NEOS JAZZ

	LARYNX – Elliott Sharp Label: NEOS JAZZ 40704 Our Price: $19.00 Quantity in Basket: none
Tracks: Orchestra Carbon – Larynx 1- 6 Performers: Samm Bennett, drums & percussion; Lesli Dalaba, trumpet & slab; David Fulton, trombone, slab, pantar; Ken Heer, trombone, slab, pantar; David Linton, drums; Charles K. Noyes, drums; Bobby Previte, drums; Jim Staley, trombone; Soldier String Quartet: Saura Seaton, violin, David Soldier, violin, Ron Lawrence, viola, Mary Wooten, cello; Elliott Sharp, doubleneck guitarbass, soprano sax, tenor sax, bass clarinet and sampler Recorded and mixed at BC Studio, Brooklyn, New York, June–October 1987 Larynx is an analogy; the orchestra as a throat. It follows as corollary to the throat as orchestra: throat singing as practiced by the Inuit of the Canadian arctic and the hoomii singing of Mongolia, as well as by related jawharp techniques found throughout the world. The natural overtone series is the melodic core of much of these musics and of much of Larynx. Ratios derived from the Fibonacci Series are used to generate tunings and melodic/harmonic material for the strings, brass, slabs, pantars, and doubleneck guitarbass, as well as rhythmic material for the ensemble.
	Tectonics ERRATA – Elliott Sharp, Volume 1 Label: NEOS JAZZ 40702 Our Price: $19.00 Quantity in Basket: none
Tracks: spliny thicket; in tongues; city of sand; which delta; calle siete; hotfoot; Noospheric; goomy; kargyraa; errataka Performed and composed by Elliott Sharp Recorded at Studio zOaR New York, 1998
	SYNDAKIT – Elliott Sharp, Volume 2 Label: NEOS JAZZ 40703 Our Price: $19.00 Quantity in Basket: none
Tracks: SyndaKit Parts 1 – 4 Artists: Orchestra Carbon: Judith Insell, viola; Rea Mochiach, percussion; Zeena Parkins, electric harp; Jim Pugliese, percussion; Ted Reichman, accordion; Marc Sloan, electric bass; Tim Smith, bass clarinet; David Soldier, violin; Evan Spritzer, bass clarinet; Joseph Trump, drums & percussion; David Weinstein, synthesizer and sampler; Elliott Sharp, electroacoustic guitar Recorded December 1998 Composed in 1998 for my ensemble Orchestra Carbon, SyndaKit utilizes a collection of biological metaphors to create an ever-shifting rhythmic and timbral matrix. Improvisatory and algorithmic but not improvisation, SyndaKit’s essence is a transformative organism consisting of 144 composed cores on 12 sheets divided among the 12 players with a set of simple rules for their use through processes of imitation, addition, recombination, transposition, and mutation. These actions are based on the activities of flocking birds, African drum choirs, cellular automata, hunting packs, and recombinant amino acids.
	ARBITRARY - Jens Joneleit Label: NEOS JAZZ 40701 Our Price: $19.00 Quantity in Basket: none
Tracks: at dawn; a candle lit; another day imagined; amidst the flares; antics revealed; epilude; procession; arbitrary* Artists: Tom Schüler, trumpet and flugelhorn; Jens Joneleit, drums, bass, electric piano, grand piano* The word "arbitrary" means operating freely, on one’s own authority or will - and hence what jazz has to be above all. The improvisation here is based not on tiny musical material such as phrases or themes but on musical auras. On Arbitrary the musicians "take power" with clear and to-the-point auras: above all, the aura of the electric period of Miles Davis in the 1970s and the "wall of sound" of Albert Ayler’s rhythm section (Sunny Murray and Gary Peacock). Such an arbitrary combination of two such crucial and fundamentally different aesthetics of jazz has its dangers, but nevertheless it opens up new perspectives thanks precisely to the risks taken.
	ILLUVIATION - Jens Joneleit Label: NEOS JAZZ 40705 Our Price: $19.00 Quantity in Basket: none
Tracks: insinuation; vicissitude; elongation; conundrum Artists: Roscoe Mitchell, tenor saxophone, flute, piccolo, soprano saxophone, bass saxophone, sopranino saxophone, alto saxophone; Jens Joneliet, drums, bass and piano Illuviation is an attempt to start out and develop precisely from where it gets "dangerous" for many jazz performers and fans, transgressing a certain tolerance level. Illuviation is also an attempt to cause seemingly irreconcilable stylistic directions and sound worlds to collide, but not to blur them mercilessly as in crossover or to allow one "world" to force the other "world" off the road, but rather to let each hear the other at the same time and to enter into a dialogue previously considered impossible. As a guest on compositions by and with Jens Joneleit, free jazz legend and multi-instrumental virtuoso Roscoe Mitchell is heard here, opening up for the first time his full talent for a very different musical spectrum, thus confirming Duke Ellington's motto: "If it sounds good, it is good".
