Avant Garde 2023

Xiu Xiu’s Hyunhye Seo commands avant-garde piano clatter and drone noise conceptually relating to the mysterious life cycle of eels in her 2nd solo album on Room 40.

The Music Improvisation Company documents the coming together of some of Britain’s most adventurous improvisers – guitar experimentalist Derek Bailey, saxophonist Evan Parker, electronics-man Hugh Davies and percussionist Jamie Muir –, combining their multiple-idioms spanning reach in a fiery display of collective musicianship. Here shape, texture and oblique dissonant constructions operate on equal terms.

Among the many prodigious and tragic talents in the Prestige Records stable of the mid-'50s, pianist Mal Waldron was one of the most prodigious and tragic. Waldron's abilities on the piano made him an accompanist of choice (he was Billie Holiday's from early 1957 until her death); his style in group improvisational formats was daring and innovative, pushing the envelope of hard bop and post-bop into more progressive areas.

On their 5th studio album, Connection, Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog have pushed their long-brewing tension between traditional pop songcraft and avantgarde improvisational music to the breaking point, bridging their customary genre-agnostic approach with elements of glam boogie, minimalist disco, psychedelic boogaloo, garage-punk-against-the-machine agitprop, and so much more.

In 1987 the Renner Ensemble Regensburg was formed under Bernd Englbrecht, which took its name from the Regensburg cathedral organist and composer Josef Renner jun. (1868 -1934) named. Almost all members of the ensemble received their musical training from the Regensburger Domspatzen.

Far from the extended still lifes and mises en abîmes of their acclaimed Penultimate Press debut A Sunset for Walter (PP43, 2019), Noetinger & Pateras’ 15 Coruscations weaves frequencies & stirs data into an agitated series of deft psychoacoustic miniatures. Employing electronics as a deformed mirror reflecting joyous lacerations & interweavings, 15 Coruscations borrows from both brut & skilled musical practises, emerging from the current despair to blister light across the moribund horizontalities of post-surveillance musical product.

La Jungle’s newest release, Blurry Landscape, is a musical journey that takes the listener on a wild ride through a comprehensive collection of music genres. With their blend of noise rock, progressive rock, art rock, krautrock, psychedelic rock, punk rock, experimental, and other similar styles, La Jungle creates an experience that is both thrilling and refreshingly unpredictable. From the opening track, Tomorrow, it is clear that La Jungle is a band that knows how to experiment with percussions, sounds, and textures. The song features a powerful drumbeat that sets the tone for the rest of the album, but you can expect powerful guitar riffs and vocals on the remainder of the material.

Poem for Malcolm is a jazz album by Archie Shepp. Recorded in Paris in August 1969 only two days after Yasmina, a Black Woman, it again features musicians from the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

The guitar has often seemed to take second place to other instruments in jazz, being perhaps more closely associated with other vernacular musics, the blues, pop, later rock. In her new album I Got Strings, award-winning guitarist and composer Eleonora Strino delves back into the great jazz standards, including “I Got Rhythm” and shows that even with just six strings, it’s possible to find rich new variants on the old songs.

Donald Eugene Cherry (November 18, 1936 — October 19, 1995) was an avant—garde American jazz trumpeter whose career began in close collaboration with saxophonist Ornette Coleman.