RETURN FROM THE STARS

Vinyl LP pressing. "When we walked out on stage it felt like a homecoming," says Jakob Bro of this texturally spacious and emotionally charged live recording from Copenhagen, on which three of the defining protagonists of improvisation in Denmark, leading musicians from three generations of Danish jazz, come together. The concert, in February 2023, was particularly poignant since it marked a return to performance for trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, who delivers some of his most thoughtful playing here. Repertoire, drawn from Jakob Bro's Returnings and Gefion albums, is addressed in spontaneous and exploratory spirit, and transformed as Marilyn Mazur's subtle percussion language of blossoming gongs and metals and rumbling drums blends with Bro's drifting and rippling washes of sound. The music's atmospheric qualities, as well it's eruptive moments, are enhanced by the resonant acoustics of the Danish Radio Concert Hall.

VAGABOND

Vinyl LP pressing. All funds from the sale of this LP will go to benefit the Tzadik label. SCP, the online distributor for our direct-to-consumer mail order projects has shut down owing Tzadik $70,000. To help rebalance this loss we are releasing this special vinyl version of six selections from New Masada Quartet Volume One. New Masada Quartet is one of the best groups Zorn has ever had. Bristling hot guitar master Julian Lage, bass wizard Jorge Roeder and 30-year Zorn veteran Kenny Wollesen perform with a crackling live energy that brings the Masada music to life like never before! Led by Zorn's versatile sax and stop-and-start conducting, the music is filled with burning solos, telepathic group interaction, heartfelt lyricism and hypnotic grooves. Please purchase this limited edition LP and help Tzadik continue it's mission to support and document new music in the 21st century. Special Thanks to Sarah Robertson, Marisa Rolish, Scott Hull, Heung-Heung Chin, Bruce Gallanter, Stephen Svacina, Glenn Dicker, and Redeye for donating their time and services to help Tzadik with this special benefit vinyl release.

Devon Hoff, Yuka C. Honda, Michael Leonhart, Jo�o Nogueira, Mauro Refosco, Ches Smith, Johnny Mathar, Sean Ono Lennon. Tzadik is proud to present Asterisms, a beautiful and exploratory instrumental project by Sean Ono Lennon, one of the most creative and versatile musician/composer/producer/songwriters working today. Sean has written countless songs, composed film scores, produced, and performed on dozens of albums-and here he steps out as the leader of an all-star band of Downtown luminaries. Years in the making, the music is powerful, trippy, and intensely imaginative, blending rock, electronics, jazz, and more into an exciting new musical soundscape. With driving rhythms, a stunning lyricism, and a brilliant sense of orchestration, this album is sure to surprise and delight music fans the world 'round. Beautifully recorded, this is modern instrumental music at it's very best-essential!

Few will ever match the musical scope of the great "first lady of song" Ella Fitzgerald. From her early years collaborating with the key figures of big band jazz to her distinctive interpretations of jazz standards, in the late 1960s, she began exploring the more popular musics that began to emerge, adding them to her repertoire and uncannily making them her own as she powerfully did throughout her career. This rare collection re-issued on vinyl is comprised of her live performances from this period, recorded in 1969 from a series of concerts from the San Francisco Fairmont Hotel and produced by the legendary founder of Verve Records, Norman Granz. With the incomparable Tommy Flanagan on piano with his trio featuring Ed Thigpen on drums and Frank de la Rosa on bass.

With his big, warm, round-toned sound, sophisticated phrasing, and hip quotes, Dexter Gordon was one of the major forces on the tenor saxophone from the mid-1940's until his death in 1990. Gordon was cited by both Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane as a major influence on their playing, and is acknowledged as a jazz icon. - The popularity of mainstream jazz was on the decline in the States during the 1960's. The Vietnam war and racial turmoil were in high gear, and many of the music's top-flight musicians, including Gordon, migrated to Europe in order both to escape and to make a living playing jazz. Gordon eventually settled in Copenhagen, Denmark. During this period, he usually played and recorded backed by a piano trio, but this 1969 recording is different. The usual quartet has been expanded with some of those premiere jazz 'refugees', each a major voice on his instrument, assembled for the session. One of the great modern jazz trombonists, Slide Hampton is also a composer/arranger of note. The album was a collaborative venture between Gordon and Hampton, and three of the compositions and all of the arrangements on the album are his. The classy Jamaican trumpeter Dizzy Reese completes the front line. The rhythm section includes two jazz giants who were Gordon's constant companions at Copenhagen's famous Club Montmartre, fellow American expatriate pianist Kenny Drew and the great Danish bassist N.-H. �rsted-Peterson. The Gordon-Drew pairing is one of the classic horn-piano matchups in jazz, and has often been compared with the Miles Davis-Red Garland and John Coltrane-McCoy Tyner pairings. Art Taylor, who "helped define the sound of modern drumming", was brought in from Paris to complete the all-star rhythm section.

