Avant Garde 2023

New Herd and genius arranger and composer Masahiko Sato cooked up this spiritual work of Japanese big band magic over half a century ago but its sound still resonates today. It's a violent mix of styles that has become a cult classic with its fiery brew of alto and baritone sax, big drums and bass, wild guitars and trumpets, trombones and piano.

'Detour Tunnels of Light' is the debut duo album from renowned improvisers Martin Kuchen and Sophie Agnel. On the recording, made in a Swedish church in February 2022, they combine the raw and the delicate, blending slow swinging percussion with a hissing sopranino sax and a cracked, symphonic grand piano - like a vintage music box.

Following his Acoustic Masks, the new record Constellation of Anomaly is Vasco Trilla’s 6th solo album, bringing a new palette of sounds with a vast array of percussion instruments played in numerous creative and unconventional ways. Russian flat bells bowed and played with vibrating objects, a timpani full of wind-up music boxes and spiced up by a transducer speaker, an old zither hit as a drum with two snare drums as resonators, Iranian round bells mixed with gamelan strips, styrofoam and triangles…. All coalesce in a narrative album that reflects on how to emancipate percussion of beat and pulsation, creating rich textures, drones, intricate layers of sound. Pure percussion Music.

Music can be so many things. So why not all at once? Best of all, it unites all conceivable opposites within itself and accomplishes the paradox of conjuring up the clash of the obvious in the harmony of the incompatible. When the German expressionist Paul Klee painted his Dadaist watercolor "Zwitschermaschine" in 1922, he had a visual idea of the cacophonous bird apparatus, but possibly no idea of its sound. The Leipzig based band Zwitschermaschine (not to be confused with the art punk band of the same name from the end of the GDR era) now provides an answer a whole century later.

At the time of this recording, Mingus had been working regularly with the piano-less quartet of Eric Dolphy, Ted Curson and Dannie Richmond - The same group featured on the 1960 Candid release, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus. The Mingus album, also recorded that year, features one track, "Stormy Weather," recorded with that same quartet, and two tracks recorded with a larger group featuring piano and additional horns. Of note, "MDM (Monk Duke & Me)" consumes the majority of this album. The piece consists of three intertwining themes - Duke Ellington's "Main Stem", Thelonious Monk's "Straight, No Chaser", and Mingus' "Fifty First Street Blues." Released in 1961, and recorded in the fall of 1960 by Candid A&R and Producer Nate Hentoff at the Nola Penthouse Sound Studios.

The "straight horn" referred to in the title of this superb album from 1961 is the soprano saxophone, and Lacy is recognized as one of the greatest to ever play the instrument, ranking alongside John Coltrane and Sidney Bechet. Because of the difficulty involved in mastering it's pitch challenges, very few jazzmen concentrated on it. Lacy is widely considered the first "modern" musician to specialize on the instrument.

This album fuses the intensity of free jazz , with the meditative and mystical feeling of the spiritual approach of the genre . The lengthier timing of the tracks provides the musician the chance to explore different paths in terms of composition , on many occasions focusing on the music progression on each track , containing his perfectionist zeal and accepting the value of leaving some of the mistakes and rough edges which we consider to be a very important addition in terms of personality and originality to the work. Gustav keeps pushing the boundaries of the form by incorporating influences from ethiojazz to eastern sounds , all of it in an amazing organic way that makes it hard to believe all the composition and performance come from a single artist.

Paul Dunmall's dynamic Birmingham quintet's release Yes Tomorrow was a Discus highlight of 2022. We enjoyed the release so much that we took the unusual step of suggesting he add Julie and Charlotte to the group to make a second release. Paul embraced the idea with enthusiasm, and came up with this suite for the expanded group. The result is a freewheeling set with a great "live gig" feel, which gives plenty of space for each player to shine, and which mixes some tight compositions with open ended improvisation sections.

"Under the moniker Öppet Caprice presents a relatively underexplored period in Swedish creative and experimental music, from the period of 1965-75.

Earth’s Precisions crafts a musical surface that simulates both a larger ensemble and a single, hybrid instrument. At times, the composite of guitar and saxophone is pushed to extremes, as each of the five co-composed pieces explore the impossible polyphony of an expansive terrain, speaking in tongues. The duo shares an expressive vocality and an approach to construction that is both elemental and ritualistic, while at other times haunting and ethereal, permeated by a dose of horror. Inspired by the lineage of guitar/saxophone duos — from Fred Frith and Anthony Braxton to Tim Berne and Bill Frisell — Earth’s Precisions expands on this tradition, at once confounding the sounds of their instruments past recognition and returning them to a seemingly nascent state.