ALICE COLTRANE (1937–2007) was a composer, master of various musical instruments, improviser, spiritual leader, and wife of John Coltrane. Throughout her adult life, she worked within and combined a broad range of musical genres, including gospel, R&B;, bebop, free jazz, Indian devotional song, and Western art music. She recorded more than twenty full-length albums for Impulse and Warner Bros. Her music speaks to her experiences as a child playing for church congregations in Detroit; the transcendent and mind-bending avant-garde improvisations she performed with her husband John Coltrane; and her religious pilgrimages to India.  Hardback, 80pp Akashic Books, 2025When Monument Eternal was originally published in 1977, Alice Coltrane was living in Southern California and had recently become a swami, building and nurturing an alternative spiritual community. In these pages, she says that the book is “based upon the soul’s realizations in Absolute Consciousness and its spiritual relationships with the Supreme One.” Monument Eternal offers deep insight into Coltrane’s tremendous musical output, and shines a light on her transformation from Alice McLeod, Detroit church organist and bebopper, to sage thought leader Swami Turiyasangitananda. It also reflects the extraordinary fluidity of American religious customs in the mid and late twentieth century.    Akashic’s long-awaited reissue of Monument Eternal includes a new foreword by Ashley Kahn.

141 x 212mm 114 pages Black & white printingPerfect bound, Softcover, 2025Published byTenement PressSchneewittchen (2025) is a feature film by the artist and author Stanley Schtinter. An auditorium only, 35mm presentation of which only one print exists. In this volume, director Stanley Schtinter and producer Gareth Evans consider their co-work on Schneewittchen—discuss the project’s implications and associations—and consider the film a catalyst fit to enable a wide-ranging conversation. Evans and Schtinter touch on the water damage done by mainstream culture to our contemporary critical faculty; consider sight and storytelling; imagination and image-making; creativity and light; the luminosity of the dark; and riff on the implications borne by an ownership of the means of production in an age of extinction. A feature-length discussion grounded in their collaboration; their exchange is a commons composed of 18181 words.

Paperback, A4, 92pp Lowthario Press, 2023Best B4 1984 by Chris Low (former drummer with The Apostles, Part One, OI Polloi etc) is a beautifully presented, limited edition, A4 size, fine-bound, 100 page collection of over 120 of the most visually stunning and ideologically engaging images from the 1980-1984 halcyon days of the UK Anarcho Punk scene. Printed on 100% eco-friendly, non bleached recycled paper it features facsimiles of fanzine pages, gig posters, cassette covers, handouts, flyers and other ephemera from Chris’s personal archive collected over this period including works by: Crass, The Apostles, Rudimentary Peni, Part One, The Mob, Poison Girls, APF Brigade, Psycho Faction, Living Legends, Flux of Pink Indians, Annie Anxiety, The Alternative, Oi Polloi, Hagar The Womb, Krondstadt Uprising, Lack of Knowledge, Assassins of Hope, Riot Clone, Political Asylum, Dirt, AOA, Napalm Death + many more; pages from fanzines including Kill Your Pet Puppy, Pigs For Slaughter, Toxic Graffiti, New Crimes, Scrobe, Antigen, The Book of Revelations, Coming Attack, Final Curtain, Scum, Dawning of a New Error, Tender Mercy, Twisted Nerve, Children of The Revolution, Cobalt Hate, Hysteria, A New Body, Enigma, The Fanzine With No Name and documents by anarchist/political groups such as Stop The City, Class War, London Greenpeace, London Autonomists, Anarchist Youth Federation, Persons Unknown Defence Campaign plus others.

The long-awaited reissue of the sequel to Amiri Baraka’s seminal work, BLUES PEOPLE, and latest selection in the AkashiClassics Renegade Reprint Series. This collection of essays by Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones includes a new introduction by the author and Q&A; by Calvin Reid. Paperback: 240 pagesPublished: 1/1/10ISBN: 9781933354934  In 2007, Akashic Books ushered Amiri Baraka back into the forefront of America’s literary consciousness with the short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone. Now, this reissue of Black Music—long out of print—features a highly provocative and profoundly insightful collection of essays on jazz criticism, the creative process, and the development of a new way forward for black artists. Black Music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. This rich and vital collection is comprised of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959–1967.

