Willem Breuker & Han Bennink: New Acoustic Swing Duo

Han Bennink | Willem Breuker

Listen closely to this session and you can hear history being made. Recorded a full five months before Peter Brötzmann’s...

Reviewed by Daniel Spicer in issue: March/2020

The Shithole Country & Boogie Band

Don’t let the name put you off: The Thing saxophonist Mats Gustafsson is mostly in a surprisingly chilled mood alongside...

Reviewed by Selwyn Harris in issue: March/2020

Charles Mingus: Mingus Ah Um

Shafi Hadi | Booker Ervin | Horace Parlan | Jimmy Knepper | Charles Mingus | Dannie Richmond | John Handy | Willie Dennis

If you’re not intimately familiar with this music, waste no time familiarising yourself and, if you think you know it...

Reviewed by Brian Priestley in issue: March/2020

Stan Sulzmann/Nikki Iles: Lush Life

Stan Sulzmann | Nikki Iles | Dave Holland

Stan Sulzmann and Nikki Iles showed just how much lyrical imagination, restrained virtuosity and empathy they possess as a sax/...

Reviewed by John Fordham in issue: March/2020

Daniel Carter/Patrick Holmes/Matthew Putman: Whoadie

Patrick Holmes | Daniel Carter | Matthew Putman

Multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter has been a player on the New York creative music scene since the early 1970s – and...

Reviewed by Daniel Spicer in issue: March/2020

Wolff Parkinson White: Favours

Oddly but attractively packaged in a spongey red material, this CD has an undiluted yet overactive contemporary improv-electronica as backdrop...

Reviewed by Selwyn Harris in issue: March/2020

David Grubbs, Mat Gustaffson, Rob Mazurkek: The Underflow

David Grubbs | Rob Mazurek | Mats Gustafsson

Though recorded live in Athens, Greece – at the Underflow Record Shop And Art Gallery, thus gifting the project its...

Reviewed by Daniel Spicer in issue: April/2020

Ellen Edwards: A New York Session

MOR singer-songwriter presents an instantly forgettable package – more EP than album – of her own material with New York...

Reviewed by Selwyn Harris in issue: March/2020

Frank Zappa: The Hot Rats Sessions

Shuggie Otis | Annie Zannus | Frank Zappa | Ron Selico | Max Bennett | Peter Occhiogrosso | John Guerin | Cynthia Dobson | Don 'sugarcane’ Harris | Jean-Luc Ponty

Hi kids… There are anthologies, re-mixes, box sets and there is Zappa World. This isn’t as re-issue, it’s an immersive...

Reviewed by Andy Robson in issue: March/2020

Muhal Richard Abrams: Celestial Birds

Maurice McIntyre | Amina Claudine Myers | Roscoe Mitchell | Thurman Baker | David Moore | Leonard Jones | Anthony Braxton | George Lewis | Leroy Jenkins | Jay Clayton

Abrams’ legend status as a founder of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) has possibly reduced the...

Reviewed by Kevin Le Gendre in issue: March/2020