Produced by Duke Robillard and utilizing his band as the backing unit, Cool Blues Walk is tightly focused from note one, making a marvelous framework for "The Chief" to do exactly what he does best. With the exception of the covers "Sen-Say-Shun," "Stranded," and "I Just Want to Make Love to You," Eddy Clearwater wrote every tune aboard in his usual wide range of styles from the rocking "Very Good Condition" to the country-ish "Nashville Road" to the shuffling "Boppin' at the Top of the Rock." Clearwater continues to surprise with a rare appearance playing piano and singing the decidedly non-blues-like ballad "I Love You" which also features Marilyn Mair and Mark Davis adding mandocello and mandola to this distinctive tune…

Thirteen years into their tenure, the Dave Brubeck Quartet was still able to mine the creative vein for new means of expression. Despite the hits and popularity on college campuses, or perhaps because of it, Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Eugene Wright, and Joe Morello composed a restless band with a distinctive sound. These eight tracks, all based on a tour of Japan the year before, were, in a sense, Brubeck fulfilling a dictum from his teacher, the French composer Darius Milhaud, who exhorted him to "travel the world and keep your ears open." The sketches Brubeck and Desmond created all invoke the East, particularly the folk melodies of Japan directly, while still managing to use the Debussian impressionistic approach to jazz that kept them riding the charts and creating a body of music that, while playing into the exotica craze of the moment, was still jazz composed and played with integrity…

Julian Jay Savarin was born on the exotic island of Dominica, being of British origin, and moved to London in 1962. There he found the appropriate enviroment to reveal his talents as an organist and composer.He was in love with sci-fi stories and wrote some sort of a Rock Opera, based on an Atlantis-like lost civilization. He formed his personal band Julian's Treatment in 1970.
"A Time Before This" is a charming British Prog/Psychedelic Rock gem, where Savarin's mood for cosmic, jamming and atmospheric music eventually surfaces via the emerging progressive scenery, as the album is dominated by his work on Hammond organ and his tendency towards sinister Marsupilami-like psych manifests and The Nice-inspired semi-Classical piano and organ smashing…

'Speak Now (Taylor's Version)' is the third re-recorded album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on July 7th 2023. It is a re-recording of Swift's third studio album, 'Speak Now' (2010), and follows her 2021 re-recorded albums, 'Fearless (Taylor's Version)' and 'Red (Taylor's Version)'. The re-recording is a part of Swift's counteraction to her 2019 masters dispute. It features collaborations with American rock acts Fall Out Boy and Hayley Williams. The CD includes 22 songs, including 6 previously unreleased songs from the vault.

Electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze has released Silhouettes, his first album of new music in 5 years. “In the wake of your 70th birthday, you naturally find yourself looking back at the past,” notes Schulze. “So the result is a reorientation, a renewed awareness of what is really important.” With this album, Schulze says that he has tried to reduce his music to its essential elements. “No great distractions, nothing to force your attention in a certain direction, no major effects or gimmicks, no frills or dominant rhythms,” he explains. “ It was important to me to paint the pictures in the depth of the space, the sonic fields of tension and atmosphere.”

The Venetian poet Antonio Conti received from Marcello the commission for a dramatic text that allows a quick succession of events, rather than the usual succession of recitative and arias.
Cassandra plunges us into Homer’s Trojan War, with its namesake prophetess who has the gift of predicting the future, but whom no one believes. The many [25] extant copies of this cantata, here given its world première recording, testify to the impact it had in its own time.

Gustavo Diaz-Jerez is one of the leading composers and pianists in Spain. His compositional output spans all genres, from solo works to opera. His works have been premiered by prestigious ensembles and orchestras. His orchestral work Ymarxa, commissioned by the XXVII Canary Islands Music Festival, was premiered by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Charles Dutoit. In 2018, his first opera was premiered, La casa imaginaria. This album represents the culmination of more than ten years of compositional work. A unique endeavour in the history of music in the Canary Islands, it comprises seven symphonic poems almost two and a half hours of music which evoke the landscapes and natural beauty of the Canaries.

The Squarcialupi Codex is an extensive, lavishly decorated manuscript of the Italian Trecento and was compiled around 1410. The manuscript contains works by twelve composers – including Francesco Landini, Giovanni da Cascia, Jacopo da Bologna, and Lorenzo da Firenze – and presents them in chronological order.

In her first chamber music album Claire Huangci- together with Solenne Païdassi, violin Adrien Boisseau, viola and Tristan Cornut, cello- devotes herself to two works by Maurice Ravel and Ernest Chausson. As the debut album of Trio Machiavelli and Adrien Bosseau as support for Chausson, this album is a calling card that is worth seeing. Claire Huangci, the young American pianist of Chinese descent and 2018 Geza Anda Competition first prize and Mozart prize winner, has succeeded in establishing herself as a highly respected artist, captivating audiences with her "radiant virtuosity, artistic sensitivity, keen interactive sense and subtle auditory dramaturgy" (Salzburger Nachrichten). Her unusually diverse repertoire, in which she also takes up rarely performed works, is illustrative of her remarkable versatility.

Hungarian-born pianist Klára Würtz has amassed an astounding catalogue of recordings for Brilliant Classics, celebrated this year (a milestone birthday year for Klára) with this rich set of piano solos, song and chamber music collaborations, and concertante outings.

Following his first successful release featuring the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Concerto for Violin, Piano and Strings by the Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin, Frank Dupree presents a selection of the little-known master's works for solo piano, performed as originally written, while bassist Jakob Krupp and drummer Obi Jenne improvise around him. There is surely no better example of jazz poured so expertly into a classical mould.