A superb guitarist and dynamic live performer, Mark Selby has shared the stage with B.B. King, Jeff Beck, John Fogerty, Robert Cray, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Delbert McLinton, John Hiatt, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Collective Soul, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Levon Helm, Junior Brown, and many more. Selby has appeared on notable radio and television music programming including World Cafe, Mountain Stage, Woodsongs and Rockpalast (Germany), and continues to perform with his stellar backup band, as an acoustic solo artist, and in a duo with his wife and frequent collaborator, Tia Sillers.

The Lark Quartet brings its stellar 34 year career to a close with this celebratory album. On it, the Lark Quartet offers premiere recordings of works by John Harbison, Kenji Bunch, Anna Weesner and Andrew Waggoner, all composed for this occasion. Assisting Lark Quartet are Yousif Sheronick, percussion (Bunch), Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet (Weesner) and the Lark's four founding members (Waggoner).

The album combines the group’s original vocal and instrumental tracks from their 100-million-selling catalogue with new orchestral arrangements by Richard Carpenter, conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios in London.

Combs is equally charismatic delivering more sensitive songs, like the romantic ballad “Nothing Like You” and “Does to Me,” a collaboration with Eric Church that takes pride in down-to-earth sincerity. In "New Every Day" and "Every Little Bit Helps," Combs brings satisfyingly agile exertion to hooks that would humble a lesser singer. He continued his partnership with producer Scott Moffatt and core co-writer Ray Fulcher on this 17-song set, re-energizing both muscular and supple sounds learned from a couple of generations of hard country predecessors.

As one of the most influential bass players in heavy metal, it should come as no surprise that Iron Maiden's Steve Harris' instantly recognizable galloping eighth notes ride high in the mix on his first ever solo outing. British Lion, which was originally the name of the band that Harris and some non-Maiden mates formed in the early '90s to tear through some sword and sorcery-less, dive bar-ready hard rock in the vein of UFO, Deep Purple, and the Scorpions, sounds exactly like its influences would suggest. Toss in a little Rainbow, Whitesnake, Judas Priest, and a tiny smattering of his meal-ticket band and you've got a serviceable slab of unpretentious yet utterly forgettable '80s retro-metal that adheres to every cliché in the book – which is forgivable, as it was brought into this world by one of that book's authors.

Celebrating one of the most revered conductors of the 20th century, this series was originally released to commemorate Herbert von Karajan’s 100th birthday in 2008. Using innovate technology to recreate the original concert acoustics, the audio for these DVDs has been re-recorded at the Philharmonic Hall in Berlin and the Musikverein in Vienna, Karajan’s two favourite concert venues, to create re-mastered surround-sound versions of these classic performances. With each DVD featuring von Karajan conducting either the Berlin Philharmonic or Vienna Philharmonic orchestras, two of the highest regarded orchestras in the world, this series really does marry the greatest music, the highest calibre performers, and the best possible audio-visual presentation.

Barbara Cook, a Broadway star in the 1950s and '60s and one of the major cabaret singers since the '70s, was nearing 80 when she recorded No One Is Alone. Her very clear and friendly voice, however, could easily pass for someone's half her age. Accompanied by a drumless rhythm section, she performs 15 songs (including a pair of two-song medleys) that debuted in Broadway shows. Her voice is strong, highly expressive and unwavering, doing justice to the lyrics and the songwriters' original conceptions without adding that much of her own personality. She presents the songs as if they were being sung on Broadway, interpreting them very straight like the best cabaret singers, swinging lightly when it is called for and sticking to the words and the melodies. A slight change of pace is offered on the final selection, "Make Our Garden Grow," which has her joined by the 16-voice "Virtuoso Singers." Barbara Cook's fans will want No One Is Alone, a fine recital by the apparently ageless singer. ~ AllMusic Review by Scott Yanow

Gidon Kremer and Valery Afanassiev enter a hotly contested area with this new release of works for violin and piano by Schubert, and they emerge as clear leaders in the field. All of their rivals do, of course, offer fine, if not always totally sympathetic accounts of these works, but with the exception of Isaac Stern and Daniel Barenboim, none can approach the Russian duo in terms of their stylistic awareness and affinity with the hidden aspects of the Schubertian genre.

