Midweek pick, August 22nd, 2024: More gems from the Berliner Jazztage archives

Live footage of the Muhal Richard Abrams Sextet, Anthony Braxton, and more.

A couple of weeks ago, a video of the Ornette Coleman Group featuring Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell emerged. Filmed live in 1971, a few months before the same group, plus guests, would record the masterpiece Science Fiction, discovering the video seemed like a revelation. The image quality was good, and crucially, so was the sound. And the music, naturally, is amazing. It would’ve been a natural inclusion for the Midweek Pick series, but by the time I got around to it, others as well as yours truly had already been spreading the word through various channels for a few days already.

It turns out the uploader of the above video, one Jay Korber, had many more gems up his sleeves. In the past few days, they have uploaded concerts by among others the Muhal Richard Abrams Sextet, featuring Henry Threadgill, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Wallace McMillan, Reggie Willis and Steve McCall, and trio and quartet performances by Anthony Braxton. Buckle up and check them out below, or head over to Korber’s channel for even more live jazz gems by Art Ensemble of Chicago, Carla Bley, Cecil Taylor, Peter Brötzmann, and more, as far as I can tell all of them recorded in Germany between the late 1960’s up to the early 1980’s.