Private Release

Monday, February 17, 2025

Andy Emler - 2025 - Le Temps est parti pour rester

PEEWEE! – PW1016

Andy Emler's Music has this peculiarity, he composes to highlight the soloists who will interpret the work he hears. After some experiments in composition, for string orchestras, for brass instruments or even saxophones, a clarinet orchestra imposed itself on him.

Usually gathered as a quartet, this time it is eight clarinets that will be accompanied by Claude Tchamitchian, Eric Echampard and Andy Emler. Time has gone to Stay is an ode to this instrument offering a wide wealth of registers. The team, as virtuoso as it is facetious, promises an unforgettable concert both by the music and by the humanity that emerges from them when they are reunited.

John Surman - 2025 - Flashpoints and Undercurrents 2xCD

Cuneiform Records – Rune 515/516

Recently celebrating his 80th birthday and one of Europe’s foremost jazz musicians, John Surman is a masterful improvisor, composer, and multi-instrumentalist (baritone and soprano sax, bass clarinet, and synthesizers/electronics). For nearly 60 years, he has been a major force, producing a prodigious and creative body of work that expands beyond jazz. Surman’s extensive discography as a leader and a side man numbers more than 100 recordings to date and has featured dozens of prominent artists worldwide. Surman is most popularly known for his longstanding association with the German label ECM, who began releasing Surman’s recordings in 1979. Every period of his career is filled with highlights, which is why Cuneiform is exceedingly pleased to release for the first time ever this amazing document of the late 60s 'Brit-jazz' scene.

Surman lived in London during the 1960’s and thrived in the exploding music scene. ‘60s London was the world’s center of popular music, and Surman was a key figure in its core, working with dozens of notable jazz and rock musicians. First appearing on record on a 1966 Peter Lemer recording on ESP, during the 60s, Surman played with Mike Westbrook, John Mclaughlin, Dave Holland, Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, Alexis Korner, Mike Gibbs and many others. He listened to everything and worked with scores of bands in London’s melting pot, playing everything from free jazz to hard bop, mainstream jazz, blues, the then-emerging jazz rock, and South African township music.

By the end of the 60s, the British Jazz emerging from London was recognized world-wide as one of jazz’s most vital and creative manifestations. In 1968, Miles Davis visited Ronnie Scott’s and subsequently recruited two Surman collaborators, Holland and McLaughlin, for his American band. Surman’s activities intensified; he appeared on at least 8 recordings, including a compilation live at Ronnie Scott’s, and then played the ‘68 Montreux Jazz Festival with his Octet, winning its award for best soloist. He began recording solo albums, his first in ’68 featuring pianist John Taylor and bassist Dave Holland. Surman would surpass these activities in 1969, his busiest year of the decade. He appeared on 11 recordings that year, including McLaughlin’s Extrapolation, and by the end of the year, he left England to begin working as part of a new, Belgium-based unit called The Trio, which would prove to be a watershed in Surman’s career, launching his international profile.

At the time of the recording released here, Surman had just finished recording his second album as a leader, How Many Clouds Can You See, so Flashpoints and Undercurrents is a unique chance to get an expanded view of his formative work as a leader and also at the early work of his musical compatriots who appear with him here. For this occasion, Surman led a ten-piece ensemble featuring the cream of modern British jazz players as well as two Austrian musicians.

What's doubly valuable about this release is that it contains a large amount of pieces never recorded elsewhere. Captured in excellent stereo sound, this release is a exceptional and hugely important document that will blow the minds of Brit-jazz fans and will open the ears, eyes and minds of those who don't know the great and distinctive work of these fine musicians!

Brian Crook - 2000 - Bathysphere

Medication – 003

EXWHITE - 2025 - Balkan Tourtape

Turbo Discos – none

La Boa Meets Tony Allen - 2025 - La Boa Meets Tony Allen

Comet Records – Comet 126

Modo Corp Ation - (1999) Snutt CDr

Satter – SPCDR1

VA - 2025 - To Say I Was Here: Arabic, Greek, Judeo-Spanish, and Turkish Speaking Jewish Recording Musicians, 1907-69

Canary Records – none

The discs that were the dominant commercial recording medium during the first half of the 20th century are composed of a mixture of shellac (the secretion of the Asian lac beetle), carbon, and over 80% finely ground stone. They are literal rocks that remember the music of people who are now gone. They remain monuments to their lives and the art of the performers who made them.

The practice of leaving stones on graves is a way of expressing the permanence of the meaning of the lives of the dead. The old, stone 78rpm discs are rarely revisited, but in listening to them again and surrounding them with context, we hope that the music can take root in the hearts of people living today. Experiencing them dignifies the musicians' contributions, expressions, and lives.

Each spiral-inscribed disc they left behind can be both a memorial to them, telling us that they were once here, and an opportunity to contribute to the permanence of the memories of the musicians and their audiences.

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"[Nagoski's work opens] up a counter history of modern life in which artists outside of the mainstream are granted a central role, and the affective labor they performed is recognized as constitutive to the communities they served. The archive of old records is a conduit to a history of American life that takes seriously immigrant communities and how they are given shape by listening practices. In turn, contemporary listeners (who may not identify with the groups represented) are encouraged to make the music live again as a form of aesthetic experience, but one that holds an invitation towards ethical contemplation.

...

The precise pathway between the post-Ottoman world and the outsider arts scene that Nagoski operates in is circuitous, abstract and suggests the outline of a science fiction narrative, or a utopian impulse. ... [The] music rejects political violence associated with identity politics and instead opens up a discussion of shared needs, as symbolized by the sociality that music uniquely provides—structuring community and providing the language of memory that gives life its mythic powers."

-- Jeremiah Lockwood, Reseach Fellow at the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience at UCLA

Tracklist

1. Badriyya S‘ādeh – Maʿa s-salāmeh yā ḥilū (Peace Be Upon You) (03:29)

2. Ibrahim Effendi – Koniali (Sweetheart From Konya) (03:18)

3. Joseph Moskowitz – Turkish Melodies (03:03)

4. Shehadi Ashkar – Taxim Hujaz Car (03:17)

5. Moses Cohen – Wana Mali, pts 1+2 (What Is Wrong With Me?) (06:32)

6. Amalia – Turnam Nerdan Galior (Crane, Where Are You Coming From?) (03:14)

7. Moise Effendi & Smyrna Quartette – Telegrafin Teleri (Telegraph Wires) (03:07)

8. Isaac Angel & Stamboul Quartette – Bir Yun Oladjak (There Will Be a Day) (03:56)

9. Zaki Mourad – El helwa di wei keffa di, pts 1+2 (He Is the Best of Us) (06:45)

10. Isaac Algazi – Anna ke'av zedoni (Like a Cloud, My Wickedness) (02:53)