For those who are not aware YET, Portuguese CLEAN FEED is one of those record labels which are working as a chronicles of the real changes taking place in the Jazz, and Creative music Avantgarde, in general. This is absolutely priceless work they do, similar to what Labels like, Swiss HAT HUT, (Hathut encompasses the labels hat ART, hatOLOGY, and hat NOIR) and INTAKT are doing. German ECM, JazzWERK or TRAUMTON. American TZADIK, CIMP, AUM Fidelity or Atavistic. French Label Bleu or NATO. British EMANEM, Leo Records, SLAM or INCUS. I can go on and on for long and still miss many who contributed into that titanic work. What matters is that, WE, listeners are aware of them and support them actively by buying their recordings and supporting artist which are going to be A Tomorrow TITANS!
Here’s an incredibly long list of releases both in quantity and quality, we promise to slow down next year. As recent times demonstrate the world is going crazy, war is spreading out as is the lack of tolerance polarizing people. We feel really proud by releasing music by people from many different parts of the globe, US, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Canada, France, Portugal, Russia, Poland, Finland, Argentina, Sweden and Slovenia. The United Nations of improvised music!
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Ned Rothenberg “Crossings Four”
Ned Rothenberg | Sylvie Courvoisier | Mary Halvorson | Tomas Fujiwara.
Crossings – points of convergence, loci for decision-making, determination and daring resolve. For more than four decades, New York multi-instrumentalist and composer Ned Rothenberg has operated at the stimulating nexus of no-return, working with ever challenging artists. His latest quartet finds him accompanied by three other like-minded musicians – Mary Halvorson, Tomas Fujiwara and regular Rothenberg associate, Sylvie Courvoisier – close friends whose equally boundary-busting careers have seen them ferment vital connections between the hook-laden audacities of New York’s downtown jazz scene, the detailed intricacies of European chamber music and the chaotic ruckus of experimental rock. Here, the group is all. Even elaborate solo deviations are pledged to the benefit of collective ensemble expression, while also allowing each player ample opportunity to stretch out and articulate… >> Listen <<
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Quicksilver apothecaries of pitch, timbre and time, the formidable Montreal-based pairing of clarinettist Lori Freedman and bassist Nicolas Caloia, reconvene their long-term Mercury connection for a fittingly volatile and strange, dangerous, and often beautiful, dose of deeply conceptual body music… >> Listen <<
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Mia Dyberg Trio “Timestretch”
Timestretch is a profoundly intrepid work, teeming with big, progressive ideas. That Dyberg and company marshal these concepts so lucidly, so resourcefully, is testament to their combined focus, vision and winning virtuosity… >> Listen <<
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Aruan Ortiz “Pastor’s Paradox” Feat. Don Byron and Pheeroan akLaff
60 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his signature “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. The content, structure and power of King’s words serve as a fundamental inspiration for Pastor’s Paradox, the stirring new album by Cuban-born, Brooklyn based pianist, composer and conceptualist Aruán Ortiz. The album features a stellar lineup of players including clarinetist Don Byron, cellists Lester St. Louis and Yves Dhar, drummer Pheeroan akLaff, and spoken word artist Mtume Gant… >> Listen <<
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Miha Gantar “Amsterdam” 5CD BOX
After a few seconds into “Reaching For The Infinite”, there can only be two reactions. First, seasoned listeners will feel satisfaction, while new ears will flood with intrigue. The album, the first disc of the sophomore five-CD set “Amsterdam” pianist Miha Gantar, kicks off a journey through several modes and lineages around the farthest reaches of the keys. With his first release, 2022’s five-CD “Introducing”, Slovenia-born artist pulled from musical disciples as diverse as his history with music itself. Hailing from a musical family, it is clear that Miha ruminates on musical origin points as much as destinations. Yet the latest set, focuses more on close relationships and introspective reflection… >> Listen <<
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Simon Nabatov 3+2 “Verbs”
Language becomes a spellbinding repository for intoxicating revelation and cryptic imagery on Verbs, the latest full-length from the remarkable Russian-American pianist Simon Nabatov, a stunning release augmenting his already notable Clean Feed catalogue. From the flickering embers of the plaintively purring ‘Prayer’ and hyper-kinetic, fragmented urgency of ‘Race’, to ‘Evolve’’s mangled retro futurist bustle and the tentative blooms of the shuffling, ever-ripening ‘Reveal’, Nabatov and his fearless crew set out their mystery-laden credos like a kabbalistic bill-of-fare to be incrementally decoded with each successive listen… >> Listen <<
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Trespass Trio Feat. Susana Santos Silva “Live in Oslo”