Canongate, 2022 (first published, 1963) Paperback, 240pp  In this essential and impassioned text, LeRoi Jones traces the intertwined development of blues and jazz music with the history of its creators in ‘White America’. As important and relevant as at its first publication in 1963, it shows how music and its people are inseparable – expressing and reflecting the other, surviving and adapting through oppression.

Fitzcarraldo, April 2025  Paperback, 215ppComposer, pianist and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before Surrealism and a conceptual artist before Conceptual Art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There’s scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn’t anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre’s Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demi-monde to the artistic avant-garde, cult critic Ian Penman’s masterful Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie’s death.

We Jazz, Issue 14, Spring 2025  Paperback, 128ppCentered around Sun Ra, We Jazz Issue 14 ‘Cosmos’, includes a collection of Sun Ra pieces by Francis Gooding, Mats Gustafsson, Rui Miguel Abreu, Stewart Smith and Joshua Lane, rare Sun Ra Arkestra photos by Guy Stevens, Larry Stabbins by Dave Waller, Angélique Kidjo by Rob Garratt, Heli Hartikainen by Wif Stenger, Alan Wilkinson by Daniel Spicer, Black Artists Group by David Mittleman, Mike Stern by Rob Garratt, album reviews, book reviews, live reviews, photo essay & more.

This catalog was produced on the occasion of the exhibition Roscoe MitchellKeeper of the Code: Paintings 1963–2022January 20–March 11, 2023Corbett vs. Dempsey2156 West Fulton StreetChicago, IL 60612 Publication Editor: Katie CatoText: John Corbett, Roscoe MitchellDesign: Michael Dyer/RemakePhotography: Joseph Blough, Robert Chase Heishman, John Corbett, Bob Crawford, Wendy NelsonFirst printing, edition of 1000Printed on 100# Classic Crest Eggshell Solar White and 70# Starbright Smooth White Opaque TextRoscoe Mitchell (b. 1940) has been a leading figure in the performing arts for over 50 years. Keeper of the Code is the first solo exhibition to spotlight his work in the visual arts. Born and raised in Chicago, Mitchell formed the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble in 1966, featuring Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors. Three years later, adding Joseph Jarman, upon their departure to Paris for a two-year sojourn the group transformed into the collective interdisciplinary troupe called the Art Ensemble of Chicago. By that time Mitchell had already recorded the first LP of music affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Sound (Delmark, 1966), and he had joined forces with St. Louis trumpeter Bowie for Numbers 1 & 2 (Nessa, 1967), which featured a painting by Mitchell on its cover. Indeed, Mitchell had been painting since 1963, and he continued on and off into the heyday of the Art Ensemble and through a hyperproductive sequence of decades of solo music, improvised encounters, and music for Mitchell-led ensembles.

Hardback, 14x23cm, 123pp Joao Simoes, Edition of 500, 2024I have chosen, in this study, to go deeply into my 1961 Transformations, to note the guises in which it appeared, to identify its issues and to sort them out. I will not rush toward an explanatory description of the piece as it is found in An Anthology (Monte Young, ed. La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, New York, 1963).I prefer to establish its context and to explore correlative issues. I want to explore fully how Transformations is positioned: .i    as a diversion from absurdist computationalist music.ii    as a diversion from the derivations of exact science.iii    as a cognitive nihilist object-lesson to exact science regarding derivations

584 pp. 2024.  Mark Lehmstedt (b. 1961) is a German publisher, editor and historian. Lehmstedt publishers focusing on cultural history was rewarded Best German Publisher in 2019 and 2020. Mark Lehmstedt teaches media history at the University of Leipzig mainly dealing with German book history from the 15th century to the present day. At the occasion of the 100th birthday of Art Tatum in 2009 he published the first biography of the pianist in German.For the first time this book in detail reconstructs the often blurred traces of the life of the Afro American piano virtuoso from Toledo, Ohio. Based on the stories of many contemporaries and fellow musicians and on countless reports in the daily press and jazz journals, a fascinating portrait emerges of a unique artist and the pulsating world of jazz of his time. Ever since his first appearance in New York City in 1932, Art Tatum has been regarded as the most important pianist in the history of jazz. His technique took the breath away even from concert pianists of the calibre of Horowitz, his touch was of unparalleled lightness and elegance, and his improvisations across the entire harmonic spectrum put him decades ahead of his time.

