Natural Selection is the highly-anticipated follow-up to drummer/composer Dan Weiss's 2018 release Starebaby, an unconventional compounding of doom metal, electronic music, and improvisation into a dark and mystic brew. That album was named to many best-of 2018 lists, including Rolling Stone, which described it as "an album that creates it's own sonic cinematic reality," while NPR called it "Astonishing... A true convergence of heavy trudge and spontaneous combustion." As with Starebaby, the new album is deeply inspired by the 2017 return of David Lynch's television show Twin Peaks, whose dreamlike, foreboding feel pervades much of this music. The entire group - comprised of a dream-team of musicians who share a love for heavy metal and whose playing is unbound by genre - returns from the first album: Ben Monder (who plays on David Bowie's Blackstar) on guitar, Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle, Melvins, Secret Chiefs 3) on bass, and the twin-keyboard/piano/electronics attack of the exceptionally creative Matt Mitchell and Craig Taborn. The recording of Natural Selection came fast at the end of a run of performances for the band, which helped further cement the group's unique sound. It's staggering to contemplate the wide-ranging ability of these musicians: from bone-crunching power to pensive reflection; exacting hits to improvised texture; faith to the compositions and manic improvisation, all played with imagination and conviction.

Last Desert is guitarist Liberty Ellman's follow up to his critically-acclaimed Radiate (Pi 2015), which the Wall Street Journal described as "bristling with energy and innovation" and Downbeat praised as "unique, indelible and fully human." Named #1 Rising Star Guitarist in the 2016 Downbeat Critics Poll, Ellman is perhaps best known as a trusted associate of jazz legend Henry Threadgill, with whom he has played for almost 20 years, including on the Pulitzer Prize-winning release In for a Penny, In for a Pound. His unorthodox playing style is also key to collaborations with the likes of Myra Melford, Joe Lovano, and JD Allen. Pianist and MacArthur Fellow Vijay Iyer calls him "my favorite living guitarist." Ellman's new work is inspired by a foot race that takes place in Antarctica, the final leg in a series of ultramarathons called Four Deserts that take place in some of the harshest environments on earth. Last Desert celebrates the juxtaposition of the austere beauty of the landscape with the grueling nature of the event, and the clarity of focus that the competition requires. His compositions employ a complex melodic weave, but are always lyrical and percolate with groove. Ellman is rejoined by all the musicians from Radiate: Steve Lehman on alto sax, Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet, Jose Davila on tuba, Stephan Crump on bass and Damion Reid on drums. Together, they conjure Ellman's panoramic musical vista to brilliant effect.

Dirt... and More Dirt is the latest from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and multi-reedist Henry Threadgill, a living legend whom the New York Times calls a "composer and bandleader of intense, unyielding originality." Featuring a brand new ensemble, 14 or 15 Kestra: Agg, the new release continues Threadgill's groundbreaking work in utilizing "a serial intervallic language" in improvisation, a system he has honed over the last 16-years with his long-running band Zooid. Inspired by the conceptual art installation "The New York Earth Room" by Walter de Maria at The Dia Art Foundation, "Dirt"finds Threadgill expanding his compositional palette to include brass instruments and the harmonic possibilities provided by two pianos. The larger instrumental forces deployed here allows for a much wider range of color, texture, and polyphonic density. Released in conjunction with "Double Up, Plays Double Up Plus" which features his Ensemble Double Up, these two recordings represent the crowning achievements in Threadgill's still-flourishing half-century long career. At the age of 73, he continues to challenge himself to create music that is pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

Classical Music

2018 release. Trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson's 3 Times Round is his first release since the widely-lauded Moving Still, which was named one of the top albums of 2016 by the New York Times and the best release of the year by PopMatters, who called it "clean and cool while still ripping with adventure." Among the most admired young musicians on the scene, Finlayson is the first-call of innovative musicians seeking a trumpeter who is able to negotiate the most complex musical material yet still bring his own sense of individuality and verve. These includes a stunning list of cutting-edge artist such as Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Lehman, Mary Halvorson and, of course, Steve Coleman, with whom Finlayson has played with for the last 18 years. Finlayson is joined on 3 Times Round by the alto and tenor saxophones of Steve Lehman and Brian Settles, which he intertwines with his own horn with fluidity and grace. The inventive pieces leave plenty of room to showcase each musician's distinctive improvisational personalities, yet still convey an overarching sense of narrative mystery. It's another purposeful step forward for a young artist on the rise.

