Thurston MooreClient Information
9 October, 2025Print
Sonic Youth Frontman Thurston Moore Announces NOW JAZZ NOW
A New Art Book For Record Collectors
|
Thursday, October 9 (London, UK) — Musicians Mats Gustafsson, Neneh Cherry, Joe McPhee, Thurston Moore, along with music writer Byron Coley have contributed to an illustrated collector’s guide to records NOW JAZZ NOW: 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings [1960-80] out on December 5, 2025 via Thurston Moore & Eva Prinz’s Ecstatic Peace Library — replete with 277-pages of beatific album art, labels, sleeve notes and collector musings on their life-long obsessions of record collecting, with a distinct focus on the recorded history of Free Jazz and Free Improvisation.
Compiling personal archives with discussions and debates of their selections of recordings which could be contenders within a list defined by a parameter of 100 most essential releases presented in chronologic order, acknowledging the music to be preternaturally non-competitive, non-hierarchical, and of equal value. NOW JAZZ NOW is a book for all adventurous music lovers, whether ravenous record collectors, avant-garde jazz enthusiasts, students of radical culture, or simply curiosity seekers in wonder at this music’s illustrious history and lineage.
The gleanings of Cherry, Coley, Gustafsson, McPhee and Moore will enlighten, delight, amuse, and bemuse all who follow their streams of consciousness, knowledge, perception, and, most importantly, unbridled respect and regard for a genre of music dedicated to the dignity of practicing freedom.
Releases December 5, 2025. Pre-orders will ship the week of December 8th from the US for delivery in time for the Christmas holidays.
|
|
|
[Cover and back cover] |
NOW JAZZ NOW: 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings [1960-80]
Published by Ecstatic Peace Library
Cover photo by Philippe Gras
|
|
|
|
|
[Sample spreads] |
|
NOW JAZZ NOW: 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings [1960-80] Published by Ecstatic Peace Library
Title: NOW JAZZ NOW Subtitle: 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings [1960-80]
ISBN: 979-8-9934040-0-4 | Soft-cover, fully illustrated | Size:196 x 268 mm | Page count: 277 Authors: Mats Gustafsson, Neneh Cherry, Joe McPhee, Thurston Moore & Byron Coley Edited by Eva Prinz Publisher: Ecstatic Peace Library | (Announcement: 4 October) Release date: 5 December 2025
AUTHOR BIOS Mats Gustafsson is an improviser, musician, composer and record collector aka “discoholic”. His own work is influenced by noise, free jazz, and rock. The artwork from this book comes from his collection and the selection process was curated in part by Gustafsson. Neneh Cherry is a Swedish singer, songwriter, actor, occasional DJ, and author who recently published her memoirs A Thousand Threads about growing up daughter of West African percussionist Amadu Jah and artist Moki Cherry and being raised by her mother and her trumpeter stepfather DonCherry. Cherry penned an introductory text for this book. Joe McPhee is an American jazz multi-instrumentalist who plays tenor, alto, and soprano saxophone, trumpet, the flugelhorn and valve trombone. McPhee has contributed a poetic afterword musing on the expression free jazz. Thurston Moore is a musician and composer. His latest album Flow Critical Lucidity was a Rough Trade ‘Album of The Year’. Moore recently published Sonic Life: A Memoir(Faber, UK / DoubleDay, US) about his band Sonic Youth. Byron Coley is a collector and writer based in Western Massachusetts. He turned a serious focus towards free jazz in the early '80s, when working at the Rhino Records store in Westwood, CA. Under the stern tutelage of Jon Williams, Nels Cline, John Breckow and Richard Grossman, he was revealed. |
|
|
ABOUT ECSTATIC PEACE LIBRARY Thurston and Eva founded Ecstatic Peace Library books in 2009 initially to release the exhibition catalogue This Train Is Bound for Glory by photographer Justine Kurland. They’ve published several titles including co-founder Thurston Moore’s memoir Sonic Life (NY Times, Vogue), facsimiles of Musics and Ripped & Torn, the autobiographies of musicians David Toop, and Necrobutcher from the band Mayhem, a catalogue raisonne of composer Luc Ferrari, an exhibition catalogue for Mersey poet and artist Adrian Henri, and most recently, a comprehensive book of interviews with the members and community of The Velvet Underground entitled Linger On by Ignacio Julia. Alongside their various activities in the musical world, Thurston & Eva are involved with publishing and poetry, and teach writing at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, Boulder CO, a programme founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in 1974. Thurston & Eva Moore reside in London. |