One of Dennis Cooper's favourite books of 2024 (no small feat) Hesse K. is a writer. Her criticism and poetry has appeared in MAP magazine and Montez Radio, and in anthologies by Sticky Fingers Publishing, Toothgrinder, Worms and Pilot Press, among others. She lives in London.  Pilot, July 2024 Paperback 248pp ISBN: 9781739364984One night a satellite falls out of the sky and splits a girl in half. Disquiet Drive is a book scraped together from the shorn parts of a person who may no longer exist. Beginning with an admission that language and embodiment seem indistinguishable, yet refusing to claim a singular voice, the texts in this collection lurch between the fiery crucible of a transition and the weird jaggedness of our own continuity; between inverted memoir and prose-poetry; the raw, irrepressible lyric and the essay as an exercise in the art of digging-one’s-heels-in. Disquiet Drive is about undoing the words we’re handed so that language can survive, and undoing the body so that it can find a way to live.

Softcover, 242 pp, 4 3⁄8 ✕ 7 inches Blank Forms Editions, June 2024   With a foreword by Darius H. James and an afterword by Tracie Morris.   STEVE CANNON (1935–2019) was a writer who shaped the literary history of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He was the founder and executive director of A Gathering of the Tribes, an East Village nonprofit and exhibition space, and the publisher of a magazine of the same name. Tribes, which operated from Cannon’s Alphabet City townhouse, functioned as a salon where artists and musicians such as David Hammons, Sun Ra and Butch Morris could reliably be found among a cohort of younger poets emerging from the Nuyorican Poets Café scene. Born to a preacher in New Orleans, Cannon relocated to New York from England in 1962, where, alongside such luminaries as Amiri Baraka and Calvin C. Hernton, Cannon joined the Umbra Workshop, a cornerstone of 1960s African American avant-garde poetry and publishing. In 1973 he, Ishmael Reed, and Joe Johnson cofounded the influential literary and audio/visual imprint Reed, Cannon, and Johnson. As a poet, playwright and professor, Cannon mentored a generation of writers includ- ing Eileen Myles and Paul Beatty, and taught across the City University of New York system for more than three decades.Despite decades of notoriety as one of the “filthiest books in the world,” Steve Cannon’s first and only novel, Groove, Bang and Jive Around, has hardly been read since first being published by the Paris-based Ophelia Press in 1969. Due to its scarcity, the New York Press deemed it “an underground classic of such legendary stature that New York’s black cognoscenti have transmogrified the work into urban myth.” This debut, revised for release by Olympia Press in 1971, cemented Cannon’s place as a stalwart of the East Village and key figure in New York’s black avant-garde—inspiring a generation to break with staid literary modernism, according to Cannon’s friend and collaborator Ishmael Reed, for whom its release “signaled a resurfacing of the irreverent, underground trickster tradition of black orature.” Seeped psychedelia and hoodoo, this erotic farce follows Anette, a fourteen-year-old runaway, from the outhouse of a New Orleans juke joint to the land of Oo-bla-dee, a realm of bacchanalian self-determination founded by Dizzy Gillespie. Inspired equally by Chester Himes and Women's Liberation, the author claims—as Ophelia put it, Groove, Bang and Jive Around is an absolute necessity “for everyone who wants to know where and how the action takes place in Sex and Soul.”

Filling a significant gap in contemporary cultural studies, Musical Elaborations examines the intersection of the public and private meaning of music. Incorporating the music criticism of Adorno, musical ideas from literary works by Proust, and criticism by Benjamin and de Man into his work, noted critic Edward W. Said discusses performers such as Glenn Gould, Arturo Toscanini, and Alfred Brendel and such composers as Beethoven, Wagner, and Strauss.   Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Edward W. Said was one of the world's most celebrated, outspoken, and influential public intellectuals until his death on September 24, 2003. He is the author of more than twenty books that have been translated into thirty-six languages, including Beginnings (1975); The Question of Palestine (1979); the internationally acclaimed Orientalism (1979); Covering Islam (1980); The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983); After the Last Sky (1986); Musical Elaborations (1991); Culture and Imperialism (1993); Out of Place: A Memoir (1999); Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2001); Power, Politics, and Culture (2001); and Freud and the Non-European (2003). He began teaching at Columbia University in 1963 and became University Professor of English and Comparative Literature there in 1992. He was a past president of the Modern Language Association and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and the American Philosophical Society. Said was the recipient of numerous prizes and distinctions—including twenty honorary doctorates—and he was first U.S. citizen to receive the prestigious Sultan Owais Prize.

