Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective
Leo Records
British record company and label From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Remove ads
Leo Records is a British record company and label, founded in 1979, which releases jazz from Russian, American and British musicians. It concentrates on free jazz.[1] This label is different from the Leo Records that was formed by Edward Vesala in Helsinki, Finland, in 1978.[1]
Remove ads
History
Summarize
Perspective
Leo Records was founded in 1979 by Leo Feigin (also known under his broadcasting name Aleksei Leonidov), a Russian immigrant to Britain.[2] The label was particularly associated with establishing the world reputation of the Ganelin Trio during the 1970s and 1980s.[3]
In its first ten years, releases from Leo included albums by musicians from the Soviet Union such as Sergey Kuryokhin, Sainkho Namtchylak and Valentina Ponomaryova.[4] By the end of 1986, Leo had released more than 20 albums by musicians from Communist countries, including the Soviet Union.[5] In 1987, a DownBeat reviewer commented that Leo had been "the main conduit for the Soviet avant garde's recorded output anywhere, East or West."[6] Leo's promotion of Soviet jazz musicians helped secure concerts for some of them spread over a week at the 1989 Zurich jazz festival; recordings from the concerts were released as Conspiracy: Soviet Jazz Festival, Zurich 1989.[7]
By the mid-1990s, Leo had introduced the Leo Lab series, "as an imprint for emerging and unknown artists".[8] Leo has released more than 50 recordings by saxophonist Ivo Perelman.[9]
By 2019, Feigin had ceased being actively involved in production, instead concentrating on "handling administrative tasks while the musicians themselves record and design artwork."[4] In 2024, he reached an agreement with Phil Freeman, a writer and owner of a record label, to make some of Leo's back catalogue available via Bandcamp.[10][11]
Remove ads
Noted artists
 |
- Aardvark Jazz Orchestra
- Art Ensemble of Chicago
- Anthony Braxton
- John Wolf Brennan
- Jaki Byard
- Eugenio Colombo
- Marilyn Crispell
- Carlo Actis Dato
- Patrick Defossez
- Joe Fonda
- Satoko Fujii
- Vyacheslav Ganelin/Ganelin Trio
- Katsuyuki Itakura
- Italian Instabile Orchestra
- Sergey Kuryokhin
- Joëlle Léandre
- Keshavan Maslak
- Phil Minton
- Amina Claudine Myers
- Joe Morris
- Don Moye
- Simon Nabatov
- Sainkho Namtchylak
- Mark Nauseef
- Maggie Nicols
- Evan Parker
- Ivo Perelman
- Umberto Petrin
- Valentina Ponomaryova
- Sun Ra
- Ned Rothenberg
- Wadada Leo Smith
- Miroslav Tadić
- Aki Takase
- Cecil Taylor
- Gebhard Ullmann
- Matthew Welch
- Reggie Workman
- Yuri Yukechev
Remove ads
References
Further reading
External links
Wikiwand - on
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Remove ads