weaving jazz, avant-garde, and global influences into a playful, genre-blurring sonic journey rich in texture, storytelling, and inventive ensemble interplay.

A solo work from D. Petri assembling three cassette-based recordings from 2016-2017, blending abstract guitar voicings with prepared tapes across partially and fully improvised performances, where lo-fi textures and fragmented structures reflect memory reconsolidation, reshaping emotional resonance through layered, obscured, and reassembled sonic material.

Captured in 1968 in Zurich and long shelved before its recent discovery, this early trio session brings Pierre Favre, Irene Schweizer, and George Mraz together in a concise, fiery set of attentive free jazz, balancing Ornette Coleman's title piece with Schweizer's compositions, where dynamic interplay and acute listening reveal a nascent yet fully engaged collective voice.

An electronic project from Phillip Klampe following his album The Contaminist, this 16-track release assembles cerebral atmospheres and surreal soundscapes from layered textures and abstract tonal fragments, where familiar and obscure elements blur into shifting, otherworldly environments that invite immersive listening and subtle psychological dislocation.

Commissioned for the for/with series, Eva-Maria Houben presents a long-form work for Nate Wooley's trumpet, voice, and whistling, where sparse, precisely placed tones unfold in a meditative arc, expanding from an early performance into a deeply considered exploration of pure timbre, attentive listening, and the subtle interplay between composition and free improv.

A site-responsive duo recording from trumpeter Matthew Langford and saxophonist Andrew Weathers, using an emptied pool's reflective acoustics to shape a restrained and textural free improv of breath, resonance, and ambient detail, where sustained tones and environmental sound merge into a focused exploration of space, duration, and the physical limits of performance.

Commissioned for Ensemble Klang's Musical Utopias festival, Matthew Wright leads a twelve-piece ensemble with Sofia Jernberg and Spheric Totemic in a large-scale work structured around a slowly descending tonal "spine," where notated layers and timed frameworks intersect with free improv, while live sampling and post-production deepen the shifting interplay between form, texture, and sonic perspective.

Joining the original Centrifugal Trio of Jeb Bishop, Antonio Borghini, and Michael Griener with Danish saxophonist Mia Dyberg, this live Berlin performance unfolds through fiercely interactive free jazz and free improv, balancing dense collective motion, spacious textural interplay, and sharply responsive exchanges in an organically evolving dialog of lyrical abstraction, raw energy, and collective momentum.

Captured live at London's The Vortex in 2025, violinist Mandhira de Saram, pianist Steve Beresford, and bassist John Edwards engage in detailed free improv that unfolds with the coherence and clarity of spontaneous composition, balancing chamber-like restraint, abstract textural interplay, lyrical precision, and sharply responsive exchanges in intuitively structured collective dialog.

Reuniting more than a decade after their explosive 2011 debut, guitarist Sandy Ewen, bassist Damon Smith, and percussionist Weasel Walter deliver a fiercely focused free improv session recorded with vivid clarity, balancing dense collective eruptions, microscopic textural detail, and deeply evolved ensemble interplay shaped in part through years performing together in Roscoe Mitchell's quartet.

Uniting veteran bassist Joe Fonda with German saxophonist Silke Eberhard and Austrian drummer Emil Gross, this collective trio balances lyrical structure, agile free improv, and Dolphy-informed melodic abstraction through elegant and highly responsive interplay, where tightly focused compositions unfold into fluid spontaneous exchanges driven by rhythmic precision, adventurous harmonies, and a vibrant live energy.

Documenting the expansive collective practice of the French improvising ensemble Le UN across three CDs recorded between 2021 and 2022, this large-scale set brings together 25 performers working in shifting formations through free improv unconstrained by score or direction, exploring acoustics, public spaces, environmental interaction, and richly textural electro-acoustic interplay.

Pianist and composer Simon Nabatov leads two extraordinary ensembles featuring Frank Gratkowski, Angelika Niescier, Ina Stock, and Lucia Mense through deeply personal compositions balancing chamber-jazz lyricism, contemporary classical textures, and adventurous free improv, transforming introspective and emotionally charged themes into richly layered collective expression.

Bassist Pascal Niggenkemper leads Ensemble Tuvalu in an immersive CD+DVD work inspired by the climate-threatened Pacific island nation, uniting brass, reeds, accordions, strings, voices, and resonant sound installations in a genre-crossing meditation on ecology, displacement, and community, with the audience surrounded by the ensemble in performance and the DVD capturing a live concert realization.

Gathering seven horn players, bass, percussion, electronics, with real-time signal processing, David Peck's Turbulence Orchestra delivers a large-ensemble free improv performance balancing dense brass and reed eruptions with richly varied percussion, electronics, and found-sound textures, evolving through steadily transforming sonorities and broad-spectrum collective interplay.

