With 2022's Fifty, Grammy-winning vocal quartet the Manhattan Transfer celebrate their 50th birthday in illustrious fashion, collaborating with Germany's WDR Funkhausorchester. Founded in the 1960s by the late Tim Hauser, the Manhattan Transfer helped repopularize '40s-style vocal harmony jazz, swing, and traditional pop, all while incorporating contemporary pop and dance elements. Here, original members Janis Siegel and Alan Paul, along with longtime member Cheryl Bentyne and Trist Curless (who joined after Hauser's passing in 2014), look back on the group's albums and revisit some of their favorite songs.

Ringo Starr anchored the Beatles with a smile and a thundering backbeat, qualities he'd never lose during the group's heyday and has held onto throughout his long solo career. As a drummer, his unconventional parts were a defining compositional feature of the band's sound and his laid-back charisma endeared him to fans, especially during their early days. While John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and to a lesser extent, George Harrison, served as the band's frontmen, Starr enjoyed his share of the spotlight.

Fantastic and uplifting 2CD set produced in association with 'Yours' Magazine. 50 original vocal classics from the biggest legends of song from the last 60 years, including massive superstars such as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan, Chet Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and many more. Almost 80 minutes of Easy Listening magic per disc.

When Willie Nelson took the unexpected step of releasing Stardust in 1978, many predicted that the album of popular standards would severely derail the outlaw country singer's career. Confounding the critics, the disc became Nelson's best-selling effort, and spawned a whole subgenre of modern singers covering the classics. Nelson revisited the format with 1994's orchestral Healing Hands of Time and to varying degrees on several other records, but it wasn't until 2009's American Classic that the red-headed stranger delivered an album billed as the true follow-up to Stardust. Released on the venerable Blue Note label, the disc features guest appearances by superstar jazz singers Norah Jones and Diana Krall, but the focus is always placed squarely on Nelson's famously idiosyncratic vocals…

Released in early 1961, Sinatra's Swingin' Session!!! is one of the last albums the Chairman of the Board made for Capitol before leaving for Reprise. Like most of Sinatra's Capitol recordings, this one shows the singer at the peak of his vocal and interpretive abilities. Nelson Riddle's hard-swinging arrangements of standards like Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Moon," Irving Berlin's "Always," and Cole Porter's "You Do Something to Me" would leave most vocalists in the dust, but Sinatra masters them without ever seeming to break a sweat.

Sometimes it’s okay to judge a book by its cover. Depicting a down-and-out Frank Sinatra entrenched in his own private world while glamorous couples dance and swirl around him, oblivious to his presence and condition, the artwork to the aptly titled No One Cares testifies on behalf of the music and moods within the record’s grooves. One of the crooner’s top-flight ballads efforts, the 1959 Capitol effort again finds him pairing with sympathetic arranger Gordon Jenkins and inhabiting each note of every song.
Often viewed as the sister album to 1957’s Where Are You?, this third pairing of Sinatra and Jenkins yields slower tempos, more deliberate textures, and lonelier emotions. A profound sense of tragedy burrows into both the luscious strings and Sinatra’s timbre, laced with ache, wanderlust, and dismay…

Where Are You? is perfect in every sense. Recorded when Frank Sinatra was 42, the torch album finds him in impeccable voice and spirit. The dozen tracks fit together as a unified whole; it’s difficult to imagine one song missing, or another added. Arranger Gordon Jenkins reads Sinatra’s mind, affording him with lush arrangements that break hearts and underscore deliberation. Topping it off, Sinatra’s interpretive skills utterly astonish. Genres aside, this 1957 Capitol classic is inarguably one of the ten-best vocal pop efforts made in the 1950s.
While not as known as Only the Lonely, Where Are You? is its creative equivalent, a poignant masterwork on which Sinatra reflects on what could have been, ponders life’s deep questions, elicits sympathy via romantic distress, and does whatever it takes to get through the night…

15 complete original Sinatra albums and 43 bonus tracks on a limited edition 9CD box set. Legendary records from Frank Sinatra's golden age as a popular sophisticated vocalist released on Capitol with three on the singer's own label Reprise - with accompaniment from orchestras conducted by Nelson Riddle, Billy May and Johnny Mandel. Digitally remastered. Includes detailed booklet.

After hooking up with the Concord label in 1977, Rosemary Clooney had a renaissance. On this enjoyable set, she interprets ten of Irving Berlin's songs (including a couple of obscurities) with fine backup from a swinging septet that includes tenorman Scott Hamilton, cornetist Warren Vache, both Chris Flory and Ed Bickert on guitars and pianist John Oddo. Highlights include "Be Careful, It's My Heart," "Cheek to Cheek," "The Best Thing for You Would Be Me" and "What'll I Do."

This is one of two albums released by Capitol Records in anticipation of the December 2001 release of the remake of Ocean's Eleven, the 1960 Las Vegas caper film that utilized the talents of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack of entertainers. The original film had no formal soundtrack album, but there was music in the picture and, of course, Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. (along with comedian Joey Bishop and actor Peter Lawford) performed on-stage during the making of the movie. This compilation of studio recordings made in the 1950s and '60s draws not only from the Capitol archives but also from Reprise, for which all three singers began to record starting in the early '60s.

With his first holiday-themed album, 2020's The Pianoman at Christmas, Jamie Cullum strikes a festive balance between swinging traditional pop and heartfelt singer/songwriter introspection. It's a balance the singer and pianist has been perfecting ever since breaking through in the early 2000s, moving between urbane re-interpretations of jazz standards and his own lyrical pop/rock originals. It's also a formula that has helped him remain a Top 20 chart regular in the U.K. with albums like 2014's Interlude and 2019's Taller. The Pianoman at Christmas makes the most of these skills as Cullum brings all of his varied experience to bear on a set of original holiday songs.

Avid Jazz continues with its Five Classic Album series with a re-mastered 2CD release from Dakota Staton complete with original artwork, liner notes and personnel details. “Late Late Show”; “Dynamic!”; “More Than The Most” “ Crazy He Calls Me” and “Time To Swing”.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dakota Staton attended the famed George Westinghouse High School, (alumni include pianist Ahmed Jamal, possibly at the same time!) and went on to study music before entering the music scene through that tried and tested, and very tough route, of the night club circuit. From a young age she was travelling around the country appearing in night clubs from Detroit to Indianapolis to Cleveland and to St. Louis and to Harlem in New York, where she was discovered by Capitol Records producer Dave Cavanaugh…