Following the much appreciated Volume 1, this is another compilation from 2xHD’s artists interpreting a selection of great ballads. Here is another selection of great ballads performed by 2xHD’s best female jazz singers and instrumentalists, a follow up to the much appreciated Jazz Ballads album released on 2xHD two years ago. It includes performances by Shirley Horn, Holly Cole, Ben Webster, and more.

A unique release of evocative Japanese music for the saxophone, performed by an artist who specialises in this repertoire, Masanori Oishi. From Yuji Takahashi to Dai Fujikura, this compilation gathers together the works of seven composers from different generations. While the album allows listeners to enjoy Masanori Oishi’s rich, expressionistic abilities as he freely manipulates the sound of the saxophone, it also showcases what Japanese composers have to offer.

Timothy Stuart Jones (born 1971) is an American composer and musician. Jones has composed scores for film and television. In 2012, Jones composed the score for 13 episodes of Cult. Jones is perhaps best known as the composer for five seasons (91 episodes) of Chuck on NBC. Jones also took over scoring duties on season 2 of Human Target on Fox. Tim Jones, who majored in film scoring, graduated in 1994 with a bachelor's degree from the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Thomas Adès was born in London in 1971. His compositions include two operas, Powder Her Face (Cheltenham Festival/Almeida Theatre, London, 1995), and The Tempest (Royal Opera, Covent Garden, 2004). Other orchestral works include Asyla (CBSO, 1997), Tevot (Berlin Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall, 2007), Polaris (New World Symphony, Miami 2011), Violin Concerto Concentric Paths (Berliner Festspiele and London Proms, 2005), In Seven Days (Piano concerto with moving image - LA Philharmonic and RFH London 2008), and Totentanz for mezzo-soprano, baritone and orchestra (London Proms, 2013).

There was nothing necessarily wrong with the soundtrack to 2002’s Tobey Maguire-starring Spider-Man. But surveying it 16 years later, there was something awfully homogenous about its lineup: Sum 41, Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger, Theory of a Deadman, Aerosmith, Pete Yorn. So it makes sense that the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse which features multiple cross-racial, cross-gender, cross-generational, cross-dimensional characters with Spidey powers has a soundtrack that really upends the franchise’s own long-established aesthetic and cultural awareness.

Marco Beltrami is an American composer best known for his stirring orchestral horror, action, and science fiction film scores, which include multiple collaborations with director/producer Wes Craven. A Long Island, New York native, Beltrami attended Brown University and the Yale School of Music, eventually studying with Luigi Nono in Italy and Jerry Goldsmith in Los Angeles.

Composer/keyboardist Mychael Danna was born in Winnepeg, Manitoba, and showed musical talent early in life. Singing and piano lessons defined his childhood and early adolescence, but a hand injury at age 14 ended his piano career. Danna switched over to synthesizer instead and concentrated on his composing skills. After earning a degree in composition from the University of Toronto and winning the prestigious Glenn Gould Composition Award his final year there, Danna began his film scoring career, which includes over 15 features and documentaries. Danna also served for a time as composer-in-residence for the McLaughlin Planetarium in Toronto.

'Mein Beethoven' is the logical next step for Dieter Ilg. His last album 'Parsifal' – a chamber-jazz interpretation of Richard Wagner's sacred festival work, which Focus magazine called a 'highlight in the Richard Wagner Year 2013' – closed with a whispered theme from Beethoven's Ninth ('Ode to Joy'), retitled 'Sehnsucht' (Longing) by Ilg. Now he has satisfied that yearning and recorded an entire album, 'Mein Beethoven', dedicated to this Olympian of German classical music, the most classical of all our composers, the one-time 'superstar of the music capital Vienna': Ludwig van Beethoven.

Saxophonist/composer Rudresh Mahanthappa examines the influence of Charlie Parker through a 21st century jazz lens. Featuring Matt Mitchell, François Moutin, Rudy Royston, and 20-year-old trumpet prodigy Adam O’Farrill. Through a series of critically acclaimed releases over the past decade, saxophonist and composer Rudresh Mahanthappa has explored the music of his South Indian heritage and translated it through the vocabulary of his own distinctive approach to modern jazz. On his latest release, Bird Calls, available February 27, 2015 on ACT, Mahanthappa trains his anthropological imagination on an equally important cultural influence: the music of Charlie Parker.

James Dean and Marlon Brando were the glamorous heroes of the silver screen in the 50s. Character actors, sex symbols, blasé eccentrics with a penchant for extravagance. Role models for the rebellious youth: the embodiment of cool. A new attitude towards life was spreading around the USA. 'The Birth of the Cool' also happened at the same time in the field of jazz, leading it to become the soundtrack of a generation. Miles Davis, John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck and Chet Baker (the 'James Dean of jazz') gave jazz a whole new direction: the search for a special 'cool' atmosphere based on tone and space in jazz, on substantial melodies with a laid-back approach designed for the collective. But this music was never cold-cool, it was merely played and conceived with what one might call a cool head.

On a per-capita basis, no other country in the world spawns more top-class jazz musicians than Norway. Jan Garbarek is the guiding star, but it was also the second generation born in the 60s that helped 'Nordic Jazz' to global notoriety: Nils Petter Molvær, Bugge Wesseltoft, Geir Lysne, Eivind Aarset and saxophonist Tore Brunborg. Although highly respected in the Norwegian jazz scene, Brunborg has until now been known internationally as a sideman, however this year, the 54 year-old brings out his own international release, his ACT debut 'Slow Snow'.

With only five and a half million inhabitants in an area as big as Germany, Finland is one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe. At the same time, the Finns are at the forefront of many fields - be it education, design or technology - and a good number of their European neighbours regard the North with some envy. The signs are pointing to a bright future for Finnish jazz as well: alongside pianist Iiro Rantala, Jukka Perko is considered to be one of the most important ambassadors of Finnish jazz. Born in 1968, he was hired to the “Dizzy Gillespie 70th anniversary big band” at the tender age of 20, with which he toured intensively through Europe and the USA before collaborating with legends of Bebop and Hardbop such as Red Rodney and McCoy Tyner and Scandinavian icons like Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen.

The programme is the star at “Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic”. The aim of the concert series, curated and produced by Siggi Loch, is to bring together different musicians in a way that has never been seen or heard before, with one thematic focus. On 13 February 2015, the eighth edition at the sold out Kammermusiksaal saw the spotlight focus on the accordion: From Musette in Paris to Schrammelmusik in Vienna, the Sinti and Roma music from the Balkans and the tango in Buenos Aires, the accordion is best loved in popular music, and a welcome companion in house and folk music: the 'common man's orchestra'. In the classical and jazz genres, however, it is all too often misunderstood and still an outsider in classical and jazz music, despite pioneering talents such as Astor Piazzolla and Richard Galliano.

Antonio de Cabezon is one of the great figures of the Spanish Renaissance. A well-known organist throughout the kingdom, he is often considered the first great Spanish composer for organ and keyboard repertoire. Official organist of the royal family, he was in the service of Charles V and accompanied King Philip II to England during his visit to Marie Tudor he was going to marry. His popularity has certainly allowed the preservation of a large part of his works piously protected, from generation to generation. His best-known pieces are the "mainos", one of the earliest forms of Western musical writing emphasizing counterpoint, at the root of what will become the fugue.

William Byrd’s keyboard music has always stood in the shadow of his vocal compositions. Drawing simultaneously on English and Italian Renaissance traditions, Byrd created a remarkable musical language that was flexible and entirely refined keyboard instruments of his time. Both keyboard instruments used on this recording are original pieces.