David Grubbs' October 19, 2017 is a live LP released online that showcases a 32-minute solo set to mark the release of that year's Creep Mission LP. It's nothing short of magical.
Atonal free jazz trio Threadbare use unique instrumentation and a love of multiple musical styles on their fascinating new album, Silver Dollar.
Cherry Red issues a gargantuan collection of anti-establishment music associated with the 1960s London counterculture, a movement which challenged the norms and conventions of mainstream society by drinking from the well of psychedelia, free jazz, Beat poetry, musique concrete, electronics, and minimalism.
Matthew Shipp's The Piano Equation is a fully improvised solo piano recital to stand the test of time, sitting in the realm where mathematics and magic collide.
Folklore, dub, and free jazz unite in Dumama and Kechou's new concept album, Buffering Juju. The duo confront the past and the present, taking on not only legacies of pain, but legacies of thriving through it.
Revered experimental Japanese noise/punk/jazz band, OOIOO are back with a typically intense and brilliant new album, nijimusi.
Veteran drummer from New York's creative music scene, Whit Dickey combines two quartets that pose so many of the key questions about purely improvised music.
On Live/Shapeshifter, William Parker goes way back to Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus in muscular swing and melodic grace while still seeming to play out on the edge.
Led by 95-year-old saxophonist Marshall Allen, the longest running band in jazz delivers a transcendent four-night run at the SFJazz Center.
In 1969, the deeply strange musician known as Captain Beefheart released an album that is still ahead of its time a half-century later. PopMatters spoke with musicians and writers about this landmark work of art and why it continues to fascinate.
Highly accomplished jazz saxophonist Jeremy Udden reins in his multitude of musical talents with an intimate trio recording, Three in Paris.
Ninety-five-year-old saxophonist Marshall Allen continues to lead Sun Ra's legendary jazz ensemble through the turbulent present and toward a better future for mankind.
A wildly revised version of this venerable creative music ensemble makes a clean, beautiful new recording in the studio and live, with fresh music from Roscoe Mitchell and an argument that the original Art Ensemble of Chicago had everything to do with today's New Jazz.
Featuring Bruce Lamont (Yakuza), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), and Eric Block (Veloce), Sick Gazelle's Odum is the result of a meditative hour-long improvisation in a Chicago recording studio.
Instrumentally dazzling but sonically muddled, Harriet Tubman's The Terror End of Beauty is a mixed bag of genre-resistant instrumentals.
An exploratory few sessions from late in Eric Dolphy's life show him expanding in both expansive and intimate ways.
On Elephantine, Egyptian artist Maurice Louca leaves behind electronic motifs and rediscovers the unyielding power of free jazz improvisation and the mystical sense of the Arabic musical tradition.
Tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman records with two different bass clarinetists on his latest free jazz releases.
Tedeschi Trucks Band members step out as Whose Hat Is This? for their sophomore release, Everything's OK, and explore brotherhood, playfulness, and the outer reaches of the avant-garde.
Nearly every track on Robbie Lee and Mary Halvorson's Seed Triangular surprises, and if the disc fails to cohere, the pleasure of hearing the two artists figure out what they're doing remains.
Led by legendary saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and Norwegian saxophonist Kjetil Møster, the End becomes a complete improvisational act that unleashes a furious offering enshrouded in a dystopian manifestation.
In a career full of lofty goals and incredible highs, William Parker has once again sculpted an album that will stand apart from the pack through beauty alone.
Ex-White Denim, Free Radicals, Shape of Broad Minds members team of up as the Young Mothers for an unbridled track from new LP, Morose.
There are jazz musicians and there are composers. And then there's Henry Threadgill. Fans of the Pulitzer-winning composer now have 86 minutes of new music into which to dive.
The fearless pianist drops two albums on ESP-Disk... for starters.
Guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson offers as much encryption as she does revelation on her latest album.
Adam Rudolph, Dave Liebman, and Tatsuya Nakatani have summoned the appropriate named Unknowable.
Americans in the '70s would not accommodate a female Japanese performer of experimental music that is designed to provoke. Have we grown since then?
John Surman's trio create a space where a listener can drift along without getting tired. There's an energy to the playing that lifts one into a pleasant state and a good-humor to the enterprise as a whole.
CID RIM may be working in an electronic medium, but the sound feels like performance, far more than it feels like programming.
Roswell Rudd, ailing from cancer at 82, releases a loving quartet record of standards with collaborators as distinctive as he is.
The prolific, free-blowing tenor saxophonists releases six recordings at once, including two live sets, that demonstrate (again) his ability to invent in the moment with collaborators of all kinds.
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