While not a Pi Recordings festival, Pi affiliated groups, artists and friends fill the BigEars lineup next year. And there are more artist announcements to come, so if you’ve never made the trip down to Knoxville, TN in March let this be your reason.
If you’re curious what the edge of acoustic bass playing sounds like and what the compositions that fuel that playing look like listen to Fog Face from Kim’s “Levs” and follow along with the score below.
Next level music out now.
It’s an incomparable thrill when an artist whom we have been working with for so long wins a major award. Congratulations, Tyshawn! To be nominated for a Pulitzer once is an achievement. To be nominated in consecutive years and win is unprecedented.
We couldn’t be happier. So much music over the past twenty years. So much more to come, we know.
Forward motion Doctor Sorey.
Take a look at the New York Times and WRTI for a couple of takes.
Unknown Rivers is bassist Luke Stewart’s debut for Pi Recordings. An omnipresent and galvanizing force on the music scene, Stewart is a leader or co-leader of such bands as Irreversible Entanglements, Exposure Quintet, Blacks’ Myths, Heart of the Ghost, and Remembrance Quintet. He is also among the most in-demand collaborators, having performed with the likes of David Murray, Nicole Mitchell, Moor Mother, Jaimie Branch, Nate Wooley, Ken Vandermark and countless others. Stewart is also a curator and presenter of multiple concert series in New York and Washington, D.C., a writer, activist, producer and D.J.
Featuring his long-running Silt Trio, with Brian Settles on tenor sax, and drummers Trae Crudup on four studio tracks and Chad Taylor on three live ones, Unknown Rivers sees the band pushing towards greater emphasis on rhythmic acuity, highlighting the different approaches to the music of the two drummers. Settles – a stalwart of the fertile Washington DC jazz scene – plays with a quiet intensity, possessing a sound that reminds of players from a distant past set against a modernist’s vocabulary. Stewart is the master of a deep, wide groove that cushions and propels, making every musical situation he finds himself in sound good. The Quietus has called the band “gripping… relies on subtlety and insinuation to register its uncanny power.” The Silt Trio is that magical juxtaposition of playing with raw spontaneity while maintaining the music’s intent and purpose.
Henry Threadgill tee-shirt and hoodie on 100% black cotton and Air tee-shirt on 100% natural cotton
Performances by Zooid and The Trio feat. Henry, Vijay Iyer and Dafnis Prieto and the Very Very Circus, Make a Move and Air Repertory Ensembles
We thought we’d share this Substack we just stumbled on that talks about Henry, his recordings and us. We didn’t know this was out there but enjoyed finding it so we thought we’d share with you. Enjoy.
Tyshawn Sorey’s Standards trio, featuring Aaron Diehl and Matt Brewer return with their second studio recording, Continuing. This time out the trio puts their touch on pieces by Ahmad Jamal, Wayne Shorter and Harold Mabern. With only four tracks and clocking in at almost 45 minutes, Continuingcaptures the trio exploring, stretching out and putting their personal stamp on the music. Available on both CD and double 45RPM vinyl.
Coinciding with the release of Continuing, we are rereleasing the trio’s first recording, Mesmerism, on CD. With pieces by Horace Silver, Duke Ellington, Muhal Richard Abrams and Paul Motion, Mesmerism is where it all began.
Pi Recordings is excited to announce the upcoming release of a new recording by the Henry Threadgill Ensemble recorded live at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn and his long anticipated auto biography, written with Brent Hayes Edwards. We are offering personally signed copies for a limited time via our BandCamp page. Autographed copies can be ordered HERE. Unsigned copies can be order from Knopf HERE.
Henry threadgill—the celebrated composer, saxophonist, and flautist—is one of only three jazz artists (along with Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis) to have won a Pulitzer Prize.
In Easily Slip into Another World, Threadgill recalls his childhood and upbringing in Chicago, his family life and education, and his brilliant career in music. Here are riveting recollections of the music scene in Chicago in the early 1960s, when Threadgill developed his craft among friends and schoolmates who would go on to form the core of the highly influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musi- cians (AACM); the year and a half he spent touring with an evangelical preacher in the mid-1960s; his military service in Vietnam, illustrative of an oft-ignored aspect of jazz history, given the number of musicians in Threadgill’s generation who served in the armed forces.
We appreciate his genius as he travels to the Netherlands, Venezuela, Trinidad, Sicily, and Goa enriching his art; immerses himself in the volatile downtown scene in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s; collaborates with choreographers, writers, and theater directors as well as an astonishing range of musicians, from AACM stalwarts (including Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Leroy Jenkins) to Chicago bluesmen, downtown luminaries, and world music innovators; shares his impressions of the recording industry and his perspectives on music education and the history of Black music in the United States; and, of course, accounts for his work with the various ensembles he has directed over the past five decades.
The composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill is widely recognized as one of the most original and innovative voices in contemporary music. A Chicago native, he studied at the American Conservatory of Music and, after serving in Vietnam, joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). He has performed on more than thirty albums, including acclaimed releases from his bands Air, X-75, the Henry Threadgill Sextett, Very Very Circus, Make a Move, Zooid, and Ensemble Double Up. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003, a United States Artists Fellowship in 2008, a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2016 Excellence in the Arts Award from the Vietnam Veterans of America. Threadgill was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2021. His four-movement work, In for a Penny, In for a Pound, received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2016.
Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003) andEpistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017). He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015, and in 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
We wanted to take this moment to say thank you to any and everyone who has ever purchased one our releases, whether it was this year or 20 years ago. We truly appreciate your support. As a way of showing our gratitude we are running a Holiday Sale. From now through December 22nd 11:59PM we are offering 25% off any sale made directly through our site. Just enter coupon code Holiday2022Sale at checkout on our website to receive 25% off.
After December 22nd we’ll be shutting down for the year and resting up for a busy 2023. All sales received before then will be shipped out. After December 22nd, we’ll see you in 2023.
Happy and safe holidays all.
Pi Recordings
We’re thrilled to share that David Virelles’ Nuna has been included on the New York Times list of Best Jazz Releases of 2022. Giovanni Russonello says of David, “David Virelles pays attention to detail at every level… And on “Nuna,” his first solo-piano record, he spreads that across all 88 keys.”
It’s high praise indeed for a recording we were excited to release and even more excited to see receive the praise it so richly deserves.