Pneuma is a cycle of eight compositions by double bassist and composer Henry Fraser, released by Kou Records, exploring breath, resonance, and the evolving relationship between form and improvisation. Approaching his solo practice as a collaboration with the instrument itself, Fraser works directly with the bass's materiality and acoustic properties, allowing sound, space, and structure to emerge together through deep listening. Recorded, mixed, and co-produced by Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Thurston Moore) and Ben Greenberg (Uniform, Marc Ribot), the album expands Fraser's previous solo language through an extended melodic register, layered textures, and carefully sculpted studio interventions. Drawing from both pre-composed motifs and newly improvised material, Pneuma unfolds across a series of concise movements, each giving shape to a distinct rhythmic or harmonic idea while contributing to a larger continuous form. Captured with an emphasis on natural dynamics and spatial detail, the recording preserves the full physical presence of the instrument, foregrounding the bass's resonance, overtones, and quiet micro-gestures. Certain pieces are built from multiple stacked performances, dramatically widening the music's scale and expressive range. The result is an intimate yet immersive listening experience - acoustic music that feels simultaneously tactile and expansive. Pneuma documents Fraser at a moment of artistic clarity, reaffirming his commitment to process-driven composition and attentive sonic practice.

Listen Ship is the latest masterpiece in the ever-expanding sound world of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, whom The New York Review of Books recently described as "one of American music's great Romantics and a lifelong seeker of the sublime." The new work is a suite for six acoustic guitars - including individual stylists such as Bill Frisell, Miles Okazaki and Brandon Ross - and two pianos that utilize Threadgill's unique intervallic syntax to illuminate his idiosyncratic vision. The eight string instruments revel in the music's painstaking detail with intricate gestures that miraculously entwine to form a grand statement. The meticulous orchestration highlights all of the usual characteristics of Threadgill's music: unusual forms, unexpected timbres, and slippery counterpoint and rhythms, all shaped by the composer's conducting into a singular experience.

Listen Ship is the latest masterpiece in the ever-expanding sound world of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, whom The New York Review of Books recently described as "one of American music's great Romantics and a lifelong seeker of the sublime." The new work is a suite for six acoustic guitars - including individual stylists such as Bill Frisell, Miles Okazaki and Brandon Ross - and two pianos that utilize Threadgill's unique intervallic syntax to illuminate his idiosyncratic vision. The eight string instruments revel in the music's painstaking detail with intricate gestures that miraculously entwine to form a grand statement. The meticulous orchestration highlights all of the usual characteristics of Threadgill's music: unusual forms, unexpected timbres, and slippery counterpoint and rhythms, all shaped by the composer's conducting into a singular experience.

To celebrate saxophonist/flutist Henry Threadgill's career retrospective at the 2024 Big Ears Festival, Pi Recordings is proud to release both Volumes I & II of This Brings Us To together in a limited-edition double vinyl set. Featuring his long-running band, Zooid, the two volumes were originally released in 2009 and 2010 even though the music was all recorded at a single session. They were his first releases in eight years, longer than any hiatus in his career, a time that allowed for the gestation of what was to become Threadgill's signature intervallic system of composition and group improvisation that ultimately won him a Pulitzer Prize for his work In for a Penny, In for a Pound. The original albums were voted the #2 and #5 best releases of the year by The Village Voice Jazz Critics' Poll, about which NPR said "The jazz world is coming to realize that Threadgill is a true idiosyncratic great... This Brings Us To staggers and lurches and creates dissonances, and it still brings the mad-scientist funk." Remastered for vinyl by Threadgill's long-time guitarist and producer Liberty Ellman and housed in a gatefold sleeve with archival photos of the band, the release focuses attention on an important turning point in the career of one of music's great iconoclastic masters.

