RABBIT HOLE

ETERNAL BIRTH

NOSTALGIA

Commemorating the 270th anniversary of Mozart's birth in 2026, the "MOZART COLORS 100" collection by Deutsche Grammophon and Decca is a masterful fusion of high-fidelity audio and innovative visual curation. By organizing 94 essential recordings and six genre-specific masterpieces into a spectrum of 12 thematic colors, the series transforms the act of listening into a mood-based experience, allowing the "jacket color" to guide the listener through Mozart's immense versatility-from his precocious childhood works to his universally beloved classics. The technical presentation is equally impressive, featuring the SHM-CD format for superior sound resolution housed in elegant, color-coordinated cardboard sleeves that appeal to tactile collectors. With insightful new commentary by Mai Takano and approachable branding by Toshiyuki Hirata, this 100-title series successfully modernizes a historical legacy, making the 2026 anniversary both a luxury for audiophiles and a welcoming entry point for new fans of the "Wunderkind."

ALL YOU CAN BEAT

OPEN SPACE

After their first recording, Nuits parisiennes, Manon Galy and Jorge Gonzalez Buajasan open the door to the inner worlds of Romanticism. Surrounding Mendelssohn's rare Sonata in F major MWV Q 26 (his only mature violin sonata), Brahms's Second, and Grieg's Third are a few poetic and intimate gems, such as Sibelius's Berceuse and Fibich's Poeme. Between "melancholy waltz and languorous vertigo," violin and piano become the exalted yet nostalgic voice of the composers' most personal confidences.

LEVE LEVE VOL 2: SAO TOME & PRINCIPE SOUNDS / VAR

Post-classical composer, sound artist, and curator Matthew Patton returns with his second album as Those Who Walk Away. Afterlife Requiem is an elegy to friend and collaborator Johann Johannsson. Drone, electroacoustics, and near-silences extracted from unfinished recordings on Johannsson hard drives, underpin two string quintets-Ghost Orchestra (Reykjavik) and Possible Orchestra (Winnipeg)-processed and erased in a doleful durational work. Patton also works again with Andy Rudolph (Guy Maddin) and Paul Corley (Sigur Ros, Ben Frost) on co-production and sound design, to forge a simmering physicality that juxtaposes roiling low-end with haunting movements of ghostly strings. Everything I have ever written is a Requiem. Everything an ending. Death is smeared all over this music. My work is about disappearance-of the present, the past, of everything. Afterlife Requiem gets slower and slower over it's duration, it is one huge ritardando, time is not just slowing down-it is disappearing. Without even thinking, two related tragedies occurred and came to the surface organically while I was writing, recording, and working: the death of my mother and the death of composer and friend Johann Johannsson. When I start writing, I am not thinking of anything in particular, I am just writing, composing, recording, and listening... but something always makes itself apparent or pushes itself through in an unforeseen way. After my mother's medically-assisted death, in clearing out her apartment, I realized that I was also erasing the physical manifestation of her world-and that I was doing the exact same thing with the music I was writing and recording. During this time, Johann's death also kept making itself apparent. For Afterlife Requiem I have taken short abandoned fragments from Johann Johannsson's hard drives and placed these disembodied audio ghosts in alternating sections within my own music, leaving them impure-and in the process blurring the distinction between making and un-making. After his death, I had been given these hard drives from Johannsson's Berlin studio to listen to. This music was abandoned, in various states of formation and dissolution: an index of decayed and dead memories, forgotten and now existing only within a series of interlocking mechanical parts which in time will themselves fail and disappear, like everything else. For months, I listened to these remains of Johann's music obsessively, trying to discover clues about Johann before he died. Many times I would find that he had left the recording device going long after the recorded music was over. He seemed to be unaware that the music had ceased or didn't register this was the end of the music or maybe he was distracted by something else. But I found these long silences profoundly emotional and touching.

A focused portrait of Britten alongside a little-known but significant British contemporary, marking both the 50th anniversary of Britten's death and the centenary year of Arthur Oldham's birth. Under Michael Waldron, the London Choral Sinfonia pairs Britten with the one composer he privately mentored: Arthur Oldham. The program brings together familiar works by Britten with a substantial selection of Oldham's choral music, placing the two composers in direct conversation. At the center is Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, a cycle of nocturnal poetry (Tennyson, Blake, Keats and others) framed by the horn's natural harmonics in the Prologue and Epilogue. Horn soloist Annemarie Federle and Tenor Nick Pritchard trace it's shifting atmosphere, with string accompaniment from the London Choral Sinfonia. Britten's Te Deum in C appears in the rarely heard orchestrated version for strings and harp, presented here as a world premiere recording. Oldham's music completes the program: the cantata Laudes Creaturarum on the text of St Francis of Assisi (with Carolyn Sampson), the carol Remember, O thou man, and the ceremonial Sacerdos et Pontifex for chorus and organ - also recorded here for the first time.

In this double album, Emmanuelle Bertrand, Pascal Amoyel and the Quatuor Parisii explore the musical world of late Schubert in all it's nuanced light and shade. Here with the well-known Arpeggione Sonata, the stupendous String Quintet, and selected songs arranged for cello and piano, the album becomes a poignant journey during which we see beauty yield to the inevitability of fate.

