Moondog - Sidewalk Dances - Joanna MacGregor & Britten Sinfonia (2006) {SoundCircus 2564 68437-4}
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© 2006 SoundCircus / Warner Classics & Jazz | 2564 68437-4
Classical / Jazz / Avant-Garde Music / International / Modern Composition / Vocal Music / Minimalism

The cult figure Moondog, who performed on the streets of New York for over 30 years, meshed jazz, classical, Native American rhythms and poetry. With a lifelong fascination for the strict rules of canon-writing, and dubbed the father of minimalism, he composed more than eighty symphonies, three hundred rounds, countless percussion, organ and piano pieces, scores for brass bands and string orchestras, and five books called The Art of the Canon. Joanna MacGregor's stunning new arrangements of fourteen of Moondog's most famous pieces are re-imaginings for larger forces, with a spectacular line-up of some of today's most cutting-edge jazz musicians, along with the brilliant Britten Sinfonia. Radically rewritten, each track retains Moondog's irresistible trademarks - short and snappy, of the street, melodic and joyful, and characterized by a pounding beat.

Through original songs and some great covers, Popa Chubby – helped by Galea - investigates Country Music, pays tribute to Gene Vincent and re-visit the sound of the Sun label! You’ll do love this trip all over the fifties and the sixties!

Sad Café was a British soft rock outfit, that enjoyed a recording somewhat successful career from the mid-'70s through the early '80s. The group's leader, singer Paul Young (not the same Paul Young that scored the '80s hit "Every Time You Go Away"), got his start with music in the mid-'60s, when he fronted a forgotten Manchester group called the Toggery Five, which included a few members that would later go on to join prog rockers Jethro Tull – guitarist Mick Abrahams and drummer Clive Bunker. By the early '70s, Young was fronting another forgotten outfit, Gyro, and by 1976, opted to leave the band – taking Gyro guitarist Ian Wilson with him. Young then formed Sad Café, along with members of another Manchester band, Mandalaband (Ashley Mumford [guitar], Vic Emerson [keyboards], John Stimpson [bass], Tony Creswell [drums]), who had issued an obscure self-titled release in 1975.

Monteverdi - Madrigali Guerrieri Ed Amorosi - Concerto Vocale, René Jacobs (2002) {2CD Set Harmonia Mundi HMC 901736.37}
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© 2001 Harmonia Mundi | HMC 901736.37
Classical / Baroque / Vocal Music

Monteverdi was seventy-one when he published his Eighth Book of madrigals. This collection, a monumental work of remarkable beauty, is a synthesis of all Monteverdi's experience in the realm of secular music. It is the culmination of a genre, the Italian madrigal, which here achieves a rare state of perfection. INDISPENSABLE!

The Early Days contributes to a musical niche with a compilation that serves as a testament to songs that should remain as they soundtracked numerous brilliant nights out.

Terence Trent D'Arby had a difficult 1990s, the nadir of which was probably the desperate mating call Supermodel Sandwich with Cheese from his 1995 album Vibrator. But he has started the new century with a clean slate, changing his name to Sananda Maitreya and launching his own label. The artful blend of soul, rock and funk is reassuringly familiar, though. D'Arby/ Maitreya still exercises a Prince-like control over songwriting, arrangement and production, rendering it a one-man show, but that's no bad thing with an artist of his ability. Drivin' Me Crazy packs enough lust into three funky minutes to satiate his most ardent fans (or "lightbeings", as he calls them), and the outstanding Suga Free pairs dark balladry with an operatic choir. Even the banjo-plinking O Divina comes good in the end, swelling into a Motownesque chorus. A snazzy comeback.

Cut during the fall of 1972, Electric Light Orchestra II was where Jeff Lynne started rebuilding the sound of Electric Light Orchestra following the departure of Roy Wood from the original lineup. It was as personal an effort as Lynne had ever made in music, showcasing his work as singer, songwriter, guitarist, sometime synthesizer player, and producer, and it is more focused than its predecessor but also retains some of the earlier album's lean textures. Lynne, drummer Bev Bevan, bassist Mike D'Albuquerque, and keyboardist Richard Tandy comprise the core of the band, with two cellists and a violinist sawing away around them.