Through exchanged realtime recordings rather than direct performance, multi-instrumentalist Udo Schindler and vibraphonist/percussionist Sergio Armaroli create an intimate two-CD session of exploratory free improv, with Schindler responding on soprano saxophone, clarinets, flutes, and cornet to Armaroli's vibraphone pieces in a fluid virtual dialog inspired by the alpine passage between Munich and Milan.

Four adventurous Polish vocalists — Anna Gadt, Natalia Kordiak, Marta Grzywacz, and Gosia Zagajewska — join forces with drummer Jim Black for a striking program of collective free improv, where extended vocal techniques, abstract textures, rhythmic interplay, and spontaneous theatrical expression unfold in highly responsive exchanges, balancing primal energy with nuanced sonic exploration.

Reconnecting generations of European free improv, legendary saxophonist Trevor Watts joins longtime collaborator Barry Guy and percussionist Ramon Lopez for a fiercely interactive trio session balancing ecstatic energy, disciplined abstraction, and deeply responsive interplay, as decades of shared musical history erupt into vivid collective expression, explosive rhythmic momentum, and emotionally charged spontaneity.

The duo of pianist Christine Wodrascka and bassist Bernard Santacruz create an intricate and mercurial dialog of free improv, balancing lyrical abstraction, percussive tension, and elastic interplay as the two musicians continuously reshape parallel narratives through intimate exchanges, textural contrasts, and restless sonic transformations that drift between delirious energy, shadowy atmospheres, and moments of fragile silence.

Uniting three masterful improvisers — baritone saxophonist Daunik Lazro, bassist Joëlle Léandre, and drummer Paul Lovens — this Paris concert presents deeply attentive free improv where resonant timbral exploration, fractured lyricism, and highly responsive interplay unfold through spontaneous collective forms of sparse abstraction, visceral expression, and nuanced rhythmic detail.

Drawing on years of close collaboration, saxophonist Cath Roberts and bassist Olie Brice engage in a deeply attuned duo of free improv where baritone saxophone and double bass shift between raw abstraction, lyrical motion, and playful unpredictability, balancing sharply focused exchanges with richly textural interplay that evokes both intimate conversation and surreal theatrical movement.

Using field recordings captured inside working printing houses in Santiago, Chile, Amanda Irarrazabal merges industrial machine rhythms, electro-acoustic manipulation, and studio improvisation into immersive sound works that balance hypnotic repetition, dense textural abstraction, and fragile resonant space, transforming mechanical process into fluid and deeply tactile experimental composition.

A deeply personal solo violin work dedicated to Hind Rajab, Mike Khoury uses extended techniques, sparse lyricism, tense silences, and raw timbral exploration to transform the violin into a vehicle for mourning, reflection, and fragile emotional resonance, balancing meditative stillness with moments of unsettling intensity in a haunting and highly expressive contemporary string performance.

Bringing together poetry, theater, and expansive orchestral jazz, composer and pianist Mike Westbrook leads a remarkable 16-piece ensemble through a sweeping work for jazz orchestra where the vocal artistry of Phil Minton and Kate Westbrook intertwines with richly textured brass, reeds, and improvisation to evoke procession, memory, mortality, and the transformative power of collective expression.

Led by guitarist and electro-acoustic improviser Abhilasha Chebolu, the Turtle Boat trio joins saxophonist Alex Burgoyne and drummer Dan DiPiero for a deeply attentive and introspective free improv session, balancing spacious interplay, raw textural exploration, and emotionally resonant exchanges informed as much by contemporary composition and experimental sound art as by the traditions of free jazz.

Blending exploratory jazz with deeply personal free improv expression, the quartet of Chad Fowler, Matt Lavelle, Ken Filiano, and Bobby Kapp engage in a volatile and spiritually charged dialogue using rare horns, elastic rhythm, and richly textural interplay, evoking ritual, memory, transformation, and collective discovery through instrumental gesture, harmolodic freedom, and emotionally raw exchange.

Marty Ehrlich leads a chamber-jazz septet with poet Erica Hunt reciting her own texts, shaping fifteen concise works where clarinet, flute, alto saxophone, trumpet, bassoon, cello, bass, and percussion move through composed forms, free improv, and spoken word in a vivid, scene-shifting suite balancing dark resonance, bright melodic sparks, and a searching sense of hope.

Flöjter, the high-voltage duo of Delphine Joussein and Mats Gustafsson, capture their first live performance at Atlantique Jazz Festival, pushing flutes, slide flute, spilåpipa, harmonica, organ, and electronics into a volatile terrain of free jazz, noise, groove, extreme metal energy, and raw chamber intensity, where breath, distortion, and fierce interaction reshape the flute from within.

