Books and Magazines


Tremble, Fatema Abdoolcarim’s debut collection of poems, is an intimate and involving sequence on fertility and faith. A memoir in verse, these poems relate encounters with the animal other, the uncertain, but always echoing the tender rituals of family, food, prayer. Abdoolcarim thinks through what it means to care – and to mother – at a time where atrocity makes those systems of loving seem out of reach. Tremble traces the sensual and unknown spaces of desire, creating a hopeful lyric in spaces of private and global loss. Tremble, Fatema Abdoolcarim’s debut collection of poems, is an intimate and involving sequence on fertility and faith. A memoir in verse, these poems relate encounters with the animal other, the uncertain, but always echoing the tender rituals of family, food, prayer. Abdoolcarim thinks through what it means to care – and to mother – at a time where atrocity makes those systems of loving seem out of reach. Tremble traces the sensual and unknown spaces of desire, creating a hopeful lyric in spaces of private and global loss.   •     ‘The remarkable poems that make up Tremble record a body’s descent into vertiginous, all-encompassing desire. Abdoolcarim is fearless in her determination not to look away from what is monstrous in our world, yet her writing also reflects what it is to be fully human. The clarity of her image-making eye, her wit, her compassion, and her rage carry us and challenge us to stay with the trouble, to set our ears to the darkness and listen for the beauty in its hollow ring, to allow it to speak to the very limits of our longing. Her words shimmer like a pool of jade at the centre of a black ceramic bowl, a sensual riposte to Hélène Cixous’ imperative: Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.’ – Rebecca Hurst   ‘Fatema Abdoolcarim is the rare artist I would follow anywhere, whose work astounds and moves me across every genre. Tremble is a gift of profound proportions, conveying with her signature brilliant and caring gaze the variable inner and outer textures of life. I hold this remarkable text—its vast and intimate reach—to my chest in gratitude.’ – Gabrielle BatesStaplebound, 44pp Monitor Books, London, Oct 2025

Fatema Abdoolcarim – Tremble

n this captivating memoir, the first full-length account of life in the Arkestra by any of its members, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts two decades of traveling the spaceways with the inimitable composer, pianist, and big-band leader Sun Ra. Gigging everywhere from the legendary Bed-Stuy venue the East to the National Stadium in Lagos, Abdullah paints a vivid picture of the rise of loft jazz and the influence of Pan-Africanism on creative music, while capturing radical artistic and political developments across Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s. Richly illustrated with more than fifty pages of photographs and posters from Adger Cowans, Marilyn Nance, Val Wilmer, and others, A Strange Celestial Road interweaves the author’s own moving story—his battles with addiction, spiritual development, and life as a working class performer—with enthralling tales of tutelage under Cal Massey, collaborations with the likes of Ed Blackwell, Marion Brown, and Andrew Cyrille, and profound, occasionally confounding, mentorship by Sun Ra. Originally written in the 1990s with the help of Nuyorican poet Louis Reyes Rivera and published now for the first time, with a foreword by Salim Washington, A Strange Celestial Road is not only an autobiography, but a history of a remarkable and under-documented movement in music.   --- AHMED ABDULLAH joined the Sun Ra Arkestra as a trumpeter in 1974 and remained a member for more than twenty years. Born in Harlem in 1947, he became an important figure in the New York loft jazz movement, forming the group Abdullah in 1972, and going on to found the Melodic Art-Tet with Charles Brackeen, Ronnie Boykins, and Roger Blank in the early 1970s and The Group with Marion Brown, Billy Bang, Sirone, Fred Hopkins and Andrew Cyrille in 1986. Abdullah is a co-founder of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium, has been the music director of Dianne McIntyre’s Sounds in Motion Dance Company, and is currently music director at the historic venue Sistas’ Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He has been a music instructor at Carnegie Hall and Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, and teaches at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and an elementary school in central Brooklyn. LOUIS REYES RIVERA (1945–2012) was a Puerto Rican poet from Brooklyn. Known as the “Dean of Nuyorican Poetics,” he led creative writing workshops in community centers and prisons across New York, lectured on Latin and Black diasporic history and literature at New York colleges including Hunter, Boricua, Pratt, and Stony Brook; and was a leader in the 1969 student movement at CUNY, leading to the founding of its department of ethnic studies. Rivera was also a prolific editor, working on books such as John Oliver Killens’s Great Black Russian: The Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin, and a translator of works by Puerto Rican poets Clemente Soto Velez and Otto Rene Castillo. His own poetry collections include Who Pays the Cost (1977), This One for You (1983), and Scattered Scripture (1996), which received an award from the Latin American Writers Institute. SALIM WASHINGTON is a saxophonist, composer, and scholar based in Durban, South Africa, where he is a professor at University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is a co-author, with Farah Jasmine Griffin, of Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis,  John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (2009) and a contributor to Yellow Power, Yellow Soul: The Radical Art of Fred Ho  (2013).

