No Business Records

Started in 1997 as a second hand music shop under an unpretentious name “Thelonious” our glorious enterprise developed considerably to embrace other music related activities – namely carrying out concerts, producing and releasing recordings. For these purposes an NGO “Thel” (concert management) was opened in 2004 and“No Business Records” (music releasing) – in 2008. Since the beginning “Thelonious” has been a special place on the city map – “a must visit” for anybody interested in jazz and improvised music. It didn’t take long before a community of dedicated fans united around the shop and it turned into some sort of club. Friendly relationship with local musicians has been established. By 2004 our love to music and an experience gained from listening and collecting records prompted an exciting idea: to invite our favourite artists to Lithuania. The NGO “Thel” was established and the first concert was successfully carried out.

Elton Dean | Paul Dunmall | Paul Rogers | Tony Bianco | Remembrance | No Business Records

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Throughout his life saxophonist Elton Dean had a varied number of associations and styles in which he worked with a sureness and mastery very rare. Whether straight-ahead with Harry Beckett, jazz-rock and beyond with the Soft Machine lineups, or just plain out, he did it all with grace, poise and fire. As far as the out side is concerned you are well served by a new two-CD set of an unreleased session from 2004, appropriately titled Remembrance (No Business NBCD 59/60). Dean and a very able quartet give us extended outings. Elton plays the alto, the incandescent Paul Dunmall takes up the tenor, Paul Rogers smokes the acoustic bass, and the ever-stoking Tony Bianco gets at the drums. — Gregory Edwards Continue reading →

Fabric Trio | Murmurs | No Business Records

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I guess we all know this. You buy a new record/CD and as soon as you are at home you put it on your stereo. You listen to it for the first time and you think: Okay, strong, a good album. Then you listen to it again and again and the more often you listen to it the better it gets. You discover hidden qualities, surprising and interesting details, you recognize what a treat it is. Fabric Trio’s “Murmurs” is exactly such an album. — Martin Schray Continue reading →

Adam Lane Trio | Absolute Horizon | No Business Records

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I’m a sucker for the thick, bluesy tone of Adam Lane’s bass — somehow, he always manages to convey its grittiest, most grounded side. Absolute Horizon kicks off with a track of the same name, a slow tattoo rising from drummer Vijay Anderson and Lane stumbling into a bass line that can’t help but give off a little swagger. Slowly, a groove coalesces, just the sort of low-end ride to best deliver Darius Jones’s sickly-sweet saxophone. Within minutes, you realize: this is what I want in a saxophone trio. There’s an edge for sure, but also the piece that fits perfectly into the well-worn rhythmic folds of your brain. Things heat up, but the trio never breaks a sweat. They ease out of the track just a coolly and calmly as they brought it into being. — Dan Sorrells Continue reading →

Howard Riley | Live With Repertoire | No Business Records

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British pianist Howard Riley’s previous album on No Business, the monumental The Complete Short Stories: 1998-2010 (2011), was a revelation to many, collecting together 6 CDs of stunning aphoristic improvisations. However on Live With Repertoire, as the title suggests, the pianist concentrates primarily on the songbook, particularly Monk, one of his touchstones along with Ellington. In the liners Riley explains that his working method sees him treat a gig as either with or without repertoire, depending on audience, ambience and how he feels. Something was clearly in the air in Leicester in November 2011 as the pianist generates an enthralling set from well-used materials, all captured in sparkling sound. — John Sharpe Continue reading →

Steven Lugerner | For We Have Heard | No Business Records

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Last summer I previewed a concert by an excellent New York jazz trio called Chives, led by the reedist Steven Lugerner, an ambitious composer, arranger, and conceptualist who seems to be overflowing with ideas. That impression is only reinforced by his strong new album, For We Have Heard (due May 14 on No Business/Primary), his second session with pianist Myra Melford, trumpeter Darren Johnston, and drummer Matt Wilson. Lugerner used texts from the Book of Joshua in the Torah to title each piece, and he further composed the music by usinggematria, a traditional rabbinical system of assigning numbers to particular words or phrases. In the album’s press materials he writes, “I devised a couple of ways of turning those numbers into music. For instance, if I had a series of five or six numbers, I could stack them in terms of harmony and build chords out of that. Or I could use those numbers in a time signature or meter of music. The numbers could be reflected in the melody or the duration of a note.” But don’t let that dissuade you from checking the actual music out, because this is no theoretical trip—the sounds stand easily on their own, as you can tell from today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “When a Long Blast Is Sounded.” — Peter Margasak Continue reading →

Melodic Art-Tet | No Business Records

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Although according to detractors, all free-jazz sessions sound alike, these high-quality dates from 1974 and 1986 put a lie to that supposition. Both also suggest why the music was never popular. Each CD shares trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah and features all stars. 1974’s Melodic Art-Tet included reedist Charles Brackeen, drummer Roger Blank, bassist William Parker and percussionist Tony Waters (Ramadan Mumeen). 1986’s The Group was saxophonist Marion Brown, violinist Billy Bang, bassists Sirone or Fred Hopkins plus drummer Andrew Cyrille. —Ken Waxman Continue reading →

Evan Parker | Barry Guy | Paul Lytton | Live at Maya Recordings Festival | No Business Records

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As a musician Evan Parker is a man of many faces. On the one hand he is always looking for new collaborations like on C-Section with electronic madman John Wiese (Second Layer Recordings), Live at Akbank Jazz Festival (Re:konstruKkt) with the Turkish group konstruKt or ‘Round About One O’clock (Not Two) with Slovenian drummer and percussionist Zlatko Kaučič. On the other hand he likes long time relations like his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble (although many new members have been added to this project), the legendary Schlippenbach Trio (as to persistence the Rolling Stones of free jazz) and the Evan Parker Trio (with Barry Guy on bass and Paul Lytton on drums). — Martin Schray Continue reading →

Correction with Mats Gustafsson | Shift | No Business Records

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The inmates riot in the House of Correction. The girls who put up postcards in London telephone boxes – are telephone boxes used for anything else now? – offer correction among other delights. The ticker-tape in newspaper offices – also not much used now – hesitates on a story, flags CORRECTION, and adjusts the casualty figures up or down. We know what the word means, and what it means is somewhere on the pleasure/pain divide, somewhere between sticking to and breaking the rules, some measure of restraint coupled to a throwing over of all restraint. — Brian Morton Continue reading →

Quat Quartet | Live at Hasselt | No Business Records

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A foursome that includes vibes and piano may initially put you in mind of the Modern Jazz Quartet. It’s a natural reaction for those who have absorbed the jazz canon going back at least that far. But though there is a certain kind of quietude at times in common with MJQ, the quartet Quat doesn’t occupy the quasi-formal bop-classical-tonal-composed-head territory of the earlier group. Listen to Quat’s CD Live at Hasselt (No Business NBCD54), however, and you will find there is much going on in an intimate interactive setting that the MJQ also excelled at, though the Quat quartet firmly occupies a modern free improv context. Quat comes through with four middle- to long-lengthed improvisations that surely bear repeated listens. —Grego Applegate Edwards Continue reading →

The Convergence Quartet | Slow and Steady | No Business Records

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Free music is no simple matter. It can work marvelously when the chemistry between players is right. Or it can earnestly go along but never quite reach a collective point of convergence. Happily, the group named after such occurrences, the Convergence Quartet, achieves such a state consistently and rewardingly on their album Slow and Steady (No Business NBCD 53). — Grego Applegate Edwards Continue reading →