Classical Music

2021 release. Smooth Jazz Icon Richard Elliot has performed and recorded with jazz and R&B superstars Rod Stewart, Smokey Robinson, The Yellow Jackets, Tower Of Power, Bonnie Raitt, just to name a few. With more than 20 top ten smooth jazz singles and number 1 contemporary jazz albums, he has delighted his dedicated fan base from coast to coast. Authentic Life, produced by Richard and his long-time collaborator Rick Braun, overflows with Richard's ebullient spirit. Highlights include the funly Lorber/Elliot original "Snapshot", a deeply moving cover of the Gino Vanelli classic "Living Inside Myself", the uplifting "Boogie, " and Much more!!

Sisterhoods have been steadily moving toward the forefront of the jazz scene. Elevated by purpose and promise, and upholding the virtues of equality and community, these sororities have become a substantial force in the music today. Monika Herzig, a thoughtful composer and inventive pianist, has become a key figure in the movement toward enlightenment. To take the message into the studio and out on the road, Herzig has assembled an all-star band of greats - "Sheroes" as she likes to call them - who selflessly work together in presenting a judicious blend of covers and originals. Leni Stern's guitar helps to frame each song in the proper light; cellist Akua Dixon adds varicolored hues in her appearances; bassist Jennifer Vincent and drummer Rosa Avila (along with guest percussionist Mayra Casales) form a flexible unit capable of buttressing with strength and sensitivity; Lakecia Benjamin's alto shines in it's flights; while the flute-trombone partnership of Jamie Baum and Reut Regev proves to be a match made in heaven. With Herzig's pen and piano serving as the ties that bind, this declaration of unity truly delivers. All hail the conquering Sheroes.

A fount of harmonic ingenuity, melodic integrity, and rhythmic authority, Jerry Bergonzi has long been a standard-bearer of sorts for the jazz community. A prolific composer prone to taking deep dives that put serious theory into profound practice, his discography is filled with smart and imaginative originals that twist and turn in unexpected fashion. But a passion for standard gems of yesteryear, the lingua franca of jazz, also fires his creative impulses and figures into his work. In fact, the tried-and-true classics serve as a source of limitless potential for his horn. This follow-up to his Spotlight on Standards session once again features Bergonzi's slightly off-center take on the tenor-organ-drums trio format while the songs on this set list function as both reminders about Bergonzi's eminence in the jazz world and love letters from the man to the music. "I just adore the melodies of these tunes. I love standards. People always tell me, 'Man, you've got to make more records like this,'" Bergonzi says, "and I'm happy to oblige. I'm just delighted that Savant is totally behind me and this music."

David Sanchez triumphantly returns with a masterwork that not only emphasizes his deep roots and respect for Jazz with a capital J, but that continues the narrative from his album Melaza, digging further into the story of the African Diaspora as it is represented in the Caribbean, from Puerto Rico to Cuba to Haiti. His playing is at a peak, and the band flawlessly follows the story of his diverse study of Afro-Caribbean culture. - "The African diaspora throughout the Americas feels to me like a big river, flowing and changing it's formation across various lands, but remaining one immense watercourse. Carib is my continuation of that river, a personal and musical stream I began when I became bandleader for my first album, The Departure (1994) where you can clearly hear Puerto Rican rhythms running throughout. Another fork, my album Melaza (2000), has the most substantial connection with Carib because of it's flow and the strong influence of the bomba music tradition from Puerto Rico. I believe some of the greatest contributions to contemporary music and culture have come from the African diaspora throughout the Americas. Unfortunately, there seems to be too little awareness of their influence, especially the vital stories told by the music. So, I wanted to approach this album as a means to pay tribute to all Afro descendent communities who have helped define my music and the culture's broad ranging beauty and idiosyncrasies. Carib features traditional music from these two islands, because it still amazes me how similar their music flows. I focused on the Congo-Guinee in Haitian music because it is a musical tradition shared by many other Afro descendant cultures." - David Sanchez

Smooth Jazz saxophonist Vincent Ingala is the hottest young rising star on the scene today. Still in his early 20s, he already has 15 Top 10 Smooth Jazz radio singles to his credit, including seven #1s! He has shared the stage with a "who's who" of Smooth Jazz royalty, from Dave Koz to Boney James! Echoes Of The Heart features Vincent's uplifting remake of Amy Grant's '90s smash "Baby Baby" plus nine inspired originals such as the driving "What's Option B?", the sensuous "Echoes Of The Heart" and much more!!