Translated by Daniella Shreir With an Introduction by Eileen Myles and Afterword by Frances MorganAnd there were other girls who were odd ones too and that was how it was. We loved each other and that was that. I was 18 in May 1968 and it seemed as though my style was becoming popular and that everything was going back to normal, if I dare use the word because I really don’t like the word normal. I prefer the word abnormal but only just, because in the word abnormal you can still hear the word normal and that’s a word I really don't want to hear. In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films.My Mother Laughsis both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

128pp, Karma Books, New York, 2024This volume is an intimate consideration of musician Kim Gordon’s brother’s life and art featuring personal photographs and pages from his journals. Following Keller Gordon’s death in 2023, his sister collected mementos including drawings, photos, poems and the diaries he kept at various stages of lucidity. Through Kim’s prose and Keller’s own words, Keller extends and destabilises the form of the biography, foregrounding the fragmented and the imperfect. Including a diaristic essay about their childhood, the complexities of family dynamics and the double-edged sword of creating and maintaining legends about those we love and admire. Designed to evoke the format of Keller’s diaries, this volume features facsimiles of his writings, offering insight into the complicated figure of Keller Gordon as well as his sister’s life.  Kim Gordon is an artist and cofounding member of the bands Sonic Youth and Body/Head, and the author of the memoir Girl in a Band.

Last few copies before Out of Print.  Heavy: 1,5kg Softcover, 21.6 x 27.9 cm, 482 pages,
370+ illustrations,
Edition of 500 AUM Fidelity/ Centering, 201415+ years in the making. Astonishing, profound, worthy of high honors in the field of such research and any accolades that can be bestowed on such a mighty creation. A labor of both deep love and an exceedingly dedicated nature.This is not a discography (although a complete-to-publish-date WP discography is a part of it); this is a fully annotated and lavishly illustrated record of every time that William Parker has ever played a gig, with all and every ensemble, as a band member or leader, from 1972 through Vision Festival 2014 when it was first made available.This is a vast microcosm of one jazz musician that reveals a macrocosm of jazz during the period of time covered – an extensive history of jazz through the work schedule of one profound jazz musician and his affiliations with elemental participants in that history.

Paperback, 180pp AUM Fidelity, Perpetual Frontier: The Properties of Free Music describes the way free music is constructed through the processes of synthesis, interpretation, and invention. With descriptive sections of four seminal methodologies: Unit Structures, Harmolodics, Tri-Axium Theory, and European Free Improvisation, as well as sections on how specific properties are consistently used and re-formulated in the construction of free music. This material, which the author developed through years of performing and teaching, is concise and coherent, making it clear for listeners and musicians alike, and thereby setting a new standard for the understanding and study of the most inherently forward-seeking musical form of our time. This extraordinary work also features contributions in the form of answers to a questionnaire by 15 renowned free music artists: Marilyn Crispell, Charles Downs, Joe McPhee, Alex Ward, Matthew Shipp, Ken Vandermark, Jack Wright, Simon H. Fell, Agusti Fernandez, Nate Wooley, William Parker, Mary Halvorson, Nicole Mitchell, Katt Hernandez, and Jamie Saft. The singularly gifted musician and composer Joe Morris is also a great scholar and writer on this music. This is his first book.

The fourth collection of poetry from the literary and cultural critic Fred Moten, B Jenkins is named after the poet’s mother, who passed away in 2000. It is both an elegy and an inquiry into many of the themes that Moten has explored throughout his career: language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical aesthetic and political tradition. In Moten’s verse, the arts, scholarship, and activism intertwine. Cadences echo from his mother’s Arkansas home through African American history and avant-garde jazz riffs. Formal innovations suggest the ways that words, sounds, and music give way to one another.The first and last poems in the collection are explicitly devoted to Moten’s mother; the others relate more obliquely to her life and legacy. They invoke performers, writers, artists, and thinkers including not only James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Frederick Douglass, Billie Holiday, Audre Lorde, Charlie Parker, and Cecil Taylor, but also contemporary scholars of race, affect, and queer theory. The book concludes with an interview conducted by Charles Henry Rowell, the editor of the journal Callaloo. Rowell elicits Moten’s thoughts on the relation of his poetry to theory, music, and African American vernacular culture.