"The First Time Ever (I Saw Your Face)" is an album by American pop singer Johnny Mathis that was released on May 10, 1972, by Columbia Records and continues in the tradition set by his recent studio releases of covering mostly current chart hits. It made its first appearance on Billboard magazine's Top LP's & Tapes chart in the issue dated June 10, 1972, and remained there for 15 weeks, peaking at #71.

The Sablé festival, held annually in Sablé-sur-Sarthe in France, has its own recording concern that it uses primarily to expose young early music artists and to support the most interesting of their projects; the Zig-Zag Territoires label provides an outlet for this endeavor. Here is a wholly worthy enterprise: the group Gli Incogniti – led by the fabulous young violinist Amandine Beyer – in a program drawn from various works of mysterious late seventeenth-century violinist Nicola Matteis, its title, False Consonances of Melancholy, fashioned after one of his publications, but not limited to its contents.

“Perhaps my most personal project to date,” is how American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato describes In War and Peace: Harmony through Music. Her ambitions for this collection of arias from Baroque operas are substantial. Surrounded as we are by instability, she hopes it will help us find an answer to a vitally important question: “In the midst of chaos, how do you find peace?”

Gould’s sole collaboration with Leopold Stokowski, to whom he devoted a large radio portrait for the CBC in 1971. This musical “summit meeting” between the thirty-four-year-old Canadian and a maestro nearly half a century his senior caused yet another dream to come true: Gould’s first encounter with his revered Barbra Streisand, who was recording her latest album next door …

“One of the most important voices of our time,” is how the young French mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa is described by Marc Minkowski, the distinguished conductor for her debut album, Oh, Boy! Comprising arias for young male characters who are sung by a woman – the so-called ‘trouser roles’ – it offers an alluring programme of Mozart, Chabrier, Gluck, Gounod, Hahn, Massenet, Meyerbeer, Offenbach and Thomas. Crebassa – praised by Le Monde for her “incredibly beautiful timbre and transcendent presence” – shows why she has already made an impact at the Paris Opéra, La Scala, Milan, the Berlin Staatsoper and the Salzburg Festival.

A legend in his lifetime for his interpretations of Beethoven, Herbert von Karajan recorded a large swathe of the composer's oeuvre. Here, Karajan conducts the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, with violin soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter.

Pianist Abdullah Ibrahim was still known as "Dollar Brand" when he recorded this solo piano set for ECM; it has been reissued on CD under his original name. The continuous live performance (which is under 39 minutes) explores eight