	RHEO~UMBRA – ELLIOTT SHARP, VOLUME 4 Label: NEOS JAZZ 40706 Our Price: $19.00 Quantity in Basket: none
Tracks: Rheo~Umbra 1 & 2 Orchestra Carbon: Zeena Parkins, sampler/electronic harp; Marc Sloan, electric bass; Evan Spritzer, bass clarinet; Tim Smith, bass clarinet; David Weinstein, sampler; Joseph Trump, electronic & acoustic percussion; Elliott Sharp, fretless guitar/slab Soldier String Quartet (David Soldier, violin, Sara Perkins, violin, Judith Insell, viola, Rufus Cappadocia, cello) Recorded live at The Knitting Factory, NYC, April 1996 "Flow of shadows" is how I would translate the composite neolog title of this 1997 work for Orchestra Carbon and how I might describe the musical gestures therein. In seven sections, Rheo~Umbra layers through-composed materials, algorithmic strategies for the ensemble, and improvisations by various soloists. The algorithmic approaches include the "transient additive pulse" where a percussive hit and its reverberations morph into a pulsing groove. There are also hockets and phased looping / transformation of the composed material designed to gradually translate the horizontal – notes and lines – into vertical simultaneities. The overall sound design of the composition is an important structural element with the two keyboardists playing samples constructed by me and derived from my own extended techniques on soprano saxophone and bass clarinet as well as an array of sounds produced on the slabs, sounds then layered with their "live" manifestations. – Elliott Sharp
	SPRING & NEAP – RE:ITERATIONS – ELLIOTT SHARP, VOLUME 5 Label: NEOS JAZZ 40708 Our Price: $19.00 Quantity in Basket: none
Tracks: Spring & Neap Artists: Michigo Yagi, 17-string koto; Yumiko Tanaka, futozao shamisen; Yoshiko Fujio, hosozao shamisen; Zeena Parkins, troubador harp; Makoto Nomura, piano; Tamiki Sawa, violin; Mio Abe, violin; Hiromichi Sakamoto, cello; Masaaki Kikuchi, contrabass; Kenji Ito, percussion; Guam Kumada, percussion; Elliott Sharp, conductor Recorded live at Music Merge Festival, Tokyo, October 5, 1996. Track: RE:ITERATIONS Artists: Soldier String Quartet: Laura Seaton, violin; David Soldier, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Mary Wooten, cello; Ratzo B. Harris, contrabass Recorded at B.C. Studio, Brooklyn, NYC Engineered by Martin Bisi, June 7, 1986. Spring & Neap - A central event during Carbon’s 1996 Japanese tour was the Music Merge Festival taking place over 3 days at Tokyo’s Shinjuku Pit Inn and bringing together a diverse and international collection of wonderful musicians including Michiyo Yagi, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Jim O’Rourke, Yumiko Tanaka, David Grubbs and more. In addition to sets from Carbon and my solo Tectonics project, I was asked to create an algorithmic structure that I would conduct and composed for a small orchestra made up of players from the festival. Re:Iterations - It was a happy coincidence that Paul Dunkel (Associate Conductor of the American Composers Orchestra) contacted me in January 1986 about a commissioned piece for the orchestra at the same time that I had been thinking about applying my Fibonacci-series work to an ensemble of strings, essentially re-orchestrating ideas evolved on the guitar. As I was completing Re:Iterations, another useful coincidence: David Soldier had formed the Soldier String Quartet and asked me for a composition for their debut concert at the Miller Theater in NYC. I decided to re-orchestrate Re:Iterations for quartet – Tessalation Row was the result. Both pieces use the Fibonacci series to generate tunings, rhythms, and forms. All pitches are played on open strings (tuned to 1/1, 3/2, 5/3, 8/5) or overtones of those open strings. The score uses graphic modules which contain information on the various operations to be performed and give exact rhythmic, timing, and pitch information. There are times when the players can vary the overtone melodies and timbres in a section but strictly within the parameters indicated in the score, not improvising. I was very concerned with identity – the ability of sonic flux and internal detail to vary greatly in each performance without destroying the essence and exact proportions of the piece.
