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LP
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HOL 135LP
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During Holiday Records' long friendship and incredibly prolific collaboration with Hartmut Geerken -- who sadly left this planet on October 21, 2021 -- he never ceased to surprise. He lived many lives, traveling the world as an employee of the Goethe Institute, playing with other incredible musicians, and being smart enough to record most of the concerts he did. His archive is in fact full of treasures, and any conversation with him could lead to the rediscovery of unheard master tapes preserving true music gold. It was during the one of these conversations we had at his house - while searching for pictures to be used for the 50th anniversary reissue of Heliopolis (HOL 124LP) -- that he pulled the original score of Music for Angela Davis No. 2 out of a folder, saying with a smile: "Let's see... I should have the complete recording of this one"!
Recorded at Nile Hall, Cairo, on December 4, 1971, Music for Angela Davis is a 24-minute composition that encounters two full ensembles -- respectively conducted by Geerken himself and Hubertus Von Puttkamer -- playing simultaneously without listening to each other, rising and falling within a brilliant and structurally complex expression of call and (non) response. Collective improvisation in its most heightened and sophisticated form.
As described by Geerken in the liner notes: "One of my attempts with the Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble was my time-related, but timeless composition Music for Angela Davis. I divided the ensemble into two groups of roughly the same size, each with a conductor, and both groups played simultaneously, according to the different hand signals of the conductors, without one group reacting to or considering the other. The only two-tone sequences consisted of the music-able notes of the name Angela Davis, i. e. a-g-e-a and d-a s. The composition was an attempt to get together in society through the medium of improvisation and a protest against the racial measurements of the American governments." Unreleased archival recording; single-sided LP; edition of 500.
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LP
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HOL 124LP
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2022 restock, last copies. Holiday Records present the first ever authorized reissue Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble's Heliopolis, originally released in 1970. Released under license from the artist. One of the great projects in Egyptian jazz, the Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble was formed by Salah Ragab and Hartmut Geerken as an avant-garde offshoot of The Cairo Jazz Band, the first jazz big band in the country. Formed in 1968 when Ragab was appointed chief of Egypt's Military Department of Music and had at his disposal a vast staff of musicians (almost three thousand!), an entire military building, and a full range collection of musical instruments. When encountering this recording, issued in 1970, the deep resonance found between the ensemble and its American counterparts becomes startlingly clear. Heliopolis is a stunning blend of big band spiritual jazz, the music of the Middle East, and the fire and energy of free jazz, unveiling a deep creative resonance with the contemporaneous efforts of Pharaoh Sanders, Phil Cohran, and of course Sun Ra, combining jazz instrumentation and musical style with indigenous melodies and instruments to create a musical object with few parallels. The album is a throbbing, squealing, wild journey through the creative heights of sound channeling swirling, focused artistry that taps future and past in a single blow. Copies of the original pressing are between the rarest and most sought-after records in canon of recorded jazz.
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