This year's An Ayler Xmas is the 5th in the series from saxophonist Mars Williams, mashing holiday classics with works by saxophonist Albert Ayler, with the amazing sextet of Josh Berman on cornet, Jim Baker on piano, viola & Arp Synth, Brian Sandstrom on bass, guitar & trumpet, Steve Hunt on drums, Peter Maunu on violin and Kent Kessler or Krzysztof Pabian on bass.

"In 2019, guitarist Ed Pettersen was given the opportunity to explore the incredible acoustic space of the Emmanuel Vigeland Mausoleum in Oslo, Norway, a dark room covered in frescos of naked figures, with his electric lap steel guitar....

"Using classic instruments and simple composition, Pepa Päivinen and Jussi Miettola illuminate a story from their national history, bringing to life a story set in the deep of Scandinavian winter. A thrilling, and ultimately tragic,...

"Ava Mendoza plays these songs. She makes them sing. Her technique is impeccable, but her playing is astonishingly expressive. She doesn't just bend blue notes; she wads them up into a ball and throws them up against a wall. She manipul...

"Inspired by Elias Canetti's book The Torch In My Ear, Vasco Trilla centered their project around this passage, "every completely unknown language is a kind of acoustic mask; as soon as one learns it, it becomes a face, understandable a...

"The latest recording by Zorn's newest ensemble Chaos Magick is a suite inspired by the ancient Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Combining contemporary classical with jazz, funk, rock, blues, film soundtrack, noise improvisation an...

"The new album from Chicago spiritual jazz shaman Kahil El'Zabar, leading an ensemble of enviable upcoming talent. A cross-generational collaboration from a jazz luminary whose work spans more than five decades, El'Zabar's extraordinary...

"Ava Mendoza plays these songs. She makes them sing. Her technique is impeccable, but her playing is astonishingly expressive. She doesn't just bend blue notes; she wads them up into a ball and throws them up against a wall. She manipul...

"Robbie Lee is an improviser and sound creator in New York City, performing on an eclectic range of instruments, across the fringes of creative music in many scenes. On Prismatist he plays only two things: sopranino saxophone and tunin...

"Tim Olive returns for his third album on Notice, a rare solo outing from this avid collaborator. Ribbon is a document of his highly developed relationship with amplified object manipulation, in a manner most cathartic and engaged, and ...

Lucy Liyou's music carries with it deeply personal poetry, in a literal and metaphorical sense, conveyed using sound collage, noise, field recordings, and abstracted pop tendencies. When Notice first heard Lucy's music, we were struck b...

"Ming Bau Set is a collective of three improvisers who began meeting regularly in 2018 to deeply explore improvisation and song form. Over the next three years this process yielded a shared language and vision of music realization that ...

"They are sameiliar which means each one resembles the one before as well as the consecutive one as if they were the same. Perhaps they were all the same in a utopian past, or there was even only one of them - which must have been, then...

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"'Two Rooms from the Memory Palace"" re-imagines and captures the live, visceral impact of Andrea Parkins' immersive eight-channel fixed-media composition 'by the same name. The work highlights Parkins' ongoing exploration of poetic int...

"This is light; hours of Stampede, Smurf, Kaboom!; this is heartship; this is suburbs; boredom; hope; imagination; fear; this is sunk; it's kaleidoscopic; it's hard to follow; this is pushed through a door on a rainbow of memories; this...

"In 1984 Cecil Taylor came to Poland for the second time. His first performance in Poland was in 1968 in Warsaw Philharmony where he presented a solo piano recital. After 16 years he returned to the Jazz Jamboree festival but that time ...

"All arrangements, deconstructions and original music by Anna Gadt In the piece "Monumentum" was used the theme from "Monumentum pro Gesualdo" by Igor Stravinski"-Anna Gadt

"Thanks to Josh Berman, Mike Reed and Hungry Brain for hosting us as part of the Sunday Night Jazz and Improvised Music Series and the lovely audience that came out for it. This was the first time Avreeayl and I played together. Matt an...

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"Here is a sonic palette of eight re-tuned pitches for piano and saxophone, explored in an attempt to expand harmonic empathy. The aesthetic that arises from this interrelating of the foreign with familiar reveals an intrinsic logic, or...

"Bennu is a brand new limited edition LP, and the first recorded document of longtime collaborators Dave Rempis (saxophone) and Avreeayl Ra (drums/percussion) performing as a duo. This new record was made in February of 2021, after the...

"Long-form solo work by multi-instrumentalist composer Andrew McIntosh. Featuring field recordings of pine woods in his home state of California mixed with impeccably crafted instrumental playing. The four parts are continuous and are i...

"Four clarinet-based works, brilliantly played by Heather Roche, with Juliet Fraser, Anton Lukoszevieze and James Opstad. Music with intricate, interweaving lines, the title piece is a mesmerising work for multi-tracked clarinets and f...

"A late work of extraordinary sensual beauty, realised by Apartment House, and - at 79'50" - only just fitting on a standard CD. Not to be missed."-Another Timbre

"A series of six beautiful works for piano and instruments, realised by Apartment House and pianist Siwan Rhys, with great cover artwork by Maxwell Doig."-Another Timbre

"Front and center in Stagnant Rapture is adherence to fidelity. The simultaneity of low fidelity and high fidelity. Loyalty to textured electric-acoustic grit and interleaved accuracy; the guitar and drum egregore straddling -buckling- ...

"This is a live recording made in Seattle in 2019, the final show of Virtual Balboa's west coast tour, a bumpy ride full of high highs and low lows, pan flute beatboxers, sadboy rappers, burglary, and unexpected detours into soggy terra...

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"And Ernesto Rodrigues is starting to release more recordings from this year: I want to note especially the "string quartet" album Fantasy Eight (another shorter release, recorded in Berlin this past May), but also the "similar" followu...

