Recorded November 1957 at Van Gelder Studio, Soul Junction is an album by jazz pianist and composer Red Garland. Also featuring the legendary John Coltrane (tenor sax) and Donald Byrd (trumpet) amongst others, the album features five cuts including the Garland penned title track. This new edition of the album is released as part of the Original Jazz Classics Series on 180-gram vinyl pressed at RTI with all-analog mastering from the original tapes at Cohearent Audio and a Stoughton Tip-On Jacket.

Judy Garland - The Judy Garland Show 1962. - Taped for TV in 1962 "The Judy Garland Show" with Judy & guests Frank Sinatra & Dean Martin have been remastered from the original playback discs. - Taped before an invited audience for TV in early 1962, "The Judy Garland Show" starred Judy and guests Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. The three stars were magical and ratings reached an all time high. The tracks have been remastered from the original playbac

Sepia Records celebrates the 75th anniversary of the iconic Wizard of Oz with this anthology CD featuring songs from the movie (and some dropped) performed "live" for a promotional radio broadcast by the stars such as Judy Garland, Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, and also including recordings by composer Harold Arlen and popular performers of the day such as Glenn Miller and his orchestra. Most of the tracks here are not from the movie sound track but recordings made to promote the movie such as "live" radio broadcasts. Included are four versions of the ever popular "Over the Rainbow" performed by Judy Garland - the movie version, a "live" version, a "pop" version and finally, one with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra recorded for radio broadcast to sell government war bonds. The big band orchestras are represented here by Glenn Miller, Vincent Lopez and Frankie Masters, each performing their "dance band" version of songs from the movie.

Limited edition high definition premium 180gm vinyl LP repressing of this classic Jazz album. Originally issued on vinyl, the ongoing popularity of LP pressings and repressings has ensured the longevity of this format for years to come. Jazz Wax Records. 2009.

HOIBY A Pocket of Time. Pierrot. In the Wand of the Wind. Lady of the Harbor. The Lamb. Where the Music Comes From. To an Isle in the Water. Winter Hubris. Jabberwocky. Lied der Liebe. Nuits. I Was There. Autumn. Evening. The Darkling Thrush. Last Letter Home. Goodby, Goodby World. The Nightingale and the Lark • Julia Faulkner (sop); Andrew Garland (bar); Lee Hoiby (pn) • NAXOS 8.559375 (75: 12)

"With the exception of Robert Ward (still active at 92, last I heard), Lee Hoiby (now 83) is probably America’s oldest traditional neo-Romantic still composing. Although he has made valuable contributions to most musical genres, his songs, choral anthems, and operas represent his most distinguished efforts. Hoiby’s musical language places his best efforts in the stylistic vicinity of such composers as Samuel Barber and Ned Rorem, while his lesser efforts call to mind the music of Gian Carlo Menotti. But this is not to suggest that Hoiby doesn’t have a voice of his own; indeed, he does, although it is perhaps not such a strikingly individual one. Less pretentious than Rorem’s, Hoiby’s music is even more resolutely tonal and diatonic than that of his three confreres, and more consonant harmonically as well, although fluid modulations, chromatic and modal ambiguities, and well-placed dissonances keep things active and interesting.

Hoiby’s songs display a remarkably consistent sense of good taste: though many of his texts deal with intense, vulnerable emotions, rarely, if ever, does he cross the line into kitsch. In addition, his workmanship, sensitivity to language, and wide range of expression are on a par with Barber’s, placing them among the most sensitive and rewarding of American art songs.

Lee Hoiby’s songs are part of the vocal repertoires of most singers who include music of the 20th century on their programs. Listeners with a taste for neo-Romantic lyricism are strongly urged to sample this music if they are not already familiar with it, and Naxos’s budget price keeps the risk at a minimal level."

FANFARE: Walter Simmons

This three-CD reissue of the noted series of seven 10-inch vinyl EPs that Cold Blue released in the early 1980s (during the label’s short-lived initial incarnation) was a Gramophone magazine “Critic’s Choice” in 2004. Extraordinary music for violins and percussion, electric guitar, electronic keyboards with voices, solo and duo pianos, cello, pedal steel guitar, wind instruments of pre-Columbian design, readers, and more from composers Peter Garland, Rick Cox, Barney Childs, Read Miller, Michael Jon Fink, Daniel Lentz, and Chas Smith. John Schaefer, longtime producer of WNYC’s New Sounds called the series of 10-inch EPs “Cold Blue’s little ‘ism’-skirting discs…a whole wonderful world of new sounds.” (This boxed set includes a 24-page full-color booklet.) In Arts Journal, Kyle Gann wrote about the reissued set, “A new three-disc set reissued from the hip southern-California label Cold Blue has me so mesmerized I can hardly quit listening to it.” Josef Woodard writing in The Santa Barbara Independent declared the boxed set “Decidedly cool—in hipness quotient and emotional temperament. Beguiling.” Roger Thomas, writing in Int’l Record Review called the set “My favorite item this month . . . the work of composers whose work might be described as avant-garde but which also exhibited the back-to-fundamentals approach which is so often an aspect of the best American music…a striking set…. This spare, uncluttered music is a compelling listening experience, sounding as fresh today as when it originally appeared.” And Gramophone magazine wrote, “The sounds are spare, wistful, innocent and soft-spoken, often beautiful in a way no other music is.”