AHMED ABDULLAH – A STRANGE CELESTIAL ROAD

This is exactly what we need. Big time. Johannes Rød returns with the massively expanded edition of his essential guide - a monument of discographic research spanning six decades of creative music documentation. 381 pages plus 47 unnumbered pages of label artwork. 185 labels mapped with obsessive detail and passionate advocacy. From the explosive emergence of free jazz in the mid-1960s through ESP-Disk, BYG Actuel, and Actuel, through the European improvisers' movement documented by FMP, Incus, ICP, and Po Torch, to contemporary operations like Clean Feed, Trost Records, Astral Spirits, and Smalltown Supersound. This is not just catalogue information. This is cultural history. Each label entry captures aesthetic vision, cultural context, the networks of musicians and presenters that made each imprint distinctive. Rød understands that free jazz culture has always been about more than just the music in the grooves - from Absinth Records' handpainted sleeves to FMP's iconic covers by Annette Peacock and Paul Lovens, this book documents the visual beauty alongside the sonic radicalism. When Rød's Free Jazz and Improvisation on Vinyl 1965-1985 appeared in 2014, it immediately became the essential companion for anyone navigating the vast landscape of creative music documentation. This 2025 edition is the complete map. Hundreds of catalogue entries. Geographical, cultural, and ideological perspectives spanning American pioneers (Savoy, Blue Note's avant-garde excursions), European explosions, Japanese radicalism (DIW, PSF), Scandinavian innovations (Odin, Circulasione Totale). With a foreword by Mats Gustafsson who writes: "DIG IN, enjoy and start your own research. It is all in front of you! Johannes Rød has created a unique possibility for all of us. It is a deep well of knowledge and music. It is the most FUN ride you can make: into the (un)known world of improvised music!" As Joakim Haugland of Smalltown Supersound notes in his introduction, free jazz has been "the spine of the label, that holds it all together" - always present, always essential. This book is that spine made visible, tangible, researchable. It's information and inspiration in equal measure. In an era when streaming platforms flatten everything into algorithmic sameness, when the physical object threatens to become mere nostalgia, this book reminds us why labels matter - why curatorial vision, aesthetic presentation, and committed documentation are crucial to creative music's survival and flourishing. A landmark publication.A guide to 185 labels  Softcover, 485pp Smalltown Supersound, 2025

johannes rod – free jazz and improvisation on lp and cd 1965 - 2024

Opening the pages of NOW JAZZ NOW will drop you into the ravenous mind of the insatiable Free Jazz and Free Improvisation record collector.  Here are the infamous and rarified recordings that challenged, advanced and, many times, polarized, the orthodoxy of a music defined by beauty, struggle, and the pure essence of inspiration.  Featuring images of albums, singles, and cassettes direct from the authors’ personal archives in all their loving wear and tear, along with Philippe Gras’ exquisite photos of Free Music legends, this is a book for all adventurous lovers of creative sound, whether they be record collectors, avant-garde Jazz enthusiasts, students of radical culture, or simply curiosity-seekers in wonder to this music’s illustrious history and lineage. The three authors, music writer Byron Coley and musician's Mats Gustafsson and Thurston Moore, share a life-long mutual obsession to record collecting with a distinct focus on the recorded history of Free Music. Compiling their personal archives with a long-running discussion and debate of which recordings could be considered within a list of more than one-hundred releases, they have decided on presenting the works in chronologic order, realizing the music to be preternaturally noncompetitive, non-hierarchical, and of equal value. The gleanings of Gustafsson, Moore, and Coley along with the words of legendary musicians Neneh Cherry and Joe McPhee, will enlighten, delight, amuse, and bemuse all who enter their enthralled streams of appreciation, perception, and, most importantly, unbridled respect and regard for a universe of music devoted to the dignity of freedom and the holistic vibrations of spiritual unitySoftcover, 196 x 268, pp 277, fully illustrated  Ecstatic Peace Library, Dec 2025 By Bryan Coley, Mats Gustafsson & Thurston Moore Foreverlogue by Neneh Cherry

NOW JAZZ NOW - 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings 1960-80

Views from the Seven Ionian Islands is an exercise in patience, contemplation, and the shifting perspectives that accrue with time and distance. Slowly unfolding across 10 years and thousands of miles—shifting between Greece, Japan, Israel, and Paris—it takes multiple forms, each element in conversation with other voices, places, and moments.Assembled in this release are two distinct but interlocking suites of music. The second of these—centered around a series of field recordings made a decade ago on the Greek island of Kythira, interwoven with instrumental interludes—was the first to be recorded. Here, it is preceded by a collection of lushly beautiful recordings made by Soloveitzik with a large ensemble in Jaffa in 2023, completed after revisiting and revising his impressions of Kythira in light of the intervening years.The accompanying book includes two texts from Tom Soloveitzik, Impressions from the Islands and Views from the Seven Ionian Islands - Revised Version (2016-2023); an incisive essay on the work by the writer and composer Derek Baron; and a transcript of correspondence between Tom Soloveitzik and the painter Masha Zusman, who has made the island of Kythira her home for a number of years. Together, they reflect on questions of creativity, landscape, home, and what it means to record—in images, words, sound, and memory. A dozen full-color images of Zusman’s paintings illustrate their conversation.As views proliferate and overlap, disparate perceptions and perspectives are superimposed. Views from the Seven Ionian Islands reveals a careful attention to the nuances that distinguish past from present, near from far, and memory from perception—and perhaps most importantly, the person one once was from the person one has become—but it retains a deep faith in the continuity between them. In a world increasingly characterized by a profound sense of dislocation—geographic, temporal, moral, aesthetic, and political—Soloveitzik’s work confirms his commitment to the enduring sense of connection to be found even in the midst of this shared displacement.     Book & CDR Suppadeneum, Arizona, August , 2025

tom soloveitzik – Views from the seven ionian islands