Eremite Records


Eremite Records is an independent American jazz record label founded in 1995 by Michael Ehlers with early involvement from music writer Byron Coley. After college, Ehlers started producing some concerts around Amherst, Massachusetts and Eremite evolved from that. The label name came from an alternate title for the Thelonious Monk tune "Reflections": "Portrait of an Eremite". The logo is an image of Joe McPhee playing soprano saxophone. Eremite organized a concerts series in Western Massachusetts that continued until 2008 & produced nearly 100 concerts, including five Fire in the Valley festivals.
The first four Eremite releases were diverse adventurous new music, but then Ehlers started focusing on free jazz, working with neglected and underrecorded survivors of the 1960s and 1970s free jazz scene: drummers Sunny Murray and Denis Charles, saxophonists Sabir Mateen and Jemeel Moondoc, trumpeter Raphe Malik, bassists Alan Silva and William Parker.

Releases