Phalanx Ambassadors is the latest release from pianist/keyboardist/composer Matt Mitchell, whom PopMatters calls "the most complete and well-integrated improvising pianist of the last 15 years." They also called his prior release, A Pouting Grimace, "brilliant and varied... animated by breathtaking compositional imagination and startling arrangements." His bold new release features works that burst forth with intricate detail, featuring precise execution of complex polyrhythms and irrational meters, adventurous harmonic exploration and otherworldly melodies. While rigorously structured, the music leaves ample room for varied layers of improvisation. The eponymously-named band - with Mitchell on piano and keyboards, Miles Okazaki on guitars, Patricia Brennan on vibraphone and marimba, Kim Cass on bass, and Kate Gentile on drums, along with producer David Torn - immerse themselves completely in Mitchell's idiosyncratic sound world, creating music that eludes genre boundaries and comparisons.

The twelve chapter Mascot serial based on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper. Starring Harry Carey, Edwina Booth, Hobart Bosworth and Junior Coghlan. The last surviving Mohicans work with their friend the scout Hawkeye to oppose the savage Hurons who have allied with the French to make war on the British American colonies. 660845441675 GVIN12979702DVD 39637017 10.49 14.98 .26 GRAPEVINE MOD DIGITAL VIDEO DISC MOVIE ACTION / ADVENTURE 10/04/2019 https://mediacdn.aent-m.com/prod-img/500/59/3741059-2501382.jpg 100 2 N OKAZAKI,MILES SKY BELOW The Sky Below is guitarist Miles Okazaki's sequel to his critically-acclaimed Trickster (Pi 2017), which the New York Times labeled tenacious futurism" and Pitchfork called "obviously complex, the work of virtuosi." The album received critics' picks in both Downbeat and JazzTimes, acclaimed as "an intellectually hefty album that feels weightless" and "a real breakthrough." The Sky Below continues the story of Trickster, this time following the classical arc of an oceanic voyage, where the character travels across a boundary ("Rise and Shine"), enters the unknown ("Dog Star"), visits magical islands ("Anthemoessa" and "Seven Sisters"), is caught in a storm ("Monstropolous"), abandoned ("The Castaway"), and finds a way home ("The Lighthouse"). For these songs, Okazaki took each of the compositions from Trickster, reduced them to their basic components, and rewrote new compositions from this genetic material to maintain their symbolic and sonic continuity. The Trickster band is comprised of Okazaki on guitar, Anthony Tidd on electric bass, Sean Rickman on drums, with the addition of Matt Mitchell on piano. A first-call musician on the cutting edge of jazz, Mitchell also prominently features Okazaki on his latest release, Phalanx Ambassadors (Pi 2019). The team of Tidd and Rickman, whom Okazaki first played with as the rhythm section of saxophonist Steve Coleman's Five Elements, form a seamless rhythmic foundation for the band. Together, they demonstrate the ability that they have honed for decades of negotiating abstract musical information while maintaining an unstoppable rhythmic drive. With it's narrative structure and Okazaki's judicious use of studio effects, The Sky Below evokes the fathomless depths of the sea, both familiar and strange.

2019 release. Hailed by The New York Times as "a state-of-the-art musical thinker" and "a quietly dazzling saxophonist," Steve Lehman has built a career creating innovative, uncompromising music that packs a visceral wallop. His signature alto sound - searing with emotional intensity and crystal clear articulation - has been featured in high-profile partnerships with Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, and Bennie Maupin. At just 40-years-old, he has achieved wide critical acclaim - various albums have landed the #1 album of the year slots in the New York Times and the NPR Critics Poll - with groundbreaking projects that have run the gamut from melding jazz with Senegalese hip-hop to French spectral music. With his latest album, The People I Love, Lehman revisits his jazz roots, reflecting his mentorship with Jackie McLean, a giant of this music. The album features his long-running trio with drummer Damion Reid (Robert Glasper Trio) and bassist Matt Brewer (SF Jazz, Gonzalo Rubalcaba). Together, the group make their mark on Lehman's compositions and arrangements that, while seemingly impossibly complex, are executed with effortless grace and with emphasis on emotional intensity. The album is a modern day referendum on the possibilities for the alto saxophone quartet tradition for 2019 and beyond.

Facets�is saxophonist/composer�Hafez Modirzadeh's latest radical entreaty against the cultural hegemony of the Western notion of equal temperament and his argument that musicians should be free to explore a variety of tonal possibilities, even on piano. His 2012 release�Post-Chromodal Out!�was the first documentation of this concept, where the piano was tuned to a variety of temperaments. Performed with pianist�Vijay Iyer, The New York Times called that album "Dauntless... There's heady discipline at work here, along with the stirrings of a hard-fought individualism." With his new release, Modirzadeh has distilled the idea to a single re-tuning, which is performed in duets with three towering musicians in contemporary improvised music:�Kris Davis,�Tyshawn Sorey�and�Craig Taborn, each interrogating the piano's new possibilities with imagination and ingenuity. Modirzadeh himself utilizes alternate fingerings and embouchure adjustments on his instrument to achieve intervals between major and minor, and the pieces sway with an elasticity reminiscent of Persian poetic meter. With eight keys re-tuned and the remainder left in equal temperament, the music explores the coexistence of familiar with unfamiliar, and in the process, discovers new logic and mysterious beauty with

