Drummer and Nea Jazz Master Billy Hart releases first live album, Multidirectional, with his longtime all-star quartet featuring saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Ethan Iverson, and bassist Ben Street.
Legendary drummer Billy Hart credits the great Rashied Ali for introducing him to the term “multidirectional” – a descriptor for the elusive, daring approach to the kit that Hart and others of his generation had developed intuitively in response to the increasing freedom and exploration of the era’s jazz experimentation.
“Rashied Ali told me that ‘multidirectional’ was what John Coltrane called this freeform feel, where conventional structure was abandoned and the rhythms could cut in any direction,” he writes in Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography…
Category: *editions*
An expanded deluxe edition of A Tab in the Ocean by Nektar. First issued in November 1972, the album was the second release by Nektar and was a milestone for the band as it set the template that that would bring them success in both Germany and the USA.
Originally featuring just four pieces, the albums first side would be dominated by the extensive title track which was a progressive rock tour de force. The remaining tracks, ‘Desolation Valley / Waves’, ‘Crying in the Dark’ and ‘King of Twilight’ would also become Nektar classics.
The album was recorded and mixed at Dierks Studios, Stommeln, Germany in October 1972, produced by Peter Hauke and Nektar and engineered by Dieter Dierks.
Coming off the less-than-classic Shake It Up, the Cars decided again to change things up, this time moving from their home studio in Boston to London to record with Mutt Lange. The producer was coming off a string of sleek modern hits, most recently Def Leppard’s Pyromania, and the Cars put themselves in Lange’s capable and demanding hands. They spent six months in the studio painstakingly putting the album together, sometimes spending days getting the right bass sound or vocal take. The bandmembers were rarely in the room at the same time and instead of using live drums on the record, Lange and David Robinson put together drum tracks using samples of Robinson’s playing. This sounds a bit like the recipe for a airless, stale album,…
While most bands undergo a number of changes over the course of their careers, few of them experienced a more radical stylistic evolution than Fleetwood Mac. Initially conceived as a hard-edged British blues combo in the late ’60s, the band gradually evolved into an incredibly popular and influential pop/rock act over the course of a decade. Originally, guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer provided the group with their gutsy psychedelic blues-rock sound, then the band moved toward pop/rock with the addition of keyboardist/songwriter Christine McVie….
Fleetwood Mac Live 1975 captures the incredible electricity of the band’s first tour with the legendary lineup of Stevie Nicks & Lindsey Buckingham joining Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, & Christine McVie.
A remastered and expanded 4-CD box set of ‘Sea Dream’, with unreleased demos, live material, and new archival content.
…Sea Dream was a collection of previously unreleased demos and recordings made by the late Randy California and his band Spirit. Originally issued in 2002 as a double CD version and unavailable for many years.
The ‘Sea Dream’ suite was a project Randy had been working on since the late 1980s and this work was the basis of the original release which was greeted with praise from Spirit fans. For this new edition, Spirit archivist Mick Skidmore has located new master sources of the original material and has also enhanced this release by the discovery of an additional 2CDs of wonderful,..
…This remastered edition celebrating the 25th anniversary, includes a previously unreleased track.
Some musical genres change violently in sudden lurches. Others sway and shimmy forwards, evolving so gracefully so you hardly notice. When the impeccably laid back Brazilian bossa nova decides to embrace modern technology there’s no surprise it should do so ever so gently.
Bebel Gilberto has a pretty daunting musical heritage to live up to. Her father is João Gilberto, the man who invented bossa nova, and her mother is the singer Miúcha. Bebel’s first public appearance was a concert at Carnegie Hall with her mother and Stan Getz when she was nine years old. So it’s not surprising that shes taken a while to record this debut album.
…featuring the original album, B-sides, remixes, singles and never-before-released live at NEC, Birmingham, which has been newly mixed by Dan Hawkins.
From the moment the pan flute fanfare on “One Way Ticket” kicks off One Way Ticket to Hell…and Back, it’s clear that the Darkness still believes that more is more. If anything, the band believes that even more is even better: with the help of producer Roy Thomas Baker, they make their second album incredibly glossy and expensive-sounding, with layers of sitars, marching drums, bagpipes, and tubular bells on top of their already-powerful guitars, drums, and keyboards (and, of course, Justin Hawkins’ formidable falsetto). But while the band’s excess succeeded on…
…featuring six bonus tracks (and one song replaced).
Neil Young’s sixth studio album, 1975’s Tonight’s the Night, closed out the singer-songwriter’s so-called Ditch Trilogy. 1972’s country-rock landmark Harvest catapulted Young to superstardom, yielding the chart-topping single “Heart of Gold” and becoming the U.S.’ best-selling album of 1972. But he wasn’t comfortable with everything that fame brought, and his successive albums replaced the wistful glow and commercial sheen of Harvest with something altogether darker. Tonight’s the Night followed Time Fades Away (1973) and On the Beach (1974) in the trilogy, though Beach was actually recorded after Tonight’s.
The raw, unvarnished music of Tonight’s…
…2025 edition features fully restored audio by Neil Combstock (Bōucan Road Studios).
Julien Philéas, better known as Granmoun Lélé (1930–2004), was a griot and one of the most outstanding artists from the island of Réunion. Lélé was a percussionist, singer, storyteller and, above all, a healer.
