Johnny Cash is a country music icon. His best period, of course, was probably on the Columbia label. This one picks up after he left Columbia in 1986 and signed with Mercury. Still, this isn't a bad set at all. This is another great disc in UMG's 20th Century Masters series. If your a huge Johnny Cash fan like I am, than this is a welcome member to your Cash collection. But, if your new or just a casual fan to Cash's music, buy this along with Sony's '16 Biggest Hits' and you are off to a great start.

Brilliant playing and great use of all of the marvelous tones an organ can produce. Tends to use the reed stops more which I know turns away some people but they add some brilliant color to the pieces. If you like Hindemith then you'll love this cd and Distler.

Ensemble 415 is a chamber ensemble devoted largely to the performance of Baroque music on period instruments. The numerical reference in the group's name derives from the pitch used for tuning instruments in the Baroque era. In performing chamber music, Ensemble 415 consists of just a few players, but for larger compositions, the number expands to a minimum of 13 and can reach up to as high as 40 performers. The ensemble's repertory has been broad over the years, taking in many Baroque standards by J.S. Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel, as well as lesser known fare by Muffat and others.

Quincy Jones' edition of Universal's 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection is hardly a comprehensive overview of Jones' career – that, as they say, would take a box set – but it does narrow in on the chart hits he had for A&M during the '70s and early '80s. Pretty much all of his pop crossovers of that era – outside of "'Roots' Medley," "Ai No Corrida," and "Money Runner," a theme song for the movie of the same name, released on Reprise – are here, which means this is very heavy on jazzy funk and jazzy quiet storm.

The Nina Simone entry in Universal Music's discount-priced best-of series 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection draws nine tracks from Simone's popular Philips Records albums of the mid-'60s, plus two tracks from her live album Let It Be Me, released by Verve Records in 1987. Several of Simone's most frequent concert selections and signature songs are included, among them a live take of "I Loves You Porgy," "Mississippi Goddam," "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," and "The Other Woman." With a running time under 40 minutes and limited to only two of the labels for which Simone recorded, this is hardly a comprehensive compilation of her work. But it is a reasonable sampler at a reasonable price.

The Secret Language of Birds (2000). The Secret Language of Birds is Ian Anderson's third solo album, but the first to specifically highlight his melodic skill and guitar prowess on a set of folk-inspired songs. His first solo album, 1983's Walk into Light, was marred by its full embrace of sterile '80s production in lieu of rusticity. While his second effort, 1995's Divinities, was a move in the right direction and a sonic precursor to the set at hand, it still was held back by its conscious decision to downplay Anderson's obvious acoustic heritage for a more classical bent. But sometimes the obvious is what works best, and Jethro Tull fans were pleased to learn that Anderson's third release finally embraced his classic sound. Just like Tull's excellent Roots to Branches, this one has a decided ethnic flair, running the gamut from Indian to Russian to Celtic…

Though in 1964 some purists considered Reflections to be certain evidence that Stan Getz had sold out and abandoned "real jazz" completely, the album is actually, while perhaps not a masterpiece, an artful and intriguing sidebar to the tenor saxophonist's now celebrated bossa nova period. Getz was always a sublimely smooth and lyrical player who had already recorded in an orchestral setting on the groundbreaking Focus, and had a number one pop hit with Jazz Samba. It was only natural, then, that he would want to combine the two concepts. Although Reflections does at times bear the slight stench of easy listening (sweeping strings, a Lawrence Welk-like vocal chorus), it's definitely not elevator music. Getz is in as fine form as ever, and the restrictive pop-based song structures challenge him to use his creative faculties in interesting ways…

Whoever thought that the surface obsession of glam rock never met the loopy idealism of the hippie movement – at least in the musical realm – has obviously never heard the appropriately titled The Impossible Dream. Recorded, again, appropriately, as the Age of Aquarius was in full transition to the age of the Spiders From Mars and, later, the me decade, The Impossible Dream manages to capture that cultural DMZ in an operatic blast of pub rock-based pomp without circumstance. Harvey is the bacchanalian ringleader, marshalling the Sensational Alex Harvey Band's considerable, flexible resources to the task at hand and providing a damn good listen in the process.

Following on from their legendary and award winning (MOJO magazine compilation of the year) "A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble (Exploding In Your Mind)" DJ series, The Amorphous Androgynous have started a parallel series called Monstrou Bubble Soundtracks which aims to explore groovy sub genres of the MPB concept, but rather than DJ/compile, they write and produce all the material themselves in a classic soundtrack vein. The first one is The Cartel which is a study of psychsploitation (where psychedelia meets blaxploitation) and traces the lineage from Lalo Schifrin, Quincy Jones, Curtis Mayfield, John Barry, Ennio Morricone through to Oceans 12.
Aided and abetted by a stellar cast including Noel Gallagher himself on bass and guitar plus Raven Bush (of fast upcoming Canterbury folk psych band Syd Arthur) on violin plus the Amorphous Androgynous themselves…

Here are two lovely Norwegian words that typify this tremendously pleasing album. Samspill and Felleskap.

Robert Schumann's late music has undergone a revival, with its main traits of monothematicism, dense, close motivic work, and a certain spiky unpredictability having been redefined from faults into virtues. A good way, perhaps, to think about works like these three violin sonatas is that the young Brahms, visiting the Schumann household and mooning over the unavailable Clara, might easily have heard them and been directly influenced by them. Indeed, these pieces have the kind of long-range connections you find in Brahms, combined with a somewhat gnarly level of local detail, without the memorable tunes of Schumann's earlier works.