Neurodivergent Orchestra's tenth exploration of Evil Clown's absurdist concept expands its improvised spoken interplay into a four-part exchange, setting disaster-movie and pop-culture mayhem amid a sprawling arsenal of reeds, brass, electronics, percussion, strings, synths, toys, real-time processing, and invented textures for an unusually theatrical form of pure improvisation.

Charles K. Noyes continues his late-period exploration of electric guitar as a personal electroacoustic language, recording direct to stereo with effects and Ferrous to create nine stark, resonant improvisations where metallic attack, spectral sustain, fractured melody, and raw electronic texture extend his history as a percussion innovator into a solitary, time-bending sound world of memory, landscape, and unease.

Elliott Sharp returns to solo piano with a set of compositions rooted in the instrument's physical properties, drawing on his complex history with the piano — from childhood performance to later works such as K!L!A!V!, Mapping, and Oligosono — to explore the poetics of resonance, high-tension strings, attack, volume, and the tactile force of sound through a Steinway B.

Eric Mingus and Elliott Sharp extend more than twenty-five years of collaboration from Terraplane and Songs From A Rogue State into a concentrated duo album of psychedelic punkfunk No Wave, with Mingus' commanding voice driven by Sharp's guitars, bass, synths, and drum programming in fourteen jagged songs of blues, politics, rupture, and electric urgency.

Turbulence closes Evil Clown's prolific 2025 with a broad-palate horn-driven improvisation led by David Peck with key members John Fugarino, Michael Caglianone, Michael Knoblach, Kelsey Gallagher, and Joel Simches, transforming reeds, brass, electronics, synths, found percussion, bells, gongs, toys, and extended objects into a tightly interactive long-form work of shifting sonorities and large-unit invention.

Collecting fourteen "Five Minute Shorties" from as many Evil Clown albums recorded between July and December 2025, this seventh volume offers a compact sampler of the label's broad-palette improvisation, presenting twenty musicians across nine modular ensembles in concise works of reeds, brass, strings, electronics, bass, percussion, and emergent form.

Myra Melford and Satoko Fujii meet in a rare two-piano encounter rooted in decades of friendship, their live performance unfolding as the heart-to-heart conversation suggested by the title, with both artists so deeply attuned that individual lines dissolve into a shared language of spontaneous form, lyrical intensity, emotional openness and beautifully balanced collective invention.

Joel Futterman and William Parker continue a collaboration of more than forty years in an hour of spontaneous composition, the pianist's heavy, high-energy approach meeting Parker's deeply grounded bass in two extended movements and a brief coda that balance ecstatic force, romantic beauty, collective listening and a rapturous sense of spiritual, improvised communion.

Merging solo performances from the US and Italy with fiery duets alongside drummer Hamid Drake at Antwerp's Summer Bummer Festival, guitarist/vocalist Ava Mendoza delivers eight live tracks of charged blues, rock, free improv and psychedelic intensity, her bold electric sound moving from raw riffs and declarative vocals to spiralling abstraction and ego-free guitar heroics.

Marta Warelis leads her first sextet as composer and bandleader in a live Bimhuis performance with Ben LaMar Gay, Ab Baars, Karen Ng, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and Frank Rosaly, shaping an energetic, interplay-driven music of multilayered reeds, trumpet electronics, piano, synth, bass and percussion into a joyous exploration of multiphonics, beat frequencies and Warelis' expanding compositional language.

NYC saxophonist Michael Foster joins Swiss bassist Christian Weber and Berlin drummer Michael Griener for a visceral trio session of free improv charged with noir tension, drawing on American crime novelist David Goodis-inspired titles as the group moves through fractured momentum, suspenseful restraint and explosive exchanges shaped by deep rhythmic instinct and structural awareness.

Swedish clarinetist Christer Bothén joins Quagmire — Nina de Heney on double bass, Karin Johansson on prepared piano, piano and zither, and Henrik Wartel on drums — in a darkly textured free improv session of sculptural interplay, where deep clarinet lines, rumbling bass, metallic percussion and fragmented piano gestures form a shifting landscape of fragile intensity and balanced collective sound.

The debut solo album from Iranian, Belgium-based clarinetist and improviser Ghazal Faghihi, a cycle of thirteen fully improvised pieces using clarinets, objects, Shruti box and electro-acoustic and interactive electronics to extend the instrument into fragile sound worlds of breath, resonance, texture and silence, moving through uncertainty in a shadowed space between order and chaos.

A 4-CD survey of Clifford Brown's essential 1953-1956 Blue Note and EmArcy recordings, tracing his masterful trumpet voice through early leader dates, string settings, vocal and ensemble sessions, and the classic Max Roach quintet with Harold Land, Sonny Rollins, Richie Powell and George Morrow, capturing a foundational hard bop figure at astonishing creative strength.