Saxophonist/flutist Anna Webber has been an active performer and bandleader on the New York scene for the last decade, playing with the likes of John Hollenbeck, Dave Douglas, Matt Mitchell, and Jen Shyu. Her own projects, which are clear expressions of her knotty compositional sense, have been hailed by The New York Times as "bracing, argumentative and engineered to show the range of the group members: fulminous, intense collective improvisation; rapid, chromatic steeplechases; research into long tones and textures." Her new release, Clockwise, is an homage to some of her favorite 20th Century composers as seen through the lens of their works for percussion. For the project, Webber researched and analyzed various percussion compositions by Iannis Xenakis, Morton Feldman, Edgard Var�se, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt, and John Cage, isolating particular moments that could be extracted and developed into new works. The music explores notions of density and indeterminacy, using timbre as an organizing principal, continuing Webber's ongoing exploration of the interstice between creative improvisation and tightly-prescribed compositions.

Idiom by composer/saxophonist/ flutist Anna Webber is the follow-up to her critically-acclaimed release Clockwise, which the Wall Street Journal called "visionary and captivating" and NPR described as "heady music [that] appeal to the rest of the body." Idiom is a series of six pieces, each of which is based on a specific woodwind extended technique - a broad term meaning any non-traditional way of producing sound on an instrument, including the use of multiphonics, alternate fingerings, key clicks, overblown notes, and the like - that she has taken from her own improvisational language. The works are the upshot of her belief that jazz composers/performers are in a privileged position to create the perfect vehicles for themselves as improvisers. As a frequent user of extended techniques in her own playing, Webber set out to create a continuum between her compositional and improvisatory vocabulary, orchestrating these effects across the ensemble, and applying them to different instruments. They are also used to generate chords and scales and, overall, gave license to utilize other naturally occurring sounds, opening up whole new worlds of mysterious sonic combinations and orchestrations. "Idiom II" from this book of compositions appeared on Clockwise, while the new project - spread out over two volumes - comprises the other five "Idiom" pieces. The first four of these feature her Simple Trio - Webber with drummer John Hollenbeck and pianist Matt Mitchell - which has been her primary working group for the past eight years. The hour-long "Idiom VI" is performed by a twelve-piece ensemble that brings together a mix of musicians equally split between improvisors and new music specialists. With Idiom, Webber has created a singular sonic world, a bold magnum opus that paves a new path for the amalgamation of cutting-edge composition and improvisation.

2019 release. The Adornment of Time is a monumental meeting between drummer Tyshawn Sorey and pianist Marilyn Crispell, two titans of contemporary music. Recorded live at The Kitchen in New York City, the performance is the apotheosis of fully-improvised music, a dialogue between two artists who are masters at bringing compositional form to their improvisations. Sorey, a 2017 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, has been named by The New Yorker as "among the most formidable denizens of the in-between zone... An extraordinary talent who can see across the entire musical landscape," and by The Wall Street Journal as "a composer of radical and seemingly boundless ideas." Crispell, whose playing has been described by The New York Times like "monitoring an active volcano," is perhaps best known for her association with Anthony Braxton in his classic quartet of the 1980s and 1990s, but also for her many projects as a leader and highly-regarded releases on the ECM label. Comprised of a single, uninterrupted movement, the performance is by turns placid and tumultuous; quietly contemplative until exploding in intensity. Their performance together is an act of collaborative spontaneous composition of the highest order.

OPHIUCHUS BUTTERFLY

A historically important new release, Sam Rivers Reunion: Live in New York features the reunion of octogenarian saxophonist/flutist/pianist Rivers with his groundbreaking trio of two-time Grammy Award winner Dave Holland on bass and Barry Altschul on drums. The venerated band was a mainstay at Rivers Studio RivBea the most famous venue during the loft jazz movement of the 1970s and was well-known for it's marathon fully-improvised concerts. Their powerful rapport gives no hint of the fact that they had not played together in 25 years when this concert took place in 2007. In a musical career that spanned more than 50 years, Rivers played with such disparate musicians as Miles Davis, T-Bone Walker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Cecil Taylor. He is best known for his heralded albums on Blue Note and Impulse!, and two Grammy-nominated big band recordings for RCA. The Rivers/Holland/Altschul trio, though revered in jazz circles, recorded rarely, and those out-of-print records are highly sought-after by collectors. Unfortunately, Rivers did not live to see the release of this CD; he passed away on December 26, 2011.

KINSMEN