Continuing is Tyshawn Sorey's highly-anticipated follow-up to Mesmerism and The Off-Off Broadway Guide to Synergism, his two critically-acclaimed 2022 releases that were voted #4 and #5 best albums of the year, respectively, in the annual Francis Davis Jazz Poll of over 150 jazz critics. Continuing features the same musicians as on Mesmerism - Sorey on drums, pianist Aaron Diehl and bassist Matt Brewer - with four long tracks allowing the musicians to explore crevices and possibilities while keeping the emphasis on melody, groove, swing, and the blues. The languorous pace taken on the standard "Angel Eyes" requires a rare intensity of concentration from the trio, but they dig deeply into the feeling of all of the songs, including compositions by Wayne Shorter and Ahmad Jamal, who both coincidentally passed away recently, and Harold Mabern, a mentor to Sorey. The performances are masterful and unforced, played with an honesty and spontaneity that get at the music's emotional core.

Xaybu: The Unseen is the sophomore release from S�l�b�yone, the international avant-rap collective led by saxophonist and composer Steve Lehman, who has been hailed by The New York Times for his "sure-footed futurism" in the realms of modern jazz and contemporary classical music. Comprised of MCs HPrizm and Gaston Bandimic, saxophonists Lehman and Maciek Lasserre, and drummer Damion Reid, their eponymous 2016 debut was hailed as a game-changing synthesis of underground hip-hop, modern jazz and live electronic music that was described by Pitchfork as "legitimately new" and a "revelation." On Xaybu, S�l�b�yone - which means "intersection" in Wolof - continues to build on it's groundbreaking work with shifting rhythms and state-of-the art sound design, now with a newfound sense of effortless fluidity. The word "xaybu" in Wolof refers to the concept in Islamic mysticism of al-Ghaib - that which is unknowable and unseeable. HPrizm (a.k.a. High Priest, legend of New York's underground hip-hop

To celebrate saxophonist/flutist Henry Threadgill's career retrospective at the 2024 Big Ears Festival, Pi Recordings is proud to release both Volumes I & II of This Brings Us To together in a limited-edition double vinyl set. Featuring his long-running band, Zooid, the two volumes were originally released in 2009 and 2010 even though the music was all recorded at a single session. They were his first releases in eight years, longer than any hiatus in his career, a time that allowed for the gestation of what was to become Threadgill's signature intervallic system of composition and group improvisation that ultimately won him a Pulitzer Prize for his work In for a Penny, In for a Pound. The original albums were voted the #2 and #5 best releases of the year by The Village Voice Jazz Critics' Poll, about which NPR said "The jazz world is coming to realize that Threadgill is a true idiosyncratic great... This Brings Us To staggers and lurches and creates dissonances, and it still brings the mad-scientist funk." Remastered for vinyl by Threadgill's long-time guitarist and producer Liberty Ellman and housed in a gatefold sleeve with archival photos of the band, the release focuses attention on an important turning point in the career of one of music's great iconoclastic masters.

Vinyl LP pressing. The second volume of the perfect pairing Br�tzmann & Nilssen-Love, recorded at Zuiderpershuis in Antwerp, August 2015. The music is less frenzied and aggressive than listeners may be used to, as the musicians shared their exploration of new tools with a more contemplative approach. To be sure, both Br�tzmann and Nilssen-Love summon the usual energy here and there, but it's a genuine revelation to hear them feel out new sounds in real-time, whether it's the former caressing the rheumy nasality of the contra-alto clarinet, or the latter reveling in the sustained resonance of his new gongs. Still, even if they were trying out new tools, their rapport and level of engagement was just as strong and deep as ever. Colliding schedules prevented them from ever wrapping up the production on the album, but they began planning for it during the pandemic. Sadly, it fell to Nilssen-Love to shepherd the project at home, but it was worth the wait. This duo album represents a major statement from both musicians. Artwork by Br�tzmann, design by Lasse Marhaug. Liner notes-transcription of an interview with Peter Br�tzmann. Peter Br�tzmann: tarogato, contra-alto clarinet, bass saxophone. Paal Nilssen-Love: drums, gongs, percussion.

Pi Recordings is celebrating their 20th anniversary with a series of limited-edition vinyl reissues of some of the highlights from their distinguished history. They kick things off with Verisimilitude from drummer/composer Tyshawn Sorey, whose continuing effort to shatter the jazz piano trio tradition by extending the form to encompass the influence of the likes of Feldman, Debussy and Xenakis. Since the release of this album, Sorey has gone on to win a MacArthur Fellowship (the "Genius Grant") and become one of the most in-demand composers in new music whom The New York Times profile in a piece titled "The Busiest Composer in the Bleakest Year." Originally best known as an immensely-talented drummer, Sorey is also in the vanguard of artists working in that liminal space between spontaneous composition and notated music. The New Yorker calls Sorey "among the most formidable denizens of [that] in-between zone," Verisimilitude was named one of the best albums of 2017 by the New York Times, and Pitchfork said of the release "that all the variety here comes from the work of three players is a marvel. It's almost frightening to imagine what Sorey could conceive, with a full orchestra at his disposal." It's a far-reaching and intensely beautiful work that daringly blurs the boundaries between composition and improvisation.

BEYOND THE MARGINS

DERAILLEUR: THE 1964 DEMO

LEGEND OF E'BOI (THE HYPERVIGILANT EYE)