Capturing the groundbreaking Cecil Taylor Unit's second set at the Power Center, Michigan State University at Ann Arbor, on Thursday, April 15th 1976, this document was recorded for broadcast on WCBN-FM's Jazz Alive program. Featuring Taylor on piano, backed by his long-term sideman Jimmy Lyons (alto sax), David S. Ware (tenor sax), Raphe Malik (trumpet), and Marc Edwards (drums), it offers a fascinating glimpse into Taylor's uncompromising vision, and is presented here in its entirety, with digitally remastered sound, background notes, and rare images.

In the mid-1960s, the rigid and colourless British way of life was irrevocably transformed by the emergence of the underground movement, a loose collective of young radicals who introduced new social, sexual and aesthetic perspectives. Operating out of the heart of London, their various activities, from the newspaper the International Times, to the psychedelic club UFO, promoted alternative lifestyles and values and sparked a cultural revolution.

Medeski Martin & Wood + Nels Cline announce the release of The Woodstock Sessions on April 14th. The four musicians came together to record on August 27, 2013 at Applehead Studios in Woodstock, NY in front of an intimate gathering of 75 lucky ticket holders. The session was part of a newly launched series that brings established and emerging recording artists together with their fans in the recording studio. The experience is a performance/session hybrid that supports the artist to fan bond by sharing the process of record making. The end results of the sessions are inimitable recordings that capture inspired, one-off performances.

The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records is a four-disc set, compiled and annotated by author Ashley Kahn who wrote the book of the same name being published concurrently with its release. Impulse's great run was between 1961 and 1976 – a period of 15 years that ushered in more changes in jazz than at any other point in the music's history. Impulse began recording in the last weeks of 1960, with Ray Charles, Kai Windig /J.J. Johnson, and Gil Evans. While Impulse experimented with 45s 33 1/3 EPs, cassettes, and reel to reel tapes later in its existence, it was–and this set focuses on– it was the music on its LPs (with distinct orange and black packaging in gatefold sleeves containing copious notes) that helped to set them apart.

Paramount among independent modern jazz record labels, Black Saint was founded in Italy back in 1975 and grew to encompass more than 190 albums, while its comparatively mainstream sister enterprise, Soul Note, emerged in 1979 and eventually racked up a phenomenal index of more than 350 releases. After purchasing both gold mines, CAM Jazz began reissuing the cream of these catalogs in affordable box sets, setting the stage for a full-scale reassessment of modern creative music. The Henry Threadgill edition contains no less than seven remastered albums, packaged like little LPs in perfectly reproduced jackets, each with the original print scaled down in miniature but still legible with the aid of a magnifying lens.

A super-session in theory, this one-off gig was recorded in Berlin in 1990 during another of Cecil Taylor's extended stays. According to the liner notes, this gig was tense from the start because of some ill will between some of the band's members, hence the title of the album. Whatever. The two tracks that comprise this set are full of the explosive, full-bore playing each of this quartet's members is well-known for. It's easy to believe there is tension here, the playing from the outset starts at furious and gets wilder. But what's more interesting is that given Taylor's gigantic stature among musicians, even the three he's playing with, he doesn't dominate the proceedings.

This captures over an hour's worth of John Zorn's search for the improvised song form. Several lineups from 1983 are documented here. The first eight tracks feature Zorn with Christian Marclay spinning and Peter Blegvad speaking. The text is unremarkable (for example, Honey-Cab's "…tell her everything I know/ In ink as black as carbon/ On paper white as snow"), but Blegvad's sonorous delivery works well with the chaos that the other two musicians spit and spin out, combining into tides of noisy mischief.

An amazing document of the life experiment that was the Organic Music Society. This super quality audio, recorded by RAI (the italian public broadcasting company) in 1976 for television, documents a quartet concert focused on vocals compositions and improvisations. Here, Don Cherry and his family-community’s musical belief emerges in its simplicity, with the desire to merge the knowledge and stimuli gained during numerous travels across the World in a single sound experience. Don's pocket-trumpet is melted with the beats of the great Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, the Italian guitar of Gian Piero Pramaggiore, and the tanpura drone of Moki.

PLANE CRASH 2 is the second document from the legendary, notoriously uncompromising improvisational power trio of Henry Kaiser, Damon Smith, and Weasel Walter… Trio music doesn't get much more real than this. Kaiser has been active in the improvised music community since the 1970s, bringing his dazzling technique and creative chops to bear in a myriad of diverse contexts, including Academy Award winning soundtrack work for longtime collaborator, director Werner Herzog.

This five-disc set, contained in a cardboard sleeve that bundles standard jewel cases, consists of Lonnie Liston Smith & the Cosmic Echoes' four albums for Flying Dutchman – Astral Traveling (1973), Cosmic Funk (1974), Expansions (1974), and Visions of a New World (1975) – along with their first for RCA, Reflections of a Golden Dream (1976). Some of the albums were intermittently elusive, at least when it came to the CD format, throughout the years, so this was a convenient – and affordable – way to get them in one shot. However, it went out of print quickly after its 2009 release.

Do you remember the film The Thomas Crowne Affair? The original—not the 1999 remake—starred Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, and contained the 1968 Academy Award-winning song "Windmills of Your Mind" by Dusty Springfield. I bring that up because this live performance by Daniel Carter, William Parker, and Matthew Shipp brings to mind the lyrics: "Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel / Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel / As the images unwind, like the circles that you find / In the windmills of your mind."

Michel Benita, partner of Dewey Redman, Aldo Romano, Marc Ducret, Erik Truffaz and Nils-Petter Molvaer (also norvegian as Eivind Aarset) is acustomed to unsual meetings. Mieko Miyazaki’ Koto and graceful voice, Eivind Aarset’s norvegian guitar, Matthieu Michel’s poetical trumpet, Philippe Garcia’s urban rythms, all organized by a subtil groove, added with electronic compositions of Michel Bentia push us to a unknow place, possible meeting place for all the cultures.

If ever a recording needed to be trumpeted from the rooftops, it's this one, and perhaps we all owe a debt of gratitude to John Zorn for making it happen. This initial trio meeting of saxophonist Anthony Braxton, drummer Milford Graves, and ubiquitous bassist William Parker is a vanguard jazz fan's dream come true. Beyond Quantum places these three modern legends in a completely improvised setting in producer Bill Laswell's studio for 63 minutes of pure inspirational, communicative fire.

Matt Mitchell, a 2015 recipient of the prestigious Doris Duke Impact Award, is one of the most in-demand pianists in jazz. As a member of Tim Bernes Snakeoil, the Dave Douglas Quintet, Rudresh Mahanthappas Bird Calls, John Hollenbecks Large Ensemble, and the Darius Jones Quartet, among many others, he has played an integral role on a number of the most critically-acclaimed releases of the last few years. Highly regarded for bringing contemporary classical music influences to his playing, his debut as a leader, Fiction (Pi 2013), a duo with drummer Ches Smith, was described by All About Jazz as “… huge quantities of brain candy, akin to a shot of adrenaline that will keep the willing listener on the edge of his or her seat.”

Recorded live at Storyville jazz club, New York, October 24 & 29, 1977. Quite simply one of Sun Ra's best live albums. This rare recording (originally on Horo records) finds Ra, along with a 19-piece Arkestra, playing a mix of his own compositions ('Images' and 'Lights') along with several jazz standards (including Jelly Roll Morton's 'King Porter Stomp' and Duke Ellington's 'Lightnin''). While Ra's own compositions were usually more avant-garde affairs, he always revelled in playing the classics as well in an effort to give his audience a lesson in jazz history."