This improvised music supergroup is truly a democratic musical commune.

Unpredictability and real passion characterizes ‘The Darkseid Recital’ as a whole, just as it did for Jones’ and Shipp’s amazing ‘Cosmic Lieder’, but those things are magnified from doing it from the stage. That’s the perfect way to follow up on that earlier, acclaimed duet.

ree-form jazz doesn’t need to go on for mind-numbingly lengths if the musicians know what they’re doing. The Sputnik Trio have this all figured out.

Provocative and fanciful, they bring Ellington and Strayhorn closer to us.

Two Bay Area pacesetters of improvised and avant-garde music will soon join forces.

It doesn’t matter if the experimental music is being rendered by electric guitar or banjo, Seabrook uses technology, virtuosity and a deviously fertile mind to blow the minds of anyone who comes across these recordings. ‘Sylphid Vitalizers’ expands the world of what is possible with a banjo. And guitar, too.

‘Solarists’ immediately establishes Haitian Rail as a fearsome battery of inscrutable, noise with terrific give-and-take. And trombonist Dan Blacksberg’s presence assures that they hold up the jazz part of the experimental metal-jazz equation, losing none of their ferocity along the way.

The first jazz record released by the just-beginning ESP-Disk record company, ‘Spiritual Unity’ quickly put this tiny label on the map, as well as thrust Ayler to the forefront of the free jazz movement when it was released more than a year later. Even then, this record was well ahead of the frontier of jazz and remains so today.

Kali Z. Fasteau’s spontaneous composition theory might be forty years old, but it’s quite alive and well in practice today, no matter what she choose to play in carrying it out. On piano, it’s a downright rapturous.

Here in ‘Merica, we covet our freedom and we root for the underdog. And we like brash. Therefore, the free-funk, noise band out of Oakland that call themselves Street Priest is as American is, well you know, Grandma’s apple pie.