Originally recorded in 1954, Brown and Roach Incorporated is a foundational hard bop album featuring the virtuosic collaboration between trumpeter Clifford Brown and drummer Max Roach. This 180-gram vinyl edition includes the original quintet's dynamic performances along with bonus tracks.

Rich Brown bought his first six-string bass in 1999, "Everyone made fun of me" he recalls with a characteristically warm smile - since then he's established a reputation as first-call player for the leaders of an impressive variety of adventurous projects, from Steve Coleman to Rudresh Mahanthappa to James 'Blood' Ulmer. Over the past two years, whenever time allows, he's been paying regular visits to the studio of his friend, the guitarist and producer Elmer Ferrer. Away from the pressures of the commercial industry, Rich seized the opportunity to explore and expand the vocabulary of his instrument. 'NYAEBA' took shape: written and performed entirely on the bass guitar. Rich drew inspiration from the many remarkable musicians he's supported as a bassist, or encountered in the richly multicultural music scene in his adopted hometown of Toronto. Throughout the album, the commitment to melody and story ensures that the technique, though prodigious, never overshadows the tale. Each tune was built up with multiple tracks in the studio, with no looping or sequencing involved. The sonic versatility on display is astounding, but the album retains the organic, intimate feel of a performance. This album will no doubt sit comfortably among the essential solo bass albums, showcasing what's possible on the instrument. While many solo bass records center the instrument itself, what's unique about Rich's approach is that he puts the composition and music first, using the electric bass as the vehicle. With a focus on texture, movement and melody, and a striking range of voices, this is not your average electric bass album. A1. Ukudlala A2. The Sum of Our Tears A3. Heart of a Lonely Woman A4. Nyaeba (The Griot) B1. Kalagala Ebwembe B2. Sowetoeira B3. Turiyasangitananda - The Transcendental Lord's Highest Song of Bliss (A Meditation for Alice Coltrane) B4. The Kingdom of Heaven is Within

Grammy Award-winning Contemporary Jazz/R&B superstar Norman Brown has sold over 5 million albums in his extraordinary career and virtually lives at the top of the Billboard Contemporary Jazz sales and radio charts. Having headlined with with virtually every Contemporary Jazz superstar from Boney James to Dave Koz to Gerald Albright, Norman's non-stop touring has electrified audiences from coast to coast! Authentically Norman has Norman Brown's hit-making talents on full display. Highlights include the uber-funky "Home Stretch," the romantic "Valentine," the joyful "Chillax'" and much more.

"This charming recording combines traditional plainchant elements with a setting of the Mass to French carol tunes, arranged in Baroque polyphony by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, a prolific and intriguing composer of church music...All is well and tastefully done by the Virgin Consort, directed by Kyler Brown."

-- Sarah Bryan Miller, New York Times [101996]

Track Listing
1. I Don't Know Why (I Just Do) / Love Me Or Leave Me
2. When I Take My Sugar to Tea
3. I'll Be Around
4. Strictly For the Birds
5. Before Love Went Out of Style
6. Soft Shoe
7. Smilin' Through
8. I Can't Give You Anything But Love
9. It's Easy to Remember
10. Play It Again Sam
11. Be a Child

Personnel: Cleo Laine (vocals); Dudley Moore (piano); Ray Brown (bass); Nick Caroli (drums).

This album is the result of two giant entertainers from the British Isles getting together in London in 1982 for a session of ballads and traditional pop. Dudley Moore was more famous, at least in the United States, for his comedic roles in a number of films. But he was a pianist and composer of no mean skills. Cleo Laine had been a singing talent of the first order since the 1950s and often performed and recorded with husband and sax player John Dankworth. Dankworth is present on one cut on this album. While Moore dashes off some nice solo work on such cuts as "When I Take My Sugar to Tea" and an Erroll Garner-like "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," it's Laine's wide-ranged, full-throated, expressive, and clear-as-a-mountain-lake voice that dominates the session. She sets the table for "I Don't Know Why I Just Do," recalling a few lines from "Love Me or Leave Me," and squeezes every ounce of feeling from "I'll Be Around." Then there's a fun, hip, overdubbed, scatting 1960 girl-singer rendition of "Before Love Went out of Style." The album's highlight track is a bluesy "Soft Shoe," where Dankworth chips in with his soprano sax and Laine and Moore engage in congenial patter. Moore's fellow rhythm section players are the inestimable Ray Brown and Nick Ceroli, which is the icing on a tasty musical cake that this album serves up.

Naxos celebrates the immigrant experience with the release of Peter Boyer’s Ellis Island: The Dream of America, an ambitious work combining spoken word performances of actual Ellis Island immigrant stories with powerful orchestral music. Performed by London’s renowned Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Boyer, this recording features a cast of Oscar-, Emmy-, and Tony-winning actors: Barry Bostwick, Blair Brown, Olympia Dukakis, Anne Jackson, Bebe Neuwirth, Eli Wallach, and Louis Zorich, directed by Tony- and Grammy-winning Martin Charnin.

Boyer fashioned the seven monologues of Ellis Island: Dream of America from interviews in the Ellis Island Oral History Project with actual immigrants who came to the United States between 1910-1940, weaving a dramatic orchestral tapestry around their true stories. The work concludes with a reading of the Emma Lazarus poem The New Colossus (“Give me your tired, your poor…”), an emotionally powerful ending to this celebration of our nation of immigrants.

Ellis Island: The Dream of America was premiered by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra in April 2002 to great acclaim, and its many subsequent performances have also received enthusiastic responses. Gerald Moshell of the Hartford Courant described the first performance as “a searing emotional experience” while Harold McNeil of the Buffalo News described the piece as “at turns, horrifying, whimsical and heart-rending. But it’s always palpably engaging ...”

Peter Boyer is emerging as one of the most successful young American orchestral composers, with nearly 100 orchestral performances of his work to date. In addition to his work for the concert hall, Boyer is active in the film and television industry and is on the faculty of Claremont Graduate University.

The suite is made up of the following sections:

1. Prologue 06:09
2. Words of Helen Cohen, emigrated from Poland in 1920, read by Blair Brown 02:37
3. Interlude 1 01:24
4. Words of James Apanomith, emigrated from Greece in 1911, read by Louis Zorich 02:43
5. Interlude 2 02:07
6. Words of Lillian Galleta, emigrated from Italy in 1928, read by Olympia Dukakis 03:32
7. Interlude 3 01:33
8. Words of Lazarus Salamon, emigrated from Hungary in 1920, read by Eli Wallach 04:16
9. Interlude 4 01:56
10. Words of Helen Rosenthal, emigrated from Belgium in 1940, read by Bebe Neuwirth 04:27
11. Interlude 5 01:01
12. Words of Manny Steen, emigrated from Ireland in 1925, read by Barry Bostwick 04:42
13. Interlude 6 02:24
14. Words of Katherine Beychook, emigrated from Russia in 1910, read by Anne Jackson 02:53
15. Epilogue: "The New Colossus" (Emma Lazarus, 1883), read by all actors 01:50

-----

REVIEW:

Peter Boyer's Ellis Island: The Dream of America will not surprise or disappoint anyone looking for a straightforward presentation piece in the American populist vein, à la Copland's A Lincoln Portrait. Indeed, the music is so openly tonal, melodic, and richly orchestrated; the attitude so noble and patriotic; and the subject matter so emotionally compelling, it would be surprising and disappointing if Boyer had not followed Copland's example, and had set these authentic immigrant narratives from the Ellis Island Oral History Project in anything less than an accessible, American vernacular style. Yet it is the texts, not the music, which matter most in this work, and listeners will find the effective but expectedly epic score less absorbing than the absorbing performances by actors Blair Brown, Louis Zorich, Olympia Dukakis, Eli Wallach, Bebe Neuwirth, Barry Bostwick, and Anne Jackson, who deliver the historic accounts with believable characterizations and genuine emotions. Of course, any invocation of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty must include a recitation of Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus," which is passionately read at the work's conclusion by the cast against the stirring, anthemic accompaniment of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Naxos provides excellent sound, though it is fairly loud in places.

– All Music Guide

After his storied stint with Ray Charles and years of solo LPs on Atlantic, Hank came to Kudu in the '70s. This funk-soul-jazz delight from '75 teams his sax with Bob James, Randy Brecker and Pepper Adams among others; the title Stevie Wonder tune joins Sho Is Funky; Groovy Junction; Jana, and more!

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Scheidemann: Organ Works, Vol. 3

Includes work(s) for organ by Heinrich Scheidemann. Soloist: Julia Brown.

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Félicien David was the pivotal figure in French opera that ignited the obsession for setting works in the exotic East. Almost all the country's leading composers in the late 19th century followed his lead, including Saint-Saëns, Delibes, Gounod and Massenet. Premièred in 1862 and recorded here for the first time, David's magical opera Lalla Roukh uses evocative orchestration to support the fairy-tale plot of an Indian princess and her journey in search of love. The work contains some memorable melodies, the most famous of which, Charmant oiseau, has been a favorite of the world’s greatest sopranos.

"The best of the music has great charm and is less self-consciously exotic than the orientalia of, say, Bizet or Massenet. Noureddin's serenades re ravishingly sung by Emiliano Gonzalez Toro. Marianne Fiset is supremely elegant in the title role." -- Tim Ashley, The Guardian [4/10/14]
“All the principals have firm, clear voices...Marianne Fiest as the heroine has a bright, perfectly placed soprano, attacking even the most exposed notes with precision.” -- Gramophone [6/2014]

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EARLE BROWN —A LIFE IN MUSIC—VOL. I • Paul Price, cond; 1–3,5 John Cage, cond; 4,7 Manhattan Percussion Ens; 1–8 Christoph Caskel (perc); 9–11 Aloys Kontarsky (pn, wood blocks); 10 Bernhard Kontarsky (cel, cymbals); 10 David Tudor (pn); 11 AMM; 12 Musica Elettronica Viva 13 • WERGO 6928 (3 CDs: 116:15)


ROLDÁN Ritmicas: No. 6; 1 No. 5. 2 HARRISON Canticle No. 1. 3 RUSSELL 3 Dance Movements. 4 3 Cuban Pieces. 5 COWELL Ostinato pianissimo. 6 CAGE/HARRISON Double Music. 7 CAGE Amore s. 8 STOCKHAUSEN Zyklus. 9 Refrain. 10 KAGEL Transición II. 11 AMM AMM. 12 MEV Spacecraft 13


Though born in Massachusetts, Earle Brown was a young composer living in Denver in 1950 when Merce Cunningham and John Cage came to perform and lecture at the McLean School. His wife at that time, Carolyn Rice Brown, was a dancer who attended Cunningham’s master class. Almost immediately, the four realized they had much in common, and Cage persuaded the Browns to move to New York in 1951—Carolyn was one of the founding members of Merce Cunningham’s dance company (where she was to remain for 20 years as a featured performer) and Earle eventually collaborated with Cage at the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. This experience with electronic equipment allowed Brown to work as a recording engineer—recording and editing pop, jazz, and classical music—for Capitol Records from 1955–1960. In 1960 he began producing records for Bob Shad’s Time label, having convinced the well-established jazz and pop maven to allow him to record a series of avant-garde compositions. The first of these remarkable documents was issued on Time, but after that label folded in 1966, Brown continued to produce the series for Shad’s larger Mainstream imprint. All 18 of these recordings were reissued on LP in the 1970s, but have not appeared on CD until now.


Brown’s broad knowledge of new music, along with his professional connections, resulted in a groundbreaking collection of music that had been largely unheard—indeed, in some cases, all but unknown—at the time. Represented, of course, were Brown himself and his friends in the “New York School”—Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and their foremost interpreter, pianist David Tudor. But Brown also included what was for the most part the first American documentation of composers from Europe like Nono, Berio, Maderna, Scelsi, and Boulez; Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle from London; an album devoted to South American composers; and one featuring the next, post-Cage generation of American radicals, Ashley, Mumma, Lucier, and Behrman. Equally important, however, was Brown’s understanding that this unfamiliar, often shocking new music needed the best possible performances in order to convince listeners of its merits, as well as the best possible sound quality to capture its tonal subtleties and extravagances. By recording performers like Tudor and pianist Yuji Takahashi, flutist Severino Gazzelloni, violinist Paul Zukofsky, vocalist Cathy Berberian, and experienced ensembles often under the direction of the composers themselves, Brown helped to establish a tradition of new-music performance styles and techniques that would stand as a model for subsequent generations of interpreters.


This long-awaited release (collectors have been paying big bucks for the precious Time and Mainstream LPs) initiates Wergo’s two-year schedule of the reissue of all 18 albums, in six three-CD sets. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that the total playing time listed above averages out to less than 40 minutes per CD. Wergo has decided to maintain the integrity of the original releases’ production by reproducing the cover art, reprinting the original liner notes, and yes, limiting each CD to a single LP’s worth of music. Their digitalization of the original sound quality, which was excellent to begin with, has been handled with care (although some lingering tape hiss is inevitable)—the proof is the first CD, where the percussion timbres are clean, crisp, and vivid. I did notice one new production error in this CD release—on disc 3, the two pieces have been mislabeled; AMM is the first piece on the disc, and Spacecraft the second, not the other way around, as listed on the CD cover and in the booklet.


What about the music, then? The first disc, “Concert Percussion for Orchestra,” reminds us that adventurous composers, looking for new sounds and timbres in the days before electronics, turned to percussion in order to expand the available palette of colors, and with them began to explore the rhythmic intricacies of other, non-classical, ethnic musics. Cuban composer Amadeo Roldán’s works for percussion ensemble date from 1930, William Russell’s Three Dance Movements and Three Cuban Pieces from later that same decade. Henry Cowell’s Ostinato pianissimo (1934) has become one of the repertoire’s classics. John Cage plays the prepared piano solos in his Amores (1943). Though for the most part concise exercises in unusual rhythms and timbres, many of which sound commonplace and simplified today, these pieces nevertheless were highly influential for their time, and display a charming sense of exploration, atmosphere, and, yes, even swing.


The Stockhausen and Kagel works on the second disc were hot off the press in 1960, and they receive gripping readings. The solo percussion score Zyklus , once so jolting, now has an almost meditative feel to it, and this version of Refrain emphasizes its delicacy and spontaneity, offering a constellation of Webernesque detail. Mauricio Kagel’s Transición II surveys a wider range of attacks and rhythms, with previously recorded and live taped components increasing the complexity of tonal relationships. Tudor and percussionist Caskel (who works directly inside the piano) pay sharp attention to the task at hand, briskly aligning the aleatoric elements of the score. (Alternate versions may be heard from the ensemble L’Art pour L’Art on the cpo label and Aldo Orvieto, Dmitri Fiorin, and Alvise Vidolin on Mode.)


Finally, we have what is probably the most unusual album released in the series, recordings of group improvisations by the British band AMM (which at this time included composer Cornelius Cardew) and the Rome-based group of American expatriates including Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, and Richard Teitelbaum (and one Hungarian, Ivan Vandor), Musica Elettronica Viva. Both ensembles featured live electronics as a major part of their instrumental arsenal, and both gleefully embraced noise as a confrontational device and a link to the ritualistic musical activities that, without benefit of a predetermined compositional design, produced their truly spontaneous structures. Drones—frictional, layered, and ambient—are the source for much of their aural environment, and acoustic instruments—pianos, saxophones, even cello—are played with pseudo-electronic timbres or mixed into the fray so as to be all but unrecognizable.


AMM’s contribution is an edited excerpt from a longer, live performance (which may be heard in its entirety on “The Crypt—12 June 1968: The Complete Session” on the Matchless label). In addition, silences of various lengths were edited into the performance after the fact, interrupting the music according to some unexplained, Cagean provocation. Interestingly, these silences still contain several small tics and pops, suggesting that rather than edit in fresh, totally silent digital silence, Wergo decided to use the analog silence taken from an LP (the master tapes may have been unavailable), thus once again maintaining the integrity (albeit flawed) of the original release. MEV’s live activity, Spacecraft , was an open improvisation that they performed a number of times in their early years—other versions may be found on the Alga Marghen label, and in the valuable four-CD set “MEV 40” on New World. The AMM and MEV improvisations have less-than-optimal sound, and are difficult to listen to without flinching, but as examples of controlled chaos they project a raw, immediate catharsis unmatched by any other music of their time. Earle Brown’s decision to include them as representation of the cutting-edge of new music’s new repertoire, giving improvisation a platform equal with composition, was gutsy and prophetic. The remaining releases in this most welcome series will afford further examples of the breadth of Brown’s vision.


FANFARE: Art Lange

Orchestral Music - Mozart, W.A. / Handel, G.F. / Pachelbel,

Includes work(s) by Mark-Anthony Turnage. Ensemble: B. B. C. Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Leonard Slatkin. Soloists: Evelyn Glennie, Peter Erskine, Christian Lindberg, Timothy [horn] Brown, Michael Murray, Christopher Larkin, Andrew Antcliff.

REVIEWS:
American Record Guide (7-8/00, p.86) - "...[T]he Chandos sound gives the strings plenty of body and a strong edge (partly the conductor's doing, of course) and color...it's rich and still incisive, and it puts the music across....[T]his disc is well worth hearing and owning."

14.99

Matthias Bamert’s ‘Contemporaries of Mozart’ project is one of Chandos’ longest-running and most successful series. The unquestionable genius of Mozart has tended to eclipse the accomplishments of many other composers who were writing at the same time as he. Many of these composers, successful in their day, suffered neglect in subsequent decades and in some cases were almost forgotten. Matthias Bamert’s series has shown just how rich this area of the repertoire is, and each of the CDs has received superb critical acclaim. This uniquely compiled box set comprises five of the most successful CDs in the series to date (many of the works are poorly represented in the catalogue, if at all) and provides an ideal introduction to the repertoire – at bargain price.

Each CD offers a wealth of classically elegant melodies wrapped up in imaginative orchestration. There are three symphonies by the Mannheim master Carl Stamitz, replete with crescendos and the then newfangled clarinets in an orchestra that so impressed Mozart. There are shimmering and rhythmic symphonies by the composer, publisher and piano maker Ignace Pleyel and the graceful and introspective symphonies by Pavel Vranicky, including the unusually titled ‘Grand Characteristic Symphony for Peace with the French Republic’, plus delightful symphonies by Kozeluch and dramatic orchestral music by Krommer, who is better known for his woodwind music.

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A beautiful and varied selection of Irish ballads sung by a veritable "Who's Who"of Irish singers and bands: John Faulkner, Br�d N� Chath�in, John Beag, Ann Mulqueen, Tim Dennehy, Iorras Aithneach, Mair�ad Taggart, Joe McDonagh, Sin�ad Murray and Fred Johnston.

This inspiring album of Celtic music features traditional Celtic instruments such as uilleann pipes, harps, fiddles, accordians, and guitars. The songs featured here create an atmosphere of magic and mystery. This album features almost 80 minutes of beautiful music. Artists featured include Catherine Duc, Medwyn Goodall, Florie Brown, Lynn Saoirse, and more.

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