It's about time these early Canned Heat albums were made available once again! Thanks in part to their appearance in the Monterey Pop and later Woodstock festival films, these two albums, especially Boogie With Canned Heat, built Canned Heat's reputation as a top-notch white blues band of the late '60s. The self-titled disc from 1967 features a rough mix of originals and blues standards, including "Catfish Blues," "Rich Woman," and "Big Road Blues." Boogie was released the following year and actually contained a hit single, "On the Road Again." The other tracks on the album, especially "Fried Hockey Boogie" and "Amphetamine Annie," became staples of early FM underground radio. Canned Heat would rarely sound this together as a working unit in the studio again.

Wadada Leo Smith & Adam Rudolph - Compassion (2006) {Meta-Kabell 010}
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© 2006 Meta Records / Kabell Records | 010
Jazz / Modern Creative / Post Bop / World Fusion / Trumpet / Percussion

Long-time occasional collaborators Wadada Leo Smith and Adam Rudolph perform improvised/composed duets from a 2002 performance live at Venice's Electric Lodge on Compassion, newly released on Rudolph's Meta Records. Both are masters of their mediums: Rudolph plays a variety of percussion instruments and at least one wind instrument to sonically shade, color, and texturize; Smith uses trumpet and flugelhorn in conventional and extended ways to complement him. With improvisers of this depth, the journey takes many unexpected turns, all rewarding.

An exclusive anthology of tracks inspired by the legendary Polish Radio Experimental Studio.

Alarm Will Sound's recording of Steve Reich's monumental orchestral/choral works The Desert Music and Tehillim, released on the Cantaloupe label in 2002, greatly benefits from the group's close connections with the composer: the ensemble's conductor, Alan Pierson, and several of the performers studied at the Eastman School with Brad Lubman, a conductor frequently enlisted by Reich. Also, Pierson's arrangements, which reconcile the chamber and orchestral versions that exist for both works, were prepared in close consultation with the composer; thus, this may well be the definitive recording of these pieces. Brilliantly sonorous in their climaxes – the burst of light near the end of Desert Music, the "Alleluias" that close Tehillim – the players also articulate Reich's intricate canonic textures with nimble precision. Voices and strings are always an Achilles heel within Reich's percussive textures (leading him to eliminate part doublings in favor of giving each line to a lone, amplified performer), but here the singers and strings maintain an impressive rhythmic vitality. This knack for precision carries over to the pristine recording, as well, which, for good or ill, was digitally recorded and heavily edited. Still, it makes up in energy and clarity what it might lack in performative spontaneity.

This double-CD set may well mislead listeners on two counts. On the one hand, there will be some neophyte listeners expecting to hear the silky pop/rock strains of the Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks-era Fleetwood Mac. This is, indeed, the original version of the band organized in 1967 by virtuoso blues guitarist/singer Peter Green, in which the latter shared the spotlight with fellow guitarist Jeremy Spencer, and they got no closer to pop/rock than renditions of Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King material.

here's no question that Osmo Vänskä is a true Beethoven conductor. He captures the music's vitality, its eruptive character, and its dramatic syntax as well as anyone on the podium today. He understands the importance of accents, of giving proper weight to Beethoven's bass lines, and of uncovering ear-catching detail without micro-managing the tempo and fracturing Beethoven's large musical paragraphs. The only quibble I have with this performance of the Eroica stems from Vänskä's otherwise admirable deployment of a very wide dynamic range. A couple of times he drops to a "super-duper" pianissimo so quiet that you can barely hear the music, causing it to momentarily lose tension. This only happens a couple of times, most notably at the point of the first-movement recapitulation, and it's so unnecessary given the general excellence of the interpretation that you wonder why he bothers.