Beseeching, smouldering, melancholy, impassioned. Live in Oslo is all these things and plenty more besides, a glorious recording capturing the dazzling inaugural summit featuring European maestros of restraint Trespass Trio (Martin Küchen, Per Zanussi and Raymond Strid) and rising radical of free-improv, Portuguese trumpeter Susana Santos Silva. Listening to “Live in Oslo” you would be excused for thinking you were experiencing a genuine long-in-the-tooth quartet, rather than the first time assignation of group meets guest. Trio and Silva are both operating here at the very peak of their telepathic powers, totally committed to the slow-burn, twinned agents-in-stealth, combining their tender semaphores on this touchstone album which bristles with an exquisite, sombre, haunting beauty… >> Listen <<
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Fritz Hauser / Pedro Carneiro “Pas de Deux”
Despite both artists enjoying remarkably intensive careers which have seen them collaborate with many of the finest talents operating in free-improvisation, experimental and classical music, “Pas de Deux” marks the auspicious first ever encounter between Swiss drummer Fritz Hauser and Portuguese marimba maestro Pedro Carneiro. This newly-formed percussive duo evince an automatic affinity, exploring a wealth of textures and tones in a dialogue of graceful tessellations, which Hauser refers to in his liner notes as, “a dance of sounds, noises and silence.” “Pas de Deux” documents formidable flights of febrile imagination, combining non-idiomatic disruption with the rigours of classical training, its creators coaxing glorious gambits of prodigious extended technique and honed practice from their armoury… >> Listen <<
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Phillip Greenlief / Scott Amendola “Stay with it”
One of the most engaging team-ups in exploratory jazz celebrates 30 years of simpatico collaboration and creativity with the release of “Stay With It”, their first outing on the Clean Feed imprint. It finds Phillip Greenlief and Scott Amendola developing the febrile dialogues mapped out on their deliciously bristling 1995 debut, Collect My Thoughts, an absorbing set that saw the pair garner considerable international plaudits, inspiring them to further cultivate their connection through regular touring expeditions… >> Listen <<
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Grzegorz Tarwid Trio “Flowers”
Tarwid’s lyrical pointillism throughout recalls the expressiveness of Paul Bley, while the graceful contributions of Mucha and Karch subtly revitalise old piano-trio conventions, their artful embellishments complementing their leader’s chiaroscuro, rendering Flowers a future classic, a landmark set to elevate Tarwid’s already burgeoning rep… >> Listen <<
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Calcanhar “Jump”
Leading figures from Porto’s vibrant jazz scene, saxophonist João Mortágua and pianist Carlos Azevedo, aka Calcanhar, announce their recording debut as a duo with the release of Jump, a full-of-beans feast of playful, telekinetic dialogue, chock-a-block with unfettered improvisations and freewheeling imaginative flights… >> Listen <<
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Innanen Pasborg Piromalli “Can you hear it?”
An organ trio like no other. Following on from their gloriously impish Clean Feed debut, 2021’s “This Is It”, comes the uber-fusion feast of Can You Hear It?, an album giving the eminent Blue Note histories of Jimmy Smith, Brother Jack McDuff and Larry Young an extra adrenaline hit, Piromalli souping up the keys for extracurricular soul-fusion kicks and spacing out like Sun Ra hammering the hyperdrive on an interstellar love mission… >> Listen <<
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Nataniel Edelman Trio feat. Michael Formanek & Michael Attias “Un Ruido de Agua”
Together this formidable triumvirate navigate six compositions (five by Edelman, another from Attias), plus four collective free improvisations, reconnoitring far-reaching adumbrar deltas ornamented by snaggletoothed key jabs, swirling helix totems and billowing puffballs of smoky nimbus, cloistered from the regimented tyrannies of the beat, the stellar trio dappling their converging colours to convey the unique flow and momentum of a single day… >> Listen <
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Sheldon Suter “Berceuses & Nocturnes”
To listen to Berceuses et Nocturnes, is to enter a hallucinatory night-realm animated with hypnagogic serenades and starlit reveries.
The music derives its influence from Indonesian gamelan and Satie’s chimerical piano works, but also the Reichian-indebted minimalism of Chicagoan post-rockers Tortoise and woozy time-warping turntablist mumble of The Caretaker. Rarefied meditations, glistening particles lingering like lullaby kisses upon the lips of the heavy-lidded, as he sows his radiant constellations, cosmic tintinnabulations ringing through obsidian night, haunting the great halls of sleep… >> Listen <<
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Nicolas Remondino “Ocra Rossa”
The first inspiration for this recording produced discontinuous weaves, segments in a free state, creating a poetic environment through a network of correspondences. Without real subdivisions or marked transitions, we are exposed to an enigmatic movement in which gestures and actions intersect, all on the same level, without hierarchies. In continuity with the background and the form, the music unfolds independently of any binding metric scheme. The rhythm here is breath, spaces, metaphors, fugitive reminiscences. In this recording Nicholas Remondino puts in place a network of dispositions, of savoir-faire, of codes… >> Listen <<
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Clean Feed’s campaign “After Holidays Bost” stays on until November 19th