With Project-K, Jim Snidero breaks new ground. Absorbing and refracting varied aspects of Korean folkways, he delves into a topic near and dear to his home and heart. "Having a Korean wife, family and friends, I've been immersed in Korean culture for more than 20 years," he shares. "Between Korean history, culture and philosophy, I felt that there was much to explore musically." Bridging his own wide-ranging aesthetic with those very traditions, Snidero turns out one of the most distinctive dates of his career. In choosing the personnel to flesh out this music, Snidero's decisions proved shrewd and sound. The rhythm section, comprised of pianist Orrin Evans, bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Rudy Royston, brings a rare balance of sensitivity, strength and insight to these ventures. And trumpeter Dave Douglas serves as the perfect front line foil for the saxophonist. "I wanted to use a traditional Korean instrument on Project-K and the gayageum appealed to me the most. My goal was to fully integrate the instrument within some of the arrangements," says Snidero, and Do Yeon Kim was the natural choice. As a group, we were all able to create what I believe is both unique and inspired music."

2021 release. With Special Guest - Najee! A proven hit maker with over 25 smooth jazz radio hits in his amazing career, all of Brian's previous releases have entered the Billboard Contemporary Jazz Charts in the top 5 and have contained at least 2 top 5 Smooth Jazz Radio hits, many of them #1s!! Both as a solo performer who has recorded and shared the stage with such greats as Boney James and George Duke and as the featured keyboardist and music director of the Dave Koz Band, Brian performs in front of an incredibly large number of devoted Smooth Jazz fans on a non-stop basis! Highlights include the first hit single "When I Found You" the inspired duet with Najee, "Mystical" the romantic ballad "When I Found You" and more brilliant Brian Simpson originals!

Facets�is saxophonist/composer�Hafez Modirzadeh's latest radical entreaty against the cultural hegemony of the Western notion of equal temperament and his argument that musicians should be free to explore a variety of tonal possibilities, even on piano. His 2012 release�Post-Chromodal Out!�was the first documentation of this concept, where the piano was tuned to a variety of temperaments. Performed with pianist�Vijay Iyer, The New York Times called that album "Dauntless... There's heady discipline at work here, along with the stirrings of a hard-fought individualism." With his new release, Modirzadeh has distilled the idea to a single re-tuning, which is performed in duets with three towering musicians in contemporary improvised music:�Kris Davis,�Tyshawn Sorey�and�Craig Taborn, each interrogating the piano's new possibilities with imagination and ingenuity. Modirzadeh himself utilizes alternate fingerings and embouchure adjustments on his instrument to achieve intervals between major and minor, and the pieces sway with an elasticity reminiscent of Persian poetic meter. With eight keys re-tuned and the remainder left in equal temperament, the music explores the coexistence of familiar with unfamiliar, and in the process, discovers new logic and mysterious beauty with

In a 2019 article, Forbes Magazine decreed that the two characteristics women need most to thrive in the business world are "grit and grace." Bass trombonist Jennifer Wharton has exemplified those qualities in the music she's made with her brass-forward band Bonegasm since it's 2019 debut. How else to explain Wharton's venture into improvising and bandleading after years in the classical world, big band sections and Broadway orchestra pits? Or her dedication to giving the oft-neglected trombone - and more to the point, her own bass trombone - it's place in the spotlight? And not least, that she's done so with a tricky balance of elegant arrangements, bold musicianship, and audacious wit?