FAMILY AFFAIR

MONTREUX, ZARAGOZA & RAMATUELLE JAZZ FESTIVALS

TRIUMVIRATE

My current project is called Omniphoria... a title conceived by Mary Suzanne Garvey (my wife/partner for many years). Mary also provides the lovely painting for the cover art. The project consists of 13 tracks featuring several of my longtime associates and musicians from years of making music, Dan Balmer, Dave Captein, Doug Durbrow and several others joined me. We were even able to squeeze in a live track from my band in 1989. And I was thrilled to record a piano/voice duet with my brother Mukunda who joins me in a song from the world of Hare Krishna of which he is a founding devotee.

Clear Vinyl. Blue Hour is Nick Schofield's first foray into ambient jazz music. The album is an ambient ode to Miles Davis' In A Silent Way, and opens up Schofield's sonic palette to introduce his childhood instrument, drums, with his contemporary ambient-electronic practice. Blue Hour features the intuitive, and totally improvised, trumpet playing of Scott Bevins (No Cosmos, Busty and the Bass). Schofield grew up playing drums, but turned to creating experimental-electronic music when studying Electroacoustics at Concordia University. Well-known for his signature ambient aesthetic, Schofield has been called a "dazzling electronic artist" by Aquarium Drunkard and a "synth maven" by Constellation Records. Blue Hour marks the first time that he has merged his percussion practice with his ambient electronic explorations, and it is all in the service of reinterpreting Miles Davis' 1969 watershed recording In a Silent Way. Schofield improvised all of the drumming and main synthesizer parts over the course of a single day, recording in a church in Ottawa. These foundational layers comprise tender Moog pulses and Roland Juno-6 pads, some of which would not be out of place on the back half of Another Green World or Music Has the Right to Children. If this was to be a reflection of In a Silent Way, of course there would need to be trumpet. Schofield invited Bevins to record the missing piece of the album during a one day recording session, where Bevins improvised all his trumpet parts having never heard the songs before. Scott Bevins' contribution gives the music a leading instrumental voice, and his intuitive approach shows a perfect understanding of how to both integrate and elevate the compositions. Blue Hour is itself a profound reference, an ambient adaptation, a dream realized and an uncanny synthesis of sounds, styles, and personal history.

Bo Diddley's iconic beat shaped the foundation of rock and roll. In this jam-packed concert, Bo shares the stage with giants from every corner of rock history: Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones, Kenny Jones of The Who, Carl Wilson of The Beach Boys, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, and many more legends. Together, for one explosive performance, they put the rock in rock and roll.

TRACTEUR HAMMER

Commemorating the 270th anniversary of Mozart's birth in 2026, the "MOZART COLORS 100" collection by Deutsche Grammophon and Decca is a masterful fusion of high-fidelity audio and innovative visual curation. By organizing 94 essential recordings and six genre-specific masterpieces into a spectrum of 12 thematic colors, the series transforms the act of listening into a mood-based experience, allowing the "jacket color" to guide the listener through Mozart's immense versatility-from his precocious childhood works to his universally beloved classics. The technical presentation is equally impressive, featuring the SHM-CD format for superior sound resolution housed in elegant, color-coordinated cardboard sleeves that appeal to tactile collectors. With insightful new commentary by Mai Takano and approachable branding by Toshiyuki Hirata, this 100-title series successfully modernizes a historical legacy, making the 2026 anniversary both a luxury for audiophiles and a welcoming entry point for new fans of the "Wunderkind."

ALL BEFORE YESTERDAY

Randy Weston is known to the public thru the lens of the small ensemble of the African Rhythm group, recognition that is very well deserved and his signature around the world. Randy Weston is not only in direct lineage of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, he was also the real integrator of African music into the Jazz World. In 1985 the city of Brooklyn honored Randy with a week-long tribute, culminating in a unique concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) on February 16. For this rare occasion, Randy assembled a dream ensemble - dancers, singers (including Andy Bey), and a big band like no other. The arrangements and conducting were entrusted to none other than Melba Liston - his trusted collaborator and musical sister. Melba, a brilliant trombonist and an even more masterful arranger, transformed Randy's compositions into grand orchestrations that paid tribute to his musical legacy. One of three releases marking the 100th birthday of Randy Weston. It features previously unreleased live material.

WHISKY SCENTED KISSES

This recording brings together three closely related works for clarinet and strings, linking Classical elegance with 20th-century English lyricism. At it's heart is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Clarinet Quintet in A major, K.581, written for Anton Stadler and one of the defining masterpieces of the clarinet repertoire. From the poised opening Allegro to the intimate, aria-like Larghetto and the finely judged closing variations, Mozart places the clarinet at the centre of a richly expressive chamber dialogue. Gordon Jacob's Clarinet Quintet (1940), composed for Frederick Thurston, reflects a clear admiration for Mozart's clarity of form while speaking in a distinctly English voice. Concise, lyrical and expertly balanced, the work moves from an autumnal opening through urgency and rhapsodic reflection to a characterful set of variations. The program concludes with a rarity: the unfinished Allegro of a second Mozart clarinet quintet, completed by Duncan Druce, offering an intriguing glimpse of a work Mozart never completed. Performed by the Gaudier Ensemble with clarinettist Richard Hosford, this recording combines stylistic authority with warm, natural chamber sound, the clarinet's expressive range and it's evolution across two centuries.

DYNASTY

HEALING SONGS