As a teenager, he worked as a fitter in a sugar factory. After a week of work, Lélé would sing at kabars — places where, according to Malagasy custom, men and women gather to dance to the sounds of traditional instruments. He was raised amid Tamil rituals and Malagasy ceremonies, and he also drew inspiration from his dreams, experiences and the surrounding nature.
The album Soléyé was originally released in…
Universe’s lone 1977 LP cloaks Hawkwind-meets-Syd-Barrett psychedelia in Yes-scale grandeur, with dexterous keys, swirling synths and ten-minute epic “Touchdown” propelling an ethereal, subtly spiritual voyage through cosmic Americana.
The result is a heady acidprog reverie, equal parts celestial hymn and spacerock odyssey, that ranks among the great hidden treasures of 70’s U.S. prog. Mixing the sounds of Hawkwind and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, Universe successfully created their own acid rock sound. Formed in the mid ’70s in California by Gary Paul Van and Dennis Lee Askew, Universe released one eponymous album in 1977, and what an album it was.
Touchdown features fine acoustic and electric guitar work. It is the longest song…
A spellbinding five-CD box set Archives Box 1983-2005 documenting the entire enigmatic production of one of the missing links in experimental electronic and prototypical industrial music: Anne Gillis. From her groundbreaking 1983 Devil’s Picnic release through her 2005 installations and exhibitions, this comprehensive collection unveils the hidden world of a visionary French composer whose work anticipated much of what would follow in electroacoustic composition and sound art.
Since the early 1980s, Manon Anne Gillis has been creating music using primitive systems, pursuing the smallest of impulses to their logical end-points. Her work exists in a space simultaneously quotidian and theatrical, transforming spoken word, breathing, and singing into blurred noise…
Everclear, one of the leading alternative rock bands to emerge from the ’90s led by vocalist, guitarist and founder Art Alexakis, has officially released the Sparkle and Fade 30th Anniversary Remastered Deluxe Edition.
The new, expanded edition of Everclear’s platinum-selling, major-label debut album, Sparkle and Fade, features all 14 original tracks, remastered by Brad Blackwood, plus bonus content pulled from the vault, featuring unreleased tracks, alternate versions of fan favorites, and original demos, as well as cover songs that were recorded around the same time as the original Sparkle and Fade sessions.
Sparkle and Fade, which had a massive impact in 1995 with its chart-topping hit Santa Monica…
1. Young Marble Giants – Final Day
2. The Fall – Totally Wired
3. Arthur Russell – I Couldn’t Say It to Your Face
4. Warpaint – Undertow
5. Robert Wyatt – At Last I Am Free
6. 1990s – You Made Me Like It
7. Cabaret Voltaire – Nag Nag Nag
8. Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers – The Neighbors
9. Galaxie 500 – Blue Thunder (W / Sax)
10. Ivor Cutler & Linda Hurst – Women of the World
11. Tav Falco’s Panther Burns – She’s the One…
12. Anohni and The Johnsons – It Must Change
13. The Strange Boys – Be Brave
14. Honey Hahs – I Know You Know
15. Jeffrey Lewis – The Chelsea Hotel Oral…
1. Alan Sparhawk – Not Broken
2. BC Camplight – Where You Taking My Baby?
3. Matt Berninger – Bonnet of Pins
4. Peggy Seeger – Slow
5. Steve Queralt – Swiss Air (feat. Emma Anderson)
6. Nathan Salsburg – Ipsa Corpora (Excerpt)
7. Poor Creature – The Whole Town Knows
8. Natalie Bergman – Dance
9. Holden & Zimpel – Incredible Bliss
10. Witch – Dancer On a Trip
11. S.G. Goodman – Snapping Turtle
12. The Wildmans – Sometimes
13. Faun Fables – Widdershins
14. Tropical Fuck Storm – Teeth Marche
15. North Mississippi Allstars – Preachin’ Blues
Many important West African musicians built productive careers in 1970s Britain, and the local stars were eager to incorporate their scintillating sounds into their own music. Originally from Ijebu Ode, Nigeria, percussionist Gasper Lawal spent much of the early part of the decade moving through the happening London scene as a session and gig musician for the likes of Joan Armatrading, Graham Bell, Stephen Stills — and even Barbara Streisand. There were stints in various groups too, including the Ginger Baker-led Air Force. But Lawal soon resolved to work on his own music, and his debut album, Ajomasé, first released in 1980 and now newly reissued by Strut, is a fascinating and surprising record with unusual eclectic flourishes throughout. “I wanted to do…
In the uncompromising world of Muslimgauze, few releases capture the raw urgency and political fire of Bryn Jones’s vision as powerfully as No Human Rights for Arabs in Israel. Now returning via MG Archive Vol. 033 as a double CD in a limited edition of 200 manually screen-printed copies, this confrontational masterpiece stands as one of the most rhythmically relentless and politically potent works in the entire Muslimgauze catalog. The album’s genesis reflects the chaotic creative process that defined Jones’s approach: Staalplaat received two DATs bearing the same provocative title but containing different content—overlapping in places yet distinct enough to warrant this expanded double CD presentation. The result is a work that captures Muslimgauze at his most focused…