Lost Recordings

The story of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble came to an end on 13 September 1994, when a heart attack forced John Stevens to stop. The SME – as we shall refer to it from here on – was, above all, Stevens himself, surrounded over the course of three decades by a multitude of musicians who gave rise to an ever-changing swarm of line-ups. Some were stripped down to the bare minimum, even to a duo; others grew to almost twenty members. Whatever the configuration, they played relentlessly, recorded whenever the opportunity arose and produced a considerable number of albums, many of which were later brought back into circulation with painstaking care and enviable thoroughness by Martin Davidson through his Emanem label. Those releases were enriched by hours of previously unheard material, recovered from treasure chests disguised as drawers. Then, in December 2023, Davidson too passed away, and the restoration work […]

Canterbury is not far from the French coast – less than a hundred kilometres away. Yet if we change our unit of measurement and...

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Canetti devoted thirty-eight years to investigating the most intimate mechanisms of human behaviour. The result of nearly four decades of uninterrupted work was Crowds...

Henry Lowther was the one who found Paul Rutherford’s body, after forcing open the door of his flat with a police officer and a...

There was a good vibe in the air around Woodstock, and not only rock musicians were breathing it in. Mike Mainieri settled near the...

At the age of 87, Mike Mainieri certainly needs no introduction. The American vibraphonist, composer, and record producer, whose father came from Ravello, has...

The 1. New Jazz Festival Hamburg '75 album remains a lost item today. It contains four long tracks from a festival whose lineup, half a century later, is still difficult to reconstruct: Terje Rypdal, Liebman & Beirach, Eberhard Weber, and Tomasz Stańko.

A member of some of the most innovative groups of the seventies, a faithful partner of Dave Holland in an unforgettable rhythm section, Barry Altschul left us some important records