Composer, arranger and conductor Henry Mancini is renowned for his involvement in music for the movies, none more so than his memorable and legendary collaboration with lyricist Johnny Mercer on "Moon River" for the classic Audrey Hepburn film "Breakfast At Tiffany's". However, he also wrote and recorded non-movie material for singles and albums, and this collection dips into both strands of his work during the early era of his recording career. This great-value 52-track 2-CD set comprises A & B sides of his s singles during these years on the Liberty, Coral and RCA labels, plus selected titles from his Liberty album "Driftwood And Dreams" and his RCA albums "The Blues And The Beat" and "Combo", which included arrangements of pop standards as well as his own compositions. It features his hits from this era, including the Academy Award winning "Moon River" and "Days Of Wine And Roses", plus the themes from "Mr. Lucky", "The Great Impostor" and "Hatari". Other movie and TV music featured in the set includes the themes from "Peter Gunn", "The Brothers Karamazov", "Experiment In Terror" and "Phaedra" plus "Baby Elephant Walk" from "Hatari". It's a fascinating and varied showcase for Mancini's unique skill as a composer of screen music but also offers a window onto his wider contribution to popular music.

Composer, arranger and conductor Henry Mancini is renowned for his involvement in music for the movies, none more so than his memorable and legendary collaboration with lyricist Johnny Mercer on "Moon River" for the classic Audrey Hepburn film "Breakfast At Tiffany's". However, he also wrote and recorded non-movie material for singles and albums, and this collection dips into both strands of his work during the early era of his recording career. This great-value 52-track 2-CD set comprises A & B sides of his s singles during these years on the Liberty, Coral and RCA labels, plus selected titles from his Liberty album "Driftwood And Dreams" and his RCA albums "The Blues And The Beat" and "Combo", which included arrangements of pop standards as well as his own compositions. It features his hits from this era, including the Academy Award winning "Moon River" and "Days Of Wine And Roses", plus the themes from "Mr. Lucky", "The Great Impostor" and "Hatari". Other movie and TV music featured in the set includes the themes from "Peter Gunn", "The Brothers Karamazov", "Experiment In Terror" and "Phaedra" plus "Baby Elephant Walk" from "Hatari". It's a fascinating and varied showcase for Mancini's unique skill as a composer of screen music but also offers a window onto his wider contribution to popular music.

Voices of Women: From Unknown to Renowned began as an idea in a workshop soprano and album producer Heather Fetrow attended called The Twenty-first Century Singer with Soprano Susan Mohini Kane in Los Angeles in the summer of 2016. The focus of the album grew further to encompass the goal of honoring female composers as a result of collaboration with renowned soprano Dr. Julianne Baird in Philadelphia in December of 2016. These events coincided with the Women's March in Washington DC the next month in January of 2017, lending a sense of timeliness to the project. The focus of an album of songs by women composers and other songs about women is unique, and brings to the fore the vast social change the world is undergoing with respect to women in our society, both in the United States and elsewhere around the world. Each piece addresses this separately from different points of view, in some cases from a previous age where the standards of women's expectations were very different than today. The World Premiere of "Still" by outstanding and innovative composer Paola Prestini, sung as a duet by sisters, brings the album's concept full circle with a song composed for and dedicated to this album. Also included are two piano pieces performed by Mila Henry, both by female composers, "Light" by Iranian composer Gity Razaz and "No. 2" from "Nine Short Piano Pieces" composed by Ms. Henry's mother-in-law. In all, this is an album for the age of the woman and about the age in which we live.

2018 release. Double Up, Plays Double Up Plus is Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill's highly anticipated follow-up to Old Locks and Irregular Verbs, which was voted the best jazz album of 2016 in the NPR and Jazz Times Critics Polls. Like on that release, which NPR called "a masterpiece," this album also features Ensemble Double Up, this time with the remarkable inclusion of three concert grand pianos, in addition to saxophones, flute, cello, tuba, and drums. Alive with the multi-layered counterpoint, and odd-angled swing that is Threadgill's hallmark, the work is rich with intricate detail and grand gestures.

In 1840s Leipzig the young Danish composer Niels W. Gade (1817-90) was welcomed with open arms, and became Mendelssohn’s successor with the Gewandhaus Orchestra. There, Gade himself conducted the first performance of his cantata Comala, which travelled as far afield as the USA and Russia. Comala is a lyrical-heroic legend based on James Macpherson’s famous Ossian poems about the warrior Fingal and his beloved Comala, here performed by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra & Choir and an inspired team of international soloists under the renowned French conductor Laurence Equilbey. While the dramatic work was one of Gade’s biggest successes, it has largely been forgotten over the last century. This first collaboration between Equilby and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Choir is a perfect revival.

