clifford_thornton

Another one I would like to improve upon vinyl condition-wise.

LPs aren't too hard to come by and feature no digital jitter!

love all the misspelled titles. Greek Cooking is a neat album. I'm surprised it hasn't been reissued on CD.

seems like the label has been dead quite awhile. I don't have much of their catalog beyond the late '60s.

I feel like it wasn't THAT long ago that Love In Us All and Crystals were on CD as mini-LP editions.

Too bad. RIP.

Got Vista on LP for $4 at one point long ago. I don't listen to it as much as some others, but it's still a solid album.

Magic of Ju-Ju is the shit. Have had it on LP for many years.

Sam Shepard played drums with the Holy Modal Rounders and the Fugs.

Well, he wasn't a bad drummer...

Like the op, I pretty much started with free music and my tastes became broader the more I dug. Reading helps, for sure - not just books full of recommendations, but books about the music and the people who've made it - Litweiler's "The Freedom Principle" and "A Harmolodic Life," Nat Hentoff's writings on jazz, Valerie Wilmer's "As Serious As Your Life," AB Spellman's "Black Music: Four Lives," Amiri Baraka's writings on Black Music in the '60s, Graham Lock's "Forces in Motion" (Braxton) and John Szwed's "Space is the Place" (Sun Ra), Larry Kart's "Jazz in Search of Itself," etc. To me, learning about artists' lives and humanity has always served as the highest recommendation, sometimes before hearing much of their music.

http://discog.piezoelektric.org/marionbrown/r/marionbrownquartet.html yeah, the last ESP edition included all five tracks on CD, so I had to pick it up too. *) Now: Amon Düül - Collapsing - (Metronome GER orig) *) 'only' four tracks have been recorded. The complete issue is hard to find and very expensive! http://www.amazon.de/Marion-Brown-Quartet/dp/B000A0GP4A/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1426434512&sr=8-11&keywords=Marion+Brown Somebody can't add... that would be me! Now: Clifford Jordan/John Gilmore - Blowing In From Chicago - (Blue Note, King JP mono)

Sunny Murray.

Couple dudes I know are associated with Stranded, which I can vouch for in the sense that they are good folks who have killer LPs. That is, if LPs are your mettle.

Indeed, that and the Baystate are both excellent.

I thought Braxton left the AACM in '75. This is an impossible task but I'll be interested to read what others have to say. People In Sorrow was the first I heard and it did leave an indelible mark.

http://discog.piezoelektric.org/marionbrown/r/marionbrownquartet.html yeah, the last ESP edition included all five tracks on CD, so I had to pick it up too. Now: Amon Düül - Collapsing - (Metronome GER orig)

OBEY = Halifax experimental/new music festival of fairly recent origin, not connected to the clothing line. dunno about the Potter Valley thing but perhaps one of Ehlers' buds is getting married or something.

Yeah, the late '70s were the time when people like Parker and Bailey started playing in the US (brought over in part by Henry Kaiser, if memory serves). Bradford Graves, who founded Soundscape in '79 along with Verna Gillis, had a pretty extensive collection of European free music from the '60s and '70s. I think that people in NYC were fairly aware of that music - in the '70s, one could buy FMPs, ICPs and Incus records from New Music Distribution Service, which was set up as an arm of the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association (Carla Bley/Mike Mantler). Stollman claims he was trying to put out Machine Gun in a US edition in the early '70s, so he was aware of Brötzmann, and he'd already released records by Gunter Hampel, Pierre Courbois, Peter Lemer and Nedley Elstak (all released in 1968, I think). These folks were cropping up in DownBeat scene reports at the time, too, so people in the US were definitely aware of European free music as part of this creative arc. EFI is a pretty broad-brush term, as is jazz. One could conceivably say that the Bead Records scene is just as much a part of it as Franz Köglmann (studied with Bill Dixon and Steve Lacy, very much applying West Coast Jazz tonal organization to free etudes) or the Don Cherry-inspired romps of the Stockholm crew.

In my view, EFI was a direct result of certain musicians deliberately separating what they were doing from the jazz tradition. Deliberately not playing the rhythmic and melodic devices that were still part and parcel of the more traditional American Free Jazz scene/movement at that time. So severe a break it was (looking at it in hindsight), it really was a factor in breaking the music up into different lineages. I have always thought of Evan Parker as a post Coltrane tenor saxophonist whose history/career ran independently of guys like Frank Wright, Charles Brackeen - and later on David Murray or Joe Lovano. There was almost no connection between this musicians except for Derek Bailey's Company interacting with some of the more outré American jazz guys like Braxton, Lewis and Zorn. Maybe I am looking at it more symbolically than it was in actuality, but EFI in some ways was the first purely radical improvisational movement that reacted against the tradition - with efforts not to incorporate forms that were pretty much a given in any sort of jazz - from trad to free jazz of that era. Now there are many musics within musics that add/subtract elements from all sorts or parts of the tradition. This focus and "narrowness" of approach opened up a timelessness in much of that music. A timelessness that exists in the best of all music. Yeah, I know there was an attempt to radically redefine improvisation on their local, white (importantly) terms. However, I take its actualization on those terms with some grains of salt. Each case is different, too - there's a fairly wide gulf between, say, "Collective Calls" and the Schlippenbach Trio/Quartet. One could say the same about AMM of the Gare/Prévost persuasion (jazz) and the Cardew/Rowe persuasion (aleatoric and heavily electro-acoustic), and I find the SME to be very much jazz music, even at its most abstract.

How does European Free Improvisation interrupt the idea of a jazz lineage? I don't follow.

Pretty much everything that Karl said.

Reminiscent of this: http://cecilmcbee.jp/ At least they could've had the dignity to call themselves Lonesome Dragon, right?

I have the Iskra/Cortical LP of Improvisation September 1975 as well - interesting record, and since I'll never be able to find/afford an original, it'll have to do.

Yeah, he was awesome. RIP.