Jenny Bergquist har alltid trott att Weeping Willows-sångaren är kapabel till att greja allt. Hon tvingas inse att det kanske inte helt stämmer.

Scepter/Wand and Musicor/Dynamo records were quintessential New York soul labels. Their common link was Luther Dixon, who set Scepter on the right road with the Shirelles and followed up with success for Tommy Hunt, Chuck Jackson and Maxine Brown. He split for Musicor in 1966 where he got the Platters, Tommy Hunt and Inez & Charlie Foxx back into the charts. Scepter/Wand had the bigger black music catalogue and dominates this compilation. It is the third in the recent Manhattan Soul series: across-the-board soul covering the 60s and the first half of the 70s.

Odisea finds Ozuna on a late-night creep, laying down a gently bumping soundtrack for after-parties around the globe. It’s a collection of slow jams that glide by like dreamy R&B hits, except these beats are built from the raw throb of Latin trap (“Una Flor”) and the rattling thump of reggaeton (“Pide Lo Que Tú Quieras”). Ozuna drops softly murmured soul hooks and bars that bristle with bad-boy charm, all while the synths twinkle and the drums patter like a music box’s lullaby.

Busoni's transcriptions of Bach have long been one of the mainstays of the piano repertoire. Bach himself worshipped the music of the Danish- (or Swedish-) born Dieterich Buxtehude (16371707), famously walking 250 miles to Lübeck to hear him play. The Liszt student August Stradal (18601930) obviously shared that admiration, transcribing ten of Buxtehudes most imposing organ works for piano, thus creating alongside Bach-Busoni a corpus of grandiose and virtuoso Baroque music for the modern concert grand that has somehow remained almost entirely unknown. Meilin Ai studied for her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in piano performance with Joseph Banowetz at the University of North Texas and is now a full-time faculty member of the Conservatory of Music of the Sichuan Normal University in China.

I believe that true poetry, worthy of lifelong dedication and utmost attention, of being impatiently awaited and painfully missed is impossible except when it encounters the world of that imagination which was once called spirit, wrote in his essay The Great Poets Are Gone Adam Zagajewski (himself a great poet). The same is true of music, and most certainly of the song genre, which inhabits the world of the imagination and is by nature fragile and evanescent. Each of the composers represented on this album entered that world of true music at least for a moment, and each did so in his own special way. A common ground is not to be sought, since it would be too great a simplification and far removed from the transient nature of songs. All we can do is point to some individual threads that relate those compositions to one another: their exoticism (the fascination with the Orient in Ravel and Szymanowski), oneiric mood (except perhaps for Obradors), unreal and fabulous character, gentleness, but also a nocturnal kind of uncertainty, and, last but not least, a sense of transience, which is an aspect of human life still unfathomed and therefore seemingly absurd…

Newly remastered from the original L'Oiseau Lyre tapes, a little-known Bach recording in the true French style. The modern phenomenon of the Cello Suites as a staple of any record collection may be laid at the feet of the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, whose HMV recording, released in 1939, belatedly placed the set alongside The Well-Tempered Clavier and the solo violin works as a cornerstone of Bach's instrumental output in the consciousness of listeners who could not play a note of his music. Another two decades elapsed before a new generation of cellists took up the mantle of Casals in the LP era. Among their select number was Jean-Max Clément, whose 1958 studio recording for L'Oiseau Lyre was released two years later. By then he had made a notable concerto appearance in London with Sir Thomas Beecham: 'His tone was very small indeed,' reported The Times, 'but it was of such rare beauty and refinement that we could have listened to him all night.'

Michael Jay Feinstein (born September 7, 1956) is an American singer, pianist, and music revivalist. He is an interpreter of and an anthropologist and archivist for the repertoire known as the Great American Songbook. In 1988 he won a Drama Desk Special Award for celebrating American musical theatre songs. Feinstein is also a multi-platinum-selling, five-time Grammy-nominated recording artist. He currently serves as Artistic Director for The Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel, Indiana.