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"Elisabeth Harnik, an Austrian based pianist and composer has created a multi-faceted body of work by blurring genre boundaries through various collaborations in the field of improvised music, interdisciplinary projects and contemporary...

Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii hasn't let the global pandemic slow her down. She's recorded solo and duet albums at home and made others by swapping sound files over the internet. Now comes Mosaic, her new album with her trio This Is It!, he...

"At first impression, it is ambiguous whether the name Moon-Liters/Millennium Development Goals signifies a band or even two connected concepts. Philadelphian poly-instrumentalist (vocals, guitars, drum machine, electronics) D. Liedel, c...

"Six years after the internationally acclaimed GETTING ALL THE EVIL OF THE PISTON COLLAR!, the uncontested masters of jambacore - André B. Silva, Pedro Melo Alves and Filipe Louro - strike again with a powerful new album in which ...

"By this time, Martin Küchen's name is familiar to all those interested in the Clean Feed catalogue, because of the Swedish saxophonist releases by this Portuguese label of his various Angles formations and bands like Trespass Trio ...

" "We sure are alive", writes Pedro Melo Alves in the liner notes of "Lumina". It's true, the music inside is a survival chant: we made it, after two years of a science fiction-like nightmare. And suddenly, there's some light. The Portug...

"The pandemic forced me to focus on solo works for its duration. It was fun to explore the world of overdubbing and multichannel recording for a year or so, but I am more than ready to resume ensemble playing. When the hammer came down ...

"Metal Chaos Ensemble was formed in early 2015 by PEK and Yuri Zbitnov as a working project to explore chaotic rhythms on metallic instruments. I had started to amass the Evil Clown Arsenal of percussion, electronic and wind instruments...

"Leap of Faith is the core duet of the Leap of Faith Orchestra (LOFO) comprised of PEK on clarinets, saxophones, clarinets and flutes, and Glynis Lomon on cello, aquasonic and voice. The ensemble is based in Boston and dates back to the...

"Centered around Nicola Cosmo Salerno and Roberto Zorzi, the NAD project - formerly Nie; Abdominaux Dangereux, now Neu Abdominaux Dangereux, 25 years after their debut release "Ghosts" - features an impressive range of collaborations on...

"This is a compilation of segments from 6 different recordings throughout the U.S. and Greece including: a trio with Amy Denio and Samantha Boshnack at the Good Shepherd Chapel in Seattle, part of the Wayward Series; a duo with Seetha S...

"Forty years ago a group of hipsters fled Manhattan for . . . has it even been that long? I cannot fathom for I'm still alive and so many of my comrades have fallen to age, to the Amerikka machine. We started our Harlem project with gre...

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"I recently became aware of the unique and distinctive instruments made by Tim Kaiser. I would classify these instruments as electro-acoustic rather than electronic since they amplify quiet acoustic sounds made on guitar strings, spring...

"One aesthetic problem requiring a solution when performing long solo works on many instruments is how to continue the sound through the time required for instrument changes... Of course, the looper does exactly this since the loop will...

"For Raymond Sheldon Peck on the day of his passing 17 September 2020. I have been very sad since the news arrived a few days ago of my father's passing. He has had a hard time the last few years, falling several times and sustaining in...

A companion of sorts to the Euphorium release from Leimgruber/Turner/Dorner/da Boff/Flesh, London/Leipzig/Luzern, soprano saxophone Urs Leimgruber breaks off solo for an extended improvisation recorded at the same studio on the same day in Leipzig....

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"For those who love vinyl albums, I recommend you to be fast to get your copy of this one, as only 300 copies exist. It brings a great duo recording full of suprises by Lao Dan on alto and Chinese flute and Deng Boyu on drums and percus...

A beautifully balanced encounter between Baltimore pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn and Bay Area reedist Phillip Greenlief, performing on tenor saxophone & B-flat clarinet, improvising four "colors" as the two span the spectrum from rapid interaction of weaving and pointillistic playing into deeply introspective and ruminating discourse, each the perfect complement for the other.

"Just a few months after the Eisenach based f r e a k e s t r a had shown their electrified groovy improvisations on a little tour performing at venues in Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden, Krakow, Gottingen etc. Oliver Schwerdt came up with an ...

"The first double album of a vast cast of an early version of the legendary E U P H O R I U M _ f r e a k e s t r a was recorded primarily in march 2001 and never officially released before the twentieth birthday of the ever renewable e...

"The E U P H O R I U M _ f r e a k e s t r a in it's early days already formulating an album presenting different musical styles one piece after another. For shure the focus seems to lie on an improvisatory approch to dealing with conte...

"With Dal Ngai the E U P H O R I U M _ f r e a k e s t r a at an age of three years is reborn as an ensemble with two godfathers of contemporary music. On the one hand it called Daddy and on the spot appears Gunter Baby Sommer, the grea...

"There are view vocal actors which can improvise semantically. Friedrich Kettlitz the co-founder of the E U P H O R I U M _ f r e a k e s t r a proved to be a master of that genre in the year 2011. With his close friend and extravagant ...

"Gunter, Baby 'Sommer is not celebrating his 70th birthday alone. In addition to his fourth solo CD Dedications, he presents the duo CD Dry Swing / Tandem Spaces together with the piano player Oliver Schwerdt. With one of the most idios...

"Aware of the history of the group later became a quintet Oliver Schwerdt decided twice to form the original triadic constellation before having a bigger set with the additional basses. That Short Night of 2013 catches the warm-up which...

"As you supposably know Oliver Schwerdt coming along within an ensemble is nothing less than a linear player. At least the multiplicity of his chordal structuring finds an equivalent in Christian Lillinger's rhythmical figuration. But o...