This is the American debut release from Lao Dan, China's emerging free player on bamboo flute, suona and alto saxophone. Dan's voice is starkly unique, even among the blurred lines of international Improv/Jazz. He's steeped in native traditions yet eagerly obliterates those boundaries with ecstatic intensity and haunting melodies. His dense reedy, drones and jagged melodic shrieks are described as a "Whitmanian yawp," by Marc Medwin in the liner notes. For his inaugural U.S. performance, Dan is welcomed by the outlaw forefathers of New England avant grade: saxophonist Paul Flaherty and percussionist Randall Colbourne. These longtime duo partners, joined by Damon Smith on double bass, show no hesitation in charging head-on with new radical brother. The album's opening moments simmer as Dan and Flaherty meditate at the bottom registers before exploding into a multiphonic sustain of runs and melodic jabs. Smith and Colbourne rattle and roar. It's a splattering overture that eventually resolves as suona and sax merge into a piercing gesture of heartbreaking unity. It turns this record store gig into a point of transcultural definition. Recorded April 2018 at Willimantic Records in Willimantic, Connecticut

"More than thirty years after the death of Albert Ayler, Flaherty and Corsano's music is the most compelling evidence I've heard in some time that music like this still needs to be played." - DUSTED

The Beloved Music is the most thoroughly realized blueprint for a post-hardcore take on improvised jazz to date from the duo of legendary long-serving New England saxophonist Paul Flaherty and young firebrand drummer Chris Corsano. Forsaking the call-and-response modes of countless improvising ensembles, the duo deal more in a simultaneity of sound - an elemental non-stop gush of ideas, rhythms and epiglottal forms that at points feels like a small-group response to the orchestral conceptions of the Peter Brötzmann and John Coltrane big bands. Between collaborations and tours with Wolf Eyes, Nels Cline (Wilco), Joe McPhee, Six Organs of Admittance, Dream/ Aktion Unit (Jim O'Rourke, Thurston Moore) and their own band Cold Bleak Heat (Greg Kelley, No Neck Blues Band's Matt Heyner), Flaherty and Corsano have coalesced and elated serious jazzbos alongside noise fans and freak-folk followers.