• On his 16th birthday, Andrew Litton received a solo album of Oscar Peterson playing his own jazz improvisations. Gobsmacked, he began collecting all of Peterson’s recordings. Coming across transcriptions of Peterson’s improvisations, he then began collecting and learning them himself. Now, in tribute to his hero, Mr. Litton has recorded his own performances of some of these transcriptions, including Monk’s ‘Round Midnight, Billy Strayhorn’s Take the ‘A’ Train and Thad Jones’ A Child Is Born.

On the eve of his centenary, the pianist/composer Cy Walter's 2 CD retrospective commemoration continues with Volume 2 celebrating his remarkable career and talents focusing on Walter as accompanist and composer. Considered one of the premier interpreters of the Great American Songbook, Walter considered himself a "stylist of show tunes" and this second volume presents another rare collection of classic song performances with a staggering roster of guest performers attesting to the respect Walters' held among his peers including Hoagy Carmichael, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, Mabel Mercer, Benny Goodman, Art Tatum, and more, Sublimities brings deserved attention to Walters' near 40 year career. With a 24 page booklet with essays by contemporary pianists and music historians including Michael Feinstein, Peter Mintun, Maggie Perrin, Richard Behrens, and more.

Polarity is an acoustic jazz project from Jan Gunnar Hoff and the Hoff Ensemble. Of the new release, Hoff writes: "My main goal is to create a specific identity for each album I make. This time I chose to involve Anders Jormin and Audun Kleive, two of Scandinavia's finest jazz artists. The result is Polarity, an album based on both new and older compositions of mine, recorded in a unique acoustic setting." Polarity has been conceived as a cohesive experience where the compositions themselves, the moments of spontaneous inspiration during performance and the natural sound world of the church acoustics all affect the final result. The compositions are inspired by actual experiences and particular states of mind. The album was recorded using state of the art technology called Immersive Audio. The listener is surrounded by music and can move about in the aural space and choose angles, vantage points and positions. Prepare to be fully enveloped in a cocoon of life-like audio.