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."

When your resume ranges from being the musical director/pianist for George Benson for the past two decades to charter member with intrepid Cryptogramophone label head/violinist Jeff Gauthier's Goatette, what do you do for your very first album as a leader? In the case of David Witham, it's to collect friends from across the musical spectrum he's worked in for his entire career and bring them together for a first meeting that's as eclectic and unpredictable as one might expect. Guest appearances from stalwart Cryptogramophone guitarist Nels Cline and ubiquitous steel guitarist Greg Leisz aside, Witham's core quintet on Spinning the Circle might seem, on paper, to be one headed for a train wreck, but only if you're not familiar with their full breadth of expertise and ability to mold into any context. Witham, who contributes all but one of the disc's eight tracks, provides plenty of contextual diversity for his band mates.

Jazz pianist Misha Alperin and classical trained French horn player Arkady Shilkloper who was the member of Bolshoi orchestra for ten years started to play together in late 80s. Their first record was released on ECM in 1989. This album was recorded live at the Grenoble jazz festival in France.

Guitarist Han-Earl Park's Anomic Aphasia features two different trios, revolving around the duo of the himself and saxophonist Catherine Sikora. One configuration features the work of guitarist Nick Didkovsky, a distinctly different guitarist than Park, and the other the deep register woodwinds of Josh Sinton.

Pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra (GUO) employs a similar head-scratching process to that utilized to make geuze, a much-treasured Belgian beer. Both elicit the "how did they do that?" question, and both seem to be a gift from Mother Nature. Schlippenbach brings together a choice assemblage of improvisers, like the ingredients of guesze (wheat and three-year-old female cone hops), The beer and Globe Unity Orchestra are then animated by spontaneous processes. With the guesze, it is a fermentation by wild yeast found in the atmosphere, specifically from the valley of Zenne, west of Brussels. When this beer was first created back in the fifteenth century, what we know as yeast fermentation must have seemed like magic. GUO also draws on a type of spontaneous fermentation, one that we call free improvisation. Thus far, at least, there is no science to explain this magic.

The fundamental and inescapable fact of our existence is that we are finite beings conscious of our finitude, and no more so than when someone near to us dies. This is the background to Sissel, a quietly moving performance by pianist John Tilbury, electric guitarist/electronics artist Keith Rowe, and Norwegian video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen, who collaborated with Tilbury and Rowe in the capacity of producer. The single piece that makes up the album was recorded as part of the Moving Sound concert series in Stavanger, Norway, in 2016, shortly after the death of Bjørgeengen’s wife Sissel, to whom the album is dedicated.

1964 was the year the Albert Ayler Quartet released their album The Hilversum Session. It consists of six songs of Ayler mayhem, but flavorful mayhem. Ayler is joined by Sunny Murray, Don Cherry, and Gary Peacock. This is the ESP Disk released in 2007

Okkyung Lee is a cellist, composer, and improviser who moves freely between of artistic disciples and contingencies. Since moving to New York in 2000 she has worked in disparate contexts as a solo artist and collaborator with creators in a wide range of disciplines. A native of South Korea, Lee has taken a broad array of inspirations—including noise, improvisation, jazz, western classical, and the traditional and popular music of her homeland—and used them to forge a highly distinctive approach.

Milton Man Gogh (MMG) is an experimental trio, formed as an outlet for the members to play the original compositions that no-one else wanted to play. Having performed and recorded together in various freelance and original settings over the last few years, the boys felt that the combination of shit yarns, shit music, a tortured, self-mutilating artist and a certain domestic beer made perfect sense; they decided to go ahead and give it a man gogh. The result is the amalgamation of the core influences from each of the members; jazz, prog, contemporary classical and metal. Equally comfortable plundering sounds from Meshuggah and Donny McCaslin to Aphex Twin and Bela Bartok, MMG seeks to explore personal inquiry through composition, ultimately being brought to life in the studio and live performance.

"A Day Of The Sun" is two Japanese jazz greats duo's album. Percussionist Masahiko Togashi (besides of pianist Masahiko Satoh) are key figure of Japanese free jazz,played with virtually everyone of important Japanese advanced jazz musician and recorded lot of albums,some of them (especially recorded in late 60s - early 70s)are part of Japanese jazz "golden fund". Acoustic bassist Isao Suzuki is even more legendary figure - in Japan he is usually titled "Godfather of Jazz".

Orca Noise Unit is based on an anagram of —oneironautics—, which refers to the ability to travel within a dream on a conscious basis. Those who have already kept a dream journal know what it feels like to go back and read over older parts. Some dream accounts have a lot of details, others evoke not much more than just a vibe. Some can be read like a full story, whereas others have no beginning, or no end, or neither. Sometimes we were genuinely lucid at the moment of the dream - or at least had a clear perception of things - whereas at other moments we were totally immersed in the projected reality.

Marc Sinan’s third ECM release is an evocative duo album with Oğuz Büyükberber which subtly covers a lot of ground. The guitarist and the clarinettist have worked together in many contexts since first meeting in Istanbul a decade ago, and Büyükberber previously appeared on Hasretim: Journey to Anatolia, released in 2013, as well as in Sinan’s music-theatre piece Komitas. The individual musical directions of the two players have effectively converged from opposite poles: Marc was trained as a classical guitarist in the western European tradition, but has increasingly been drawn to improvisation and Turkish material, while Oğuz started out with Turkish music and jazz before exploring free improvisation and contemporary composition. For White, both musicians provide new music.

Tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Matt Bauder is one of those young musicains who has an equal capacity to play in and out of the formal idiomatic conventions. When with Memorize the Sky he goes out, profiting from his studies with the innovative composers Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier and Ron Kuivila. Conversely, his band Day in Pictures (now reformed by replacing Angelica Sanchez for Kris Davis) operates completely in jazz domains, and does it very much according to the tradition. The truth is that the jazz tradition has defined a space for freedom right from the start, and Bauder is a master of combining that freedom with form.

In 1964 John Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. It's one of most influential and imposing jazz suites ever written, and on this debut CD for the Palmetto label, The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, featuring Wynton Marsalis, adapts Coltrane's immortal composition to the big band. Not to be outdone by his brother Branford's quartet version of this material recorded live on DVD, Wynton and company skillfully extend and elaborate on the Coltrane's work, and preserve the soul-searching spirit of the four-part suite, which deals with the blues, 4/4 swing, Afro-Latin rhythms, and ballads. Pulsed by Carlos Henriquez's sure-footed basslines, Herlin Riley's spiritual syncopations and Earl Lewis's profound pianisms, saxophonist Wess "Warmdaddy" Anderson's Tranish cries, and the leader's triumphant trumpet tones are as fluent and fierce as ever. Collectively, this brilliant orchestra goes where no large ensemble has gone before.

Misha Alperin has been something of a shadowy presence in the annals of ECM. His previous albums—namely, Wave Of Sorrow, North Story, and First Impression—marked him as an enigmatic musician of sparse yet effective language, at times of humor and gaiety. But if you want to know how the Ukrainian-born pianist’s heart beats, the forms his dreams take, let At Home be your looking glass. The aching lyricism of the title track, which opens this collection of improvised pieces, is all you need to know what’s going on: a private, reflective session surrounded by Alperin’s most familiar things. Recorded at his home in Norway, where he has lived for the past two decades, the program unfolds in a mosaic portrait of the artist in various stages of emotional awareness.