	IN-BETWEEN – BLUES PIECES – Jens Joneleit Label: NEOS JAZZ 40707 Our Price: $19.00 Quantity in Basket: none
Tracks: rise; impasse; plosion; lapse; submerged; nite out; washed over; cwm; in-between Jens Joneleit, drums, bass and piano
	MAZE DRUM SOLO – Jens Joneleit Label: NEOS JAZZ 40709 Our Price: $19.00 Quantity in Basket: none
Tracks: intro…; … wall-of-sound (homage to Sunny Murray); energy piece… Jens Joneleit, drums Recorded live on July 2, 2004 at Audio for the Arts Studio, Madison, WI Jens Joneleit is a gifted contemporary composer, born in Offenbach, Germany, in 1968. In his formative years as a composer, he was largely influenced by the musical environment provided by his parents who both play the piano. Realizing their son's talent in music early on, Jens Joneleit was sent to a music school to learn basic theory skills when he was seven years old. In 1975, Jens started to take percussion lessons and successively took part in performing with the marching band of his home town Nieder-Roden. From 1984-1986, Jens Joneleit taught himself the piano during which time he became more interested in composing music, writing compositions for solo piano and percussion.
	JAZZ Label: NEOS JAZZ 40807 Our Price: $19.00 Quantity in Basket: none
COMPOSER IN DIALOGUE - WHO AM I?/NO MORE – Olga Neuwirth & ICI Ensemble Tracks: Who am I?/No more – 2 audio films, texts by Franz Kafka, Jules Michelet and Olga Neuwirth Artists: Olga Neuwirth, laptop, bicycle machine; ICI Ensemble: Philipp Kolb, trumpet, tuba; Christofer Varner, trombone; Leo Gmelch, bass trombone, tuba; David Jäger, soprano and tenor saxophones; Roger Jannotta, alto saxophone, flute, piccolo, clarinet; Markus Heinze, baritone saxophone, bass clarinet; Johanna Varner, cello; Martin Wolfrum, keyboards; Gunnar Geisse, electric guitar, laptop; Georg Karger, double bass, electric bass; Walter Bittner, drums; Sunk Pöschl, drums; Jenny Evans, Suzanne Michel, Isabelle Luke, Gerd Lohmeyer, Dim Schlichter, speakers The title ‘Composer in Dialogue’ stands for a biennial cooperation between the ICI Ensemble and a contemporary figure, the aim of which is to create a kind of ‘work in progress’ through composition itself but also by involving improvisational forms. Performances of pieces thus created remain the intention. The present recording documents an ICI concert with the composer Olga Neuwirth. Olga Neuwirth began her musical career on the trumpet, before she embraced composition as her favoured means of expression. She remains one of today’s most important protagonists in the field. She can thank exchanges with Adriana Hölszky and Luigi Nono, studies with Tristan Murail, and a befriended author, Elfriede Jelinek, for the path her professional life took. Olga Neuwirth meets an ICI Ensemble whose calling card is a kind of improvised music that draws on Afro-American roots. Here we must look to Vinko Globokar, Barry Guy, Giancarlo Schiaffini, and George E. Lewis for any explanation. NEOS will now release, after the duo CD JOMO (Johanna Varner & Mary Oliver), the second recording in the ICI Edition. The most exciting thing about this meeting of musical minds is the feeling that opposites impinge on each other. Here, that which is composed comes into head-on conflict with what has been – or can be – improvised. This simultaneity of determination and random coincidence, the inherent paradox of which is something that especially interests Olga Neuwirth, guarantees friction. As for the medium of live electronics and the use of samples, which have such an important bearing on the way instruments actually sound, these too point in this direction. Olga Neuwirth likes to describe her music as ‘music for catastrophes’, because just beneath the surface with its confusing patterns of sound – ones which resemble a series of labyrinths – there is a dark undertow that suddenly takes the music in new and unexpected directions. This is how she enables the listener to take part in a virtuosic deconstruction, and experience how sounds are perceived. What are called into question are our aural habits. And what is born is the impingement of possible associations. Two works emerged as joint projects and were premiered: the first, Who Am I?, is a composition that uses musically heterogeneous material and fragments of Kafka’s Letter to his Father, these excerpts read, however, by a woman. In the second work, No More, Olga Neuwirth incorporates her own writings with lines from the songs of Frank Zappa as well as providing us with an instrumental song, one that “continues to return and which is ‘worked through’, as in the process of Psychoanalysis”, to quote the composer. At the end, only vague reminiscences of The Long Rain remain. - Gunnar Geisse
	MANFRED KNIEL AND HIS REDUCTION QUARTET – LOW DOWN MUSIC Label: NEOS JAZZ 40902 Our Price: $19.00 Quantity in Basket: none