Saxophonist/flutist Anna Webber has been an active performer and bandleader on the New York scene for the last decade, playing with the likes of John Hollenbeck, Dave Douglas, Matt Mitchell, and Jen Shyu. Her own projects, which are clear expressions of her knotty compositional sense, have been hailed by The New York Times as "bracing, argumentative and engineered to show the range of the group members: fulminous, intense collective improvisation; rapid, chromatic steeplechases; research into long tones and textures." Her new release, Clockwise, is an homage to some of her favorite 20th Century composers as seen through the lens of their works for percussion. For the project, Webber researched and analyzed various percussion compositions by Iannis Xenakis, Morton Feldman, Edgard Var�se, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt, and John Cage, isolating particular moments that could be extracted and developed into new works. The music explores notions of density and indeterminacy, using timbre as an organizing principal, continuing Webber's ongoing exploration of the interstice between creative improvisation and tightly-prescribed compositions.

2018 release. Pat Bianchi is a jazz organist. In 2010, Downbeat named him among the ten best organists in jazz. He took up piano at age seven and began formal lessons at age 12. He studied classical piano at the Eastman School of Music and jazz piano at the Berklee School of Music. He is currently based in New York City.

Idiom by composer/saxophonist/ flutist Anna Webber is the follow-up to her critically-acclaimed release Clockwise, which the Wall Street Journal called "visionary and captivating" and NPR described as "heady music [that] appeal to the rest of the body." Idiom is a series of six pieces, each of which is based on a specific woodwind extended technique - a broad term meaning any non-traditional way of producing sound on an instrument, including the use of multiphonics, alternate fingerings, key clicks, overblown notes, and the like - that she has taken from her own improvisational language. The works are the upshot of her belief that jazz composers/performers are in a privileged position to create the perfect vehicles for themselves as improvisers. As a frequent user of extended techniques in her own playing, Webber set out to create a continuum between her compositional and improvisatory vocabulary, orchestrating these effects across the ensemble, and applying them to different instruments. They are also used to generate chords and scales and, overall, gave license to utilize other naturally occurring sounds, opening up whole new worlds of mysterious sonic combinations and orchestrations. "Idiom II" from this book of compositions appeared on Clockwise, while the new project - spread out over two volumes - comprises the other five "Idiom" pieces. The first four of these feature her Simple Trio - Webber with drummer John Hollenbeck and pianist Matt Mitchell - which has been her primary working group for the past eight years. The hour-long "Idiom VI" is performed by a twelve-piece ensemble that brings together a mix of musicians equally split between improvisors and new music specialists. With Idiom, Webber has created a singular sonic world, a bold magnum opus that paves a new path for the amalgamation of cutting-edge composition and improvisation.

2023 release. This live solo album features the pianist and composer's interpretations of nine songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and one by George Harrison. Although other Beatles songs have long been staples of Mehldau's solo and trio shows, he had not previously recorded any of the tunes on Your Mother Should Know. The album ends with a David Bowie classic that draws a connection between The Beatles and pop songwriters who followed. Your Mother Should Know was recorded in September 2020 at Philharmonie de Paris.

Alice Coltrane - "The Carnegie Hall Concert" / Alice Coltrane's "The Carnegie Hall Concert" is a previously unreleased recording of a historic 1971 concert. The original multi-track recording was commissioned by Impulse but wasn't released at the time. Features an all-star group including Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Jimmy Garrison, Cecil McBee, Ed Blackwell and others. This was a triple bill placing her in the company of Laura Nyro and The Rascals. Concert produced by Sid Bernstein, who promoted the first Beatles concert in the US. CD Softpak.

2023 release. M�lusine features a mix of five originals and interpretations of nine songs, dating as far back as the twelfth century, mostly sung in French along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Krey�l. M�lusine follows last year's label debut, Ghost Song, which has received two Grammy nominations and tremendous critical praise, including spots on best albums of 2022 lists from the New York Times and NPR, among others. The new album's songs tell the story of the European folkloric legend of M�lusine, a woman who turns into a half-snake each Saturday as a result of a childhood curse by her mother. M�lusine later agrees to marry Raymondin on the condition that he never see her on Saturdays. He agrees but is ultimately convinced by his brother to break his promise, piercing his wife's door with his sword and finding her naked in the bath, half snake, half woman. When she catches him spying on her, she turns into a dragon and flies out the window, only to reappear every time one of her descendants is on their deathbed. Salvant, whose parents are French and Haitian, says M�lusine is also "partly about that feeling of being a hybrid, a mixture of different cultures, which I've experienced not only as the American-born child of two first generation immigrants, but as someone raised in a family that is racially mixed, from several different countries, with different languages spoken in the home. "