Swiss saxophonist Christoph Gallio presents two complementary works: a 2016 Lucerne set of concise, aphoristic exchanges with Raphael Loher on piano and effects, and a 1988 NYC electroacoustic session with Matthew Ostrowski on ARP synthesizer and sampling and Alfred Zimmerlin on cello and effects, balancing wit, beauty, abstraction and sharply focused improvisational form.

Italian violinist and viola d'amore explorer Marco Fusi meets Canadian bass guitarist and electronics performer Pierre Alexandre Tremblay in a first free improvisation recorded at Huddersfield, where bowed resonance, baroque memory, electric bass vibration and electronic transformation merge into a tactile electroacoustic dialogue of gesture, space, memory and shifting emotional tension.

Uniting Federico Reuben's laptop improvisation and live coding with Mark Hanslip's tenor saxophone, Dominic Lash's double bass and Paul Hession's drums, this first meeting of the quartet creates a vivid field of possibility, balancing glitching electronic textures, elegant reed detail, inventive bass work and nuanced rhythmic motion in exploratory free improv.

Collecting Machinefabriek works from singles, EPs and compilations released between 2015 and 2025, Rutger Zuydervelt presents a 17-track, 76-minute continuous mix that serves as both a personal selection of favourites and an inviting entry point into his immersive world of ambient detail, drone, field recordings and electro-acoustic texture.

The sixth entry in Ivo Perelman's expanding Duologues series, and the sixth album in Squidco's digital label Squid Note Records, pairs his searching tenor saxophone with Damon Smith's commanding double bass, a freely improvised exchange of raw physical immediacy and deep listening, where intertwining lines, extended techniques and spontaneous form turn dialogue itself into the core of the music.

Exploring Kristofer Svensson's 11-limit Just Intonation tuning for Prakāśa, violinist Maya Bennardo, bass clarinetist Erik Blennow Calälv and Svensson on Indonesian kacapi shape a fragile, resonant chamber music of fully notated form and modal improvisation, where breath, string resonance, silence and unequal intervals create a quietly radiant field of melancholy and meditative depth.

Judith Wegmann and Marlies Debacker perform John Cage's 1989 Two2, a late work for two pianos whose thirty-six short lines unfold through independent tempi, shared pauses and resonant decay, allowing the duo's deep experience in composed and improvised music to shape a live performance of patient asymmetry, concentrated listening and quietly radical spaciousness.

Presenting four recent works by James M. Creed performed by Standard Issue, To Your Ear Collective and Outline Ensemble, this debut on Another Timbre explores sparse notation, instrumental doubling, fragile homophony and gently shimmering ensemble textures, as overlapping groups of young UK experimental musicians sustain music of quiet uncertainty, collective attention and delicate, slowly forming resonance.

Swiss composer Edu Haubensak's 2019-2024 cycle for six scordatura pianos, performed by Simone Keller, Rafael Rütti, Asia Ahmetjanova, Stefan Kägi, Yoko Sawa and Stefan Wirth, builds a monumental field of microtonal resonance and harmonic colour, paying homage to Ivan Wyschnegradsky's Arc-en-ciel while linking Haubensak's mature tuning work to his 1979 Schwarz Weiss.

Composer Sylvia Lim's quietly individualistic chamber works explore fragility, decay and timbral richness across solo, duo, trio and small ensemble settings, using prepared cello, resonant piano, clarinets, percussion and guitars to let intimate gestures, unstable sounds and microscopic details slowly unfold into hushed, tactile sound worlds.

A deeply elegiac final statement from Nate Wooley's Columbia Icefield, with Susan Alcorn's pedal steel, Ava Mendoza's guitar and voice, and Ryan Sawyer's drums joining Wooley's trumpet, amplifier, voice, whistling and footwork in music shaped by grief, memory and gratitude, responding to the deaths of Ron Miles and Alcorn through expansive, emotionally weighted improvisation.

Klaus Lang's chamber works for Apartment House trace a patient, inwardly focused music of sustained tones, structural clarity and lyrical restraint, drawing from Pre-Raphaelite poetry, Basho's autumnal imagery and Keats' epitaph as clarinets, strings, piano and electric organ reveal slowly shifting architectures where beauty, stillness and sound become forms of quiet protest.

Expanding Matthias Muche's BONECRUSHER into a 12-trombone ensemble with Etienne Nillesen on extended snare drum, this powerful ezz-thetics release explores the trombone as a massive yet highly detailed acoustic organism, moving between composition and improvisation through crackling chords, microtonal pressure, resonant overtones, dense brass clouds and fiercely sculpted collective sound.