Bürgermusi; Naiv, tief und grausig-schön; Miss Blue; Eklat; Free ‘n’ Open; Pozilei; Klagelied Reduction Quartet - Karl Farrent, trumpet; Mike Svoboda, trombone; Veit Hübner, bass; Manfred Kniel, drums The Reduction Quartet with eight LOW DOWN compositions. LOW DOWN MUSIC is a clear, uncompromisingly reduced, and independent musical language, which includes the basic elements of all possible kinds of music. LOW DOWN MUSIC is an idea for the illuminated, and part of a canny ability to fail – at the end of the day, it is my music. The first title Bürgermusi – in American Burgermusi – is dedicated to the successful German musician, composer and producer Dieter Bohlen. The second title Naiv, tief und grausig-schön is dedicated to our trombonist Mike Svoboda. Mike cooperates closely with star composers of the contemporary music scene. For him, some particularly difficult, highly complex trombone concertos have been written. The Low down Trombone Concerto is naive, bass and awful in its beauty. The third title called Miss Blue is dedicated to an Irish landowner, in whose house my wife and I spent a beautiful and bizarre vacation. This aged, educated, and distinguished lady nourished herself almost exclusively on biscuits and whiskey. I wrote the fourth title Eklat for a person whom I know pretty well, and whom I would like to know even better. I dedicated the piece to myself. More than that, I can not say. The fifth title Free 'n' Open , I dedicate to our bass player. American southern "down home feeling" is mixed up with the edifying and comforting of the wind players in a Salvation Army band. The sixth title Pozilei is an attempt to write a musical comic strip. The comic heroes, two high-ranking police chiefs, meet regularly at a secret place to fool around. A quote: "This is the only way to carry on with such a job in the long term." At the centre of the composition there is a dramatic break. Without any preliminary warning one finds oneself as part of the reality of a television programme discussing politics. Two European parliamentary delegates are arguing the toss. The topic …are we defending Germany at the Hindu Kusch. Yes or no? But, back to our comic heroes. The police officer duo carries on with badinage. A Dumb job. No question. The seventh title Klagelied is a mixture of African polymetric rhythms and a Czech Polka. The dirge is written in a major key. Africans complain in major, Europeans in the minor mode! I have no idea whether this statement is correct. I shall however stick to my guns. The eighth title Schneefelder relates to my childhood. - Manfred Kniel
	ELLIOTT SHARP AND SCOTT FIELDS – AFIADACAMPOS Label: NEOS JAZZ 41004 Our Price: $19.00 Quantity in Basket: none
ELLIOTT SHARP (b. 1951): Pleonica; The Great Red Spot; Krash Area; Delta Delta; Convolution Now! SCOTT FIELDS (b. 1952): Earth Ecology: Fishes Emplore God; Love Not Green Eggs; The Iconography Of Shame; Sun Figtree Elliott Sharp & Scott Fields, guitars Tracks: 1. Pleonica, 2. Earth Ecology: Fishes Emplore God, 3. The Great Red Spot, 4. Love Not Green Eggs, 5. Krash Area, 6. The Iconography Of Shame, 7. Delta Delta, 8. Sun Figtree, 9. Convolution Now! Elliott Sharp: There is both ease and difficulty in an ongoing collaboration, especially one between two guitarist composers. We now both have a good sense of each others’ language on the instrument — not just the surface shape and form but the underlying syntax and substance. This allows for a flow and interlock of sounds and ideas, the ability to complete each others’ sentences, a relaxed interpretation and expansion of our compositional personalities. Scott Fields: Our handful of gigs and recording sessions have exposed commonalities and contrasts, as composers and as instrumentalists. We are both interested in fuzzing up relationships between written and improvised sounds, rejecting the free-jazz model in which heads are matched with unrelated blowing. Our methods of obfuscation, however, differ. One tends to offer large themes for metamorphication. The other often works with fragments and asynchronism. But by now each has a pretty good handle on what the other is getting at. Elliott Sharp: The difficulty lies in that very relaxation. As with every creative history, there is a fine line between style and self-parody, between exploring our identities and falling prey to cliché. Scott Fields: Our emphasis on composition, and specifically composition for the relatively narrow dynamic range and timbral pallet of paired steel-string, acoustic guitars, directs us away from dependence on muscle memory and set phrases. These structures focus us on interactions that grow out of our immediate reactions to how each of us is, in the moment, interpreting the material. Elliott Sharp: With Afiadacampos, I feel that Scott and I have deepened our ability to improvise together and to orchestrate compositional strategies, pointing the way to our future work together.