In 1962, two of the most influential and talented instrumentalists that Cuba ever produced were brought together. Saxophonist/clarinetist Paquito D'Rivera was invited to hear pianist Chucho Vald�s at a local club in his Marianao neighborhood of South Havana. The two soon became a musical partnership that helped shape jazz in Cuba. Their paths would separate in 1980 when D'Rivera left Cuba. // Sixty years after their initial meeting, the pair has finally reunited to create a monumental new recording. Their I Missed You Too! Marks D'Rivera and Vald�s's first recording since they were both members of Cuba's most influential jazz/fusion ensemble, Irakere.

Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt's latest project, Woven, is a fascinating album that fuses more traditional aspects of 21st-century jazz with the myriad possibilities of electronic synthesized sound. This collection of mostly original compositions showcases Pelt's instrumental artistry together with his commitment to composing works that explore new dimensions in jazz. Each track on Woven is meticulously crafted, perfectly balancing innovation with communicative emotional depth. The full range of contemporary jazz can be found here, from neo-bop, hard-driving rhythms to touchingly intimate balladic utterances. But Pelt's trumpet can also weave through electronic textures, creating a sonic landscape where the group's kaleidoscopic tone colors become a fundamental part of the melodic content. Joined by an impressive ensemble of musicians, Pelt and his collaborators create a fluid interplay of acoustic and electronic sounds, displaying their skill in integrating bold, contemporary elements while simultaneously underlining the very essence of jazz.

Classical Music

2019 release. The Adornment of Time is a monumental meeting between drummer Tyshawn Sorey and pianist Marilyn Crispell, two titans of contemporary music. Recorded live at The Kitchen in New York City, the performance is the apotheosis of fully-improvised music, a dialogue between two artists who are masters at bringing compositional form to their improvisations. Sorey, a 2017 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, has been named by The New Yorker as "among the most formidable denizens of the in-between zone... An extraordinary talent who can see across the entire musical landscape," and by The Wall Street Journal as "a composer of radical and seemingly boundless ideas." Crispell, whose playing has been described by The New York Times like "monitoring an active volcano," is perhaps best known for her association with Anthony Braxton in his classic quartet of the 1980s and 1990s, but also for her many projects as a leader and highly-regarded releases on the ECM label. Comprised of a single, uninterrupted movement, the performance is by turns placid and tumultuous; quietly contemplative until exploding in intensity. Their performance together is an act of collaborative spontaneous composition of the highest order.

Live archive release. In August of 1961, the John Coltrane Quintet played an engagement at the legendary Village Gate in Greenwich Village, New York. Eighty minutes of never-before-heard music from this group were recently discovered at the New York Public Library. In addition to some well-known Coltrane material ("Impressions"), there is a breathtaking feature for Dolphy's bass clarinet on "When Lights Are Low" and the only known non-studio recording of Coltrane's composition "Africa", from the Africa/Brass album.

This budget priced compilation contains soothing, mellow jazz, feat. Wallace Rooney, Antoine Roney, Geri Allen, Ralphe Armstrong, Lenny White, John Hicks, Russell Gunn, Myron Walden, Mark Turner, Greg Tardy & many others

LIVE IN BROOKLYN

MEDIETAS

Echolocation is the astonishing debut album from Mendoza Hoff Revels, an electric & formidable new unit led by Ava Mendoza (electric guitar, compositions) & Devin Hoff (electric bass, compositions) and featuring James Brandon Lewis (tenor sax) & Ches Smith (drums). A super-group of our time, all profound creative artists in their own right, rocking mightily together, in their prime. 21st Century progressive rock played by punk rockers with serious improv skills & jazz feel. And non-stop wicked catchy tunes, riffs & grooves. Strong sonic references are The Stooges' Funhouse, rendered by a band readily adept at rapidly swinging rhythmic & harmonic shifts, plus tenor sax on every track! -&- Minutemen, both their whole body of music & their fundamental egalitarian punk ethos.