For Lullaby, Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick draws on the quartet formation in a programme that includes some of his most exploratory and improvisatory qualities, with a cast of ECM familiars Kristjan Randalu and Ole Morten Vågan on piano and bass, and new arrival Hans Hulbækmo on drums. There’s a sense of abandon within these melodic songs, as the musicians flow smoothly between harmonies, collectively building momentum from within the forms. Eick’s immediately recognizable and soothing tone is often confronted by Randalu’s in turns lyrical and energetic keyboard-flights, soaring above a propulsive, always engaging rhythm section. The album was recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo.

Out May 3, ‘Funeral For Justice’ is the new album by Mdou Moctar. Recorded at the close of two years spent touring the globe following the release of 2021 breakout ‘Afrique Victime,’ it captures the Nigerien quartet in ferocious form. The music is louder, faster, and more wild. The guitar solos are feedback-scorched and the lyrics are passionately political. Nothing is held back or toned down.

aking Turns, recorded in New York’s Avatar Studio a decade ago, finds Danish guitarist Jakob Bro joined by a multi-generational cast of improvisers, highly distinctive players all. Lee Konitz, Andrew Cyrille, Bill Frisell, Jason Moran and Thomas Morgan lend their energies to a session that bypasses conventions of the “all-star” band and puts the emphasis on teamwork. Bro’s space-conscious music encourages fresh responses: an atmospheric hint, or a fragment of gentle melody, opening up new trails to explore. “My compositions are about catching a glimpse of a feeling, sketching it down and then unfolding it as we record”, said Jakob Bro at the time.

This superlative set was taped for FM broadcast soon after the release of Herbie Hancock s groundbreaking Man-Child album, and finds the great keyboardist backed by the awesomely tight combo of DeWayne Blackbyrd McKnight, Bennie Maupin, Paul Jackson, Bill Summers and Michael Clarke on a selection of his finest tracks, from Hancock s early classic Watermelon Man right up to the present.

Rekindling the familiarly flowing interplay with fellow travellers Thomas Morgan and João Lobo – the trio’s musical partnership goes back over a decade at this point –, on A New Day Italian pianist Giovanni Guidi moreover expands the group’s instrumental grasp with the introduction of American saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, who makes his ECM debut here. Not only is the ensemble scope widened; with Brandon Lewis in tow, new dialects and fresh perspectives are broached, and different instrumental paths taken, inspired by an overall heightened sense of communication and Lewis’s unmistakable, confident tone. Recorded at Studios La Buissonne, Southern France, in August 2023, the album was produced by Manfred Eicher.

French singer/songwriter Cyrille Aimée, a matchless interpreter of song, is back with a new album and a new story to tell 'à Fleur de Peau' presents Cyrille in her own words, with her own original compositions presented in her own arrangements, developed in close collaboration with New York multi-instrumentalist and producer Jake Sherman. The music on 'à Fleur de Peau' is the most original and personal of Cyrille's career. Drawing on her Dominican heritage with its cargo of African dance rhythms and Spanish folksongs, embracing the directness and simplicity of contemporary pop forms, singing tales straight from her own life, this is Cyrille as you have never heard her before. The album's genesis originates far from New York or her adopted New Orleans home, deep within the forests of Costa Rica and an astonishing tale of a creative rebirth.

In blazing form, the trumpeter from Tel Aviv responds to the turbulent spirit of a troubled time, leading his dedicated band through a five-part suite that runs the gamut of emotions, by turns hopeful, despairing, outraged and profoundly melancholic. The melodic directness of the concluding “The Seventh”, composed by Avishai Cohen’s teenaged daughter Amalia, offers consoling contrast to the suite’s intensity. In between, Cohen turns his attention to the haunting Adagio assai from Ravel’s G major piano concerto, which has long been a highlight of the quartet’s concerts. Ashes to Gold was recorded in November 2023, at Studios La Buissonne, in the South of France.

Genesis 1970-1975 is a box set of five studio albums by Genesis featuring Peter Gabriel. The 7CD box set includes newly remixed versions of the albums Trespass, Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The band's 1969 debut album, From Genesis to Revelation, was excluded because of the band losing the rights to it. The fifth pair of discs includes B-side songs, 3 rare songs from BBC Sessions in 1970 and the never-before-released Genesis Plays Jackson soundtrack.

Stevie Ray Vaughan and his band Double Trouble formed the most impressive blues act of the 1980s, which made Vaughan's death in a helicopter crash at the start of the '90s all the more tragic. He grew up in Dallas, the younger brother of Jimmie Vaughan (cofounder of the Fabulous Thunderbirds). Stevie began playing in clubs at 12, and by 17 had dropped out of high school and moved to Austin. There followed years of struggling until April 23, 1982, when Vaughan and his group, Double Trouble, played a private audition for the Rolling Stones in New York. The gig led to an invitation to appear at the Montreux Jazz Festival, at which Vaughan was seen by David Bowie, who hired him to play guitar on his Let's Dance album, and Jackson Browne, who offered the free use of his recording studio. Vaughan took up that offer after being signed by legendary talent scout John Hammond to Epic, recording his debut album, Texas Flood, in the fall of 1982. ..

This fascinating survey of the Russian (and Polish!) piano concerto includes the masterworks of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov - beloved examples at the pinnacle of both Russian music and the piano concerto genre - along with more- and lesser-known yet all eminently worthy works by composers from both Imperial and Soviet Russia and those by Paderewski, Scharwenka and Moszkowski, who were born in what today is Poland. Though the piano concerto is now inextricably linked in modern minds to the Russian repertoire, the area's isolation meant that it would take some time for the genre to take hold there, but that it would grow into a unique, characteristic and varied expression. Apart from the jaw-dropping virtuosity and orchestral brilliance of these works, they share that common Slavonic flavor, an undefinable mixture of melancholy and passion, whether smoldering or blazing. The recordings on this release date from between 1964 and 2016.

The live recording of Elias (Elijah) is the first historic release from the archive on the Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings label. It is historic in many respects, not only with regard to the almost four decades which have passed since 4 July 1984, but most of all because it brings together a phenomenal ensemble that shaped an entire era at the National Theatre in Munich within the genres of opera, lieder and symphonic music – thus representing something of a dream team of classical music at that time.