Spontaneous Music Ensemble

Manfred Schoof: European Echoes

by Fran Kursztejn
April 27, 2025

Manfred Schoof's European Echoes is popularly characterized as a diamond in the rough, with emphasis on the rough. Boasting a cast filled with near every mainstay of the erupting European free jazz style, amounting to 16 independent players, most awarded their own solo, duet or section improvisation in the record's second half, audio technology of the ...

Trevor Watts' Original Drum Orchestra: The Art Is In The Rhythm Volume 2

by Chris May
July 13, 2023

A co-founder of London's pioneering Spontaneous Music Ensemble with drummer John Stevens in the mid 1960s, saxophonist Trevor Watts has straddled an unusually wide spectrum of genres. With SME he explored an area of free jazz which, in deliberate contrast to contemporary American adventurers such as Ornette Coleman or members of the Association for the Advancement ...

The Master Musicians Of Joujouka At The Forge

by Chris May
June 28, 2023

Every June, what the Guinness Book of Records has dubbed “The Smallest Festival in The World" and Rolling Stone has called “The Most Exclusive Dance Party in The World," is held in the village of Joujouka high in Morocco's Rif mountains. For three days, the Master Musicians of Joujouka play host to trance-music connoisseurs and newbies ...

Rhythm And Blues Records: Small But Perfectly Formed

by Duncan Heining
November 10, 2022

Back in 2007, music fan Nick Duckett walked into a record shop hoping to buy a comprehensive history of rhythm and blues on CD. To his surprise, the owner told him no such set existed at the time. Having a bit of time on his hands, Duckett thought to himself, “Well, there bloody ought to be?" ...

Paul Rutherford: In Backward Times

by Enrico Bettinello
February 16, 2018

Si parla sempre troppo poco di Paul Rutherford, uno dei maestri assoluti dell'improvvisazione europea, trombonista avventuroso, scomparso nel 2007 a soli 67 anni. Sebbene il suo ruolo fondamentale nell'ambito dei linguaggi pi�� radicali, a partire dagli anni Settanta, non sia mai stato messo in dubbio, �� pi�� facile che a essere citati siano Derek Bailey o ...

Karyobin

By Spontaneous Music Ensemble

Label: Emanem
Released: 2017
Track listing: Kary��bin Part 1; Kary��bin Part 2; Kary��bin Part 3; Kary��bin Part 4; Kary��bin Part 5; Kary��bin Part 6.

Spontaneous Music Ensemble: Karyobin

by John Eyles
November 7, 2017

Kary��bin is a crucially important album in the history and development of freely improvised music. Originally studio-recorded in February 1968 and issued as an Island Records LP later that year, it was remastered and re-released on CD by Chronoscope in 1993. Fine as the music was, both of those issues suffered from less than ideal sound ...

Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra: GIO Sevens

by Duncan Heining
September 2, 2017

Back in the 60s, there was a pop show on British TV called Thank Your Lucky Stars. It featured a “spin-a-disc" segment, where a DJ and three teenagers scored a clutch of 45s on a scale of one to five. One of these was a girl from the West Midlands called Janice Nicholls, who delighted audiences ...

Emanem Tidies Up

by John Eyles
December 19, 2016

As well as releasing contemporary recordings of improv, Martin Davidson's Emanem label has played a vital role in documenting the history of the music by releasing, re-releasing or re-curating recordings that are decades old. In the process, Davidson has sometimes worked tirelessly to improve the sound quality of recordings that were never intended for release, and ...