FOUR CLASSIC ALBUMS PLUS

Painting In Sound, Hayes Greenfield's third Sunnyside release, expands the perception of what jazz-and binaural, spatial, immersive music-can be. An acclaimed jazz musician, composer, and electroacoustic artist, Greenfield draws from decades of traditional and improvisational mastery and sonic exploration to create a recording that is resonant and substantial. Captured with Max/MSP and SPAT spatial and binaural software, the album positions the listener inside a fully three-dimensional sound field. Greenfield treats space as an equal voice, shaping air, distance, proximity, and motion with the same care he brings to melody, harmony, and rhythm. Using spatial placement and movement through the immersive field, lines arc and spiral, instruments and textures shimmer, orbit, recede, and tones approach, and dissolve. Rooted in jazz's spontaneity and reaching beyond traditional form, the record extends the line between performance and environment. It is an expansive statement from an artist pushing jazz into new perceptual dimensions.

Composer Michael William Balfe composed 29 operas, and around 250 other pieces. He is best known for his opera The Bohemian Girl. Balfe’s opera Satanella was his 23rd opera, and was premiered at Covent Garden in 1858. The work is a hybrid of classical opera tradition and stand-alone songs. This release is performed by the John Powell Singers and the Victorian Opera Orchestra under the direction of Richard Bonynge.

Review:

Bonynge is unsurpassed in this repertoire; he keeps it zipping buoyantly along, effortlessly supporting his singers and clearly relishing every baleful horn call, rippling harp and languishing cello solo. His cast, too, feels near-ideal. The young Chinese-born tenor Kang Wang is a Rupert of considerable dash, and Sally Silver sings the title-role…with sweetness and sparkle.

– Gramophone

Maritana was one of the most popular of mid-nineteenth-century British operas. It's 1848 premiere was a triumph and was soon followed by performances in opera houses from Vienna to Philadelphia.

Digitally remastered and expanded deluxe two CD edition. The original Shaft soundtrack reached #1 on Billboard and won a Grammy for Best Film Score, while the "Theme" won the Oscar for Best Original Song. However, the music from soundtrack and the film were actually not the same. After recording the music that would be used in the film in L.A., Hayes returned to Memphis to re-record songs to be released as the soundtrack. It's taken 48 years, but finally both the music from the film and the soundtrack can be heard together in this deluxe two CD edition.

Limited double 180gm vinyl LP pressing. Upon it's release in the summer of 1971, Shaft became the first double album of original studio material released by an R&B artist. The album peaked at #1 on The Billboard 200 chart, and spent sixty weeks on the chart despite Stax bootlegging their own album. In a long career full of triumphs as a singer, songwriter, musician, producer, actor and soul-music visionary, Shaft was the pinnacle for Hayes. The theme shot to #1, the album hit #1 and stayed on the pop charts for well over a year and the sound of it all not only defined blaxploitation, but also helped usher in the sound of the '70s. It's still a powerful experience, one that's best served here: Theme from Shaft and the hit Do Your Thing join Ellie's Love Theme, No Name Bar, Soulsville, Caf� Regio's, and the rest of this essential classic.

Digitally remastered edition. Upon it's debut in the summer of 1971, Shaft became the first double album of original studio material released by an R&B artist. The album peaked at #1 on Billboard and spent 60 weeks on the chart. The following year the album won a Grammy for Best Film Score and "Theme" won the Oscar for Best Original Song.

Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing. One of the truly timeless albums in soul music history and the one that launched the career of Isaac Hayes, putting him firmly on the map as a musical force to be reckoned with and a source on musical inspiration for generations to come. After writing and performing for Stax for years, Hayes broke out as a solo artist with this 1969 #8 smash. This sea of strings, funk and sensual vocals pave the way for '70s soul: his hit versions of "Walk On By" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and more featuring the Bar-Kays. Craft. This new vinyl reissue, complete with replica old-school style tip-on jacket, features audio remastered from the original analog tapes by leading engineer Dave Cooley.

Listen to the Naxos Podcast episode on this release to learn more!

Randall Thompson’s choral works retain the affection of American choral singers and conductors alike. The Requiem is his masterpiece, written in response to the loss of close friends and colleagues. Using a wide-ranging selection of Biblical verses, it takes the form of a dramatic dialogue between two choirs, a "chorus of mourners" and a "chorus of the faithful", concerning eternal life. Recorded here for the first time in its complete form, this Requiem is an emotional and dramatically intense journey of conflict and resolution, and entirely unique within American music history and the requiem tradition as a whole.

REVIEW:

The performance is very well done by The Philadelphia Singers, a professional choir that after 43 years disbanded in 2015, the year after this recording was made. Although it’s an often strange and imperfect work, we’re fortunate to have the recording, as it fills an important gap in Thompson’s recorded catalog and gives a first-class opportunity to experience aspects of his compositional style that we don’t hear anywhere else in his output.

-- ClassicsToday.com (David Vernier)

The Philadelphia Singers, under the tireless, polished leadership of David Hayes, sustain an impressively high level of musicianship over the course of this long and demanding unaccompanied piece. Thompson’s Requiem is revealed here as a major work, unique and masterful, by an important American voice of the last century. I highly recommend it.

-- Opera News

Following on from his acclaimed Resonus debut of solo works by Bartok and Kurtag, virtuoso violinist Simon Smith returns to the label with an enticing programme of chamber works for strings by Zoltan Kodaly and Erno Dohnanyi. Joined by colleagues Clare Hayes (violin), Paul Silverthorne (viola) & Katherine Jenkinson (cello), Smith presents three seminal chamber works from the first half of the twentieth century, performed with considerable elan by this exceptional collaboration.

Louis Hayes' music is full of life and humanity. It is sometimes refreshingly simple and sometimes intricately complex, sometimes light, sometimes dark, but it is always interesting and consistently engaging. Through it all, Louis Hayes has always remained indefatigably optimistic and his latest Savant release is all those things. Throughout the album Hayes, a 2023 NEA Jazz Master, coaxes concise, well-conceived tracks from his players where everybody swings with loads of feeling, and no self-indulgence. From the first note to the last, Hayes creates performances that take veteran jazz listeners into deep jazz waters while at the same time allowing recent converts to safely wade into the invigorating flow of ideas.

Banjo player/vocalist live in 1964 at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago, backed-up by the Original Salty Dogs feat. Lew Green, Jim Dapogny, Jim Snyder, Kim Cusack, Johnny Cooper + never before released alternate takes.

Greenfield first met bassist Johnson while they were both studying at the Berklee College of Music in the mid-1970s. It took them another decade to begin playing together regularly in different configurations in New York City. Their work in quartets and trios helped the two develop a conversational style of play. They soon found that they really didn't need other musicians to enhance what they already had as a duo, a formation that they have been revisiting for nearly 20 years. Naturally, Greenfield and Johnson's musical connection was deep. Their duo allowed for an openness in their playing, allowing them to stretch and push one another. Johnson's bass approach maintained the outline of their material perfectly and provided jumping off points for improvisation for the two of them. Hayes Greenfield and Dean Johnson have found that their duo is one of the most enjoyable and rewarding musical pairings in their careers.