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REVIEW:

Together they deliver a magnificent account of this undeservedly forgotten score. Taken from live performances, there’s also a vibrancy, which turns music that in lesser hands might be ordinary fare, into a highly memorable listening experience.

– Classical Lost and Found (Bob McQuiston)

American Originals is the latest release from the Cincinnati Pops conducted by John Morris Russell and features iconic American songs interpreted by a diverse array of acclaimed musical collaborators including Rosanne Cash, Dom Flemons, Over the Rhine, Joe Henry, Aoife O'Donovan and the Comet Bluegrass All-Stars. The first-ever Cincinnati Pops album to be recorded live in concert, American Originals breathes new life into the first chapter of the Great American Songbook and the music of Stephen Foster. The 94th Cincinnati Pops album includes inspiring new renditions of My Old Kentucky Home, O Susannah, Camptown Races, Aura Lee, Slumber My Darling, Hard Times, and Beautiful Dreamer, among other classic tunes. According to The Cincinnati Enquirer, The fresh arrangements and unique talents who performed them set each in a new light.

Charade [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack] by Henry Mancini - Reflecting the European setting of Stanley Donen's 1963 comedy thriller Charade, Henry Mancini's soundtrack provides an easy listening tour of continental musical history: Parisian cafe songs on "Bistro," Eastern European gypsy music on "Bateau Mouche," Schubert quartets on "Bye Charlie," and some beer barrel polka on "Punch and Judy." Thrown in for variety's sake are dashes of Bond soundtracks, Cossack songs, and Strauss waltzes. A great Mancini recording made during the same fruitful, early-'60s period that produced two other fine soundtracks of his, Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Pink Panther.

Recorded in 1961, The Blues in St. Louis, Vol. 2 celebrates 1930s and '40s style Barrelhouse Blues and Boogie Woogie. Henry Brown and Edith Johnson came from very different musical backgrounds: pianist Brown was formally trained, while Johnson learned the blues by singing along with music playing in her husband's record shop. Yet, the two came together in Jazz and Blues fan Bob Oswald's recording studio, and the result is a combination of Classic Blues instrumentals and vocals like "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Little Drops of Water," often accompanied by Brown tapping his foot against the piano pedal. Musician and scholar Samuel Charters gives a first hand account of the musicians and circumstances of recording in the liner notes.

Track Listing
1. As Time Goes By
2. One For My Baby
3. Everything I Do (I Do It For You)
4. Stella by Starlight
5. Windmills of My Mind
6. Crazy World
7. That Old Black Magic
8. Unchained Melody
9. Mona Lisa
10. Call Me Irresponsible
11. Two For the Road
12. It's All There
13. Summer Knows, The
14. Tender Is the Night
15. Charade

Conceived and built in 1931 by musical forward-thinkers Leon Theremin and Henry Cowell, the Rhythmicon was a musical keyboard instrument. The online one made by Nick Didkovsky, of Dr. Nerve fame, in 2003 takes the instrument to it's next logical step. In the hands of some of today's leading sound artist/composers, the Virtual Rhythmicon makes music that shimmers, pulses and haunts with a beauty that would do it's more famous cousin, the theremin, proud.

Stravinsky has been compared to his near contemporary Picasso, the painter who provided décor for Pulcinella and who through a long career was to show mastery of a number of contrasting styles. Stravinsky's earlier music was essentially Russian in inspiration, followed by a style of composition derived largely from the eighteenth century, interspersed with musical excursions in other directions. His so-called neo-classicism coincided with the beginning of a career that was now international. The initial enthusiasm for the Russian revolution of 1917 that had led even Dyagilev to replace crown and scepter in The Firebird with a red flag, was soon succeeded by distaste for the new régime and the decision not to return to Russia. Stravinsky wrote his Danses concertantes in Hollywood in 1941 and early 1942, in response to a commission from the Wemer Janssens Orchestra, which gave the first performance in Los Angeles on 8th February under the direction of the composer. Although originally intended for concert use, the Danses concertantes were planned in balletic sequence, with an introductory and concluding march to bring the dancers on and off the stage and the necessary variety, not only in the Pas d' action and Pas de deux but also in the theme and variations, three of the latter based on an ascending semitone step. In 1944 the dances were choreographed by Balanchine for the Ballet russe of Monte Carlo. The style of writing reflects that of the earlier ballet Jeu de cartes.