pi

Level Pi is a one-man project from the Rhineland, stylistically related to the early Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, or Klaus Schulze. The person behind this is a certain Uwe Cremer who is playing all the instruments himself, especially the guitar and the synthesizer. Spherical sounds above which a lonely electrical guitar is majestically floating. Uwe Cremer regards his CD as homage to the days when Krautrock was still young and Pink Floyd still wrote music.

Pierre Boulez - Notations & Piano Sonatas - Pi-hsien Chen (2005) {hat[now]ART 162}
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© 2005 HAT HUT Records | hat[now]ART 162
Classical / Contemporary Classical / Post Modern / Piano Solo

Chen's survey of Boulez's piano music (bar the little competition piece Incises) invites comparisons with Paavali Jumppanen's accounts of the three sonatas released by Deutsche Grammophon earlier in the year. Both are first rate; Chen's tempi are marginally slower, but her approach is more dramatic - some of the early Notations are positively explosive - while Jumppanen explores Boulez's command of keyboard sonority more fastidiously. Both convey the energy of the young Boulez's piano writing. It's hard to believe the Notations were composed 60 years ago, and the First Sonata, with its strange, intensely French flavour, followed a year later; this music still sounds astonishingly fresh.

Marc Ribot - Live At The Village Vanguard (2014) {Pi Recordings PI 53}
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© 2014 Pi Recordings | PI 53
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Experimental / Guitar

It might be more concise to list what musical genres Marc Ribot hasn't explored than the ones he has, but his approach to the guitar has often reflected the freedom, reinvention, and elastic boundaries of jazz, no matter what the specific context. On this date, recorded in mid-2012 during a handful of shows at one of New York's most iconic venues, Ribot gives himself the luxury of stretching out with a pair of gifted accompanists, bassist Henry Grimes (who worked with Albert Ayler, one of Ribot's key influences) and drummer Chad Taylor (a veteran of the Chicago Underground Duo and Trio), and the result is one of Ribot's most explicitly jazz-focused dates in some time.

Marc Ribot - Spiritual Unity (2005) {Pi Recordings PI15}
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© 2005 Pi Recordings | PI15
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Structured Improvisation / Guitar

Guitarist Marc Ribot, formerly of the Lounge Lizards and sometime partner of Marianne Faithfull, Tom Waits and John Zorn, has been involved in his share of unusual projects, but this one might be the most unexpected: a tribute to the late saxophonist Albert Ayler's music of the 1960s. The band catches the group's rough-hewn, trancelike sound with uncanny accuracy, with Ayler's bassist, Henry Grimes, back in action for the project at age 70. But this is no sentimental tourist trip: it's an attempt to reignite the transported atmosphere that the old band discovered through a mix of simple materials, church- and street-music, blues and selfless free-fall interplay.

Steve Coleman And Five Elements - The Mancy Of Sound (2011) {Pi Recordings PI38}
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© 2011 Pi Recordings | PI38
Jazz / Free Funk / Post-Bop / M-Base / Modern Jazz

A saxophonist of a different order—part griot, theorist, numerologist, and incessant seeker of knowledge— Steve Coleman continues to forge new paths in creative music. He's influenced more of today's forward thinking artists than almost anyone in recent memory with his proven M-Base concepts. His critically acclaimed 2010 recording, Harvesting Semblances and Affinities (Pi Recordings), was a welcome return to the spotlight, and the follow-up, The Mancy of Sound , is even more rewarding.

Demian as Posthuman is saxophonist Steve Lehman’s most experimental release to date. With a solid acoustic quintet record, Artificial Light, and trio release, Interface, under his belt, Lehman is also one-third of the collaborative trio Fieldwork, whose Simulated Progress is easily one of 2005’s best jazz releases. Lehman has upped the ante on this album, which dispenses with typical notions of jazz and popular music by combining the two in an effort to document the creation of a new, hybrid music.

In for a Penny, In for a Pound is the latest installment in saxophonist/ flutist/composer Henry Threadgill’s ongoing exploration of his singular system for integrating composition with group improvisation. The music for his band Zooid – his main music-making vehicle for the past fourteen years and the longest running band of his illustrious forty plus-year career – is no less than his attempt to completely deconstruct standard jazz form, steering the improvisatory language towards an entirely new system based on preconceived series of intervals. His compositions create a polyphonic platform that encourages each musician to improvise with an ear for counterpoint and, in the process, creating striking new harmonies.

Jen Shyu - Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses (2021) {Pi Recordings PI88}
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© 2021 Pi Recordings | PI88
Jazz / Classical / Avant-Garde Music / Ethnic Fusion

Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses, the new work by sui generis vocalist, composer and multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu, is a collection of songs devoted to the marginalized voices of women around the world, and a profound elegy to personal loss. The album is dedicated to her father, who passed away in 2019. It was Shyu's discovery of her old diaries while cleaning out his closet that transformed Zero Grasses into a coming-of-age story about her ambitions and personal reflections on the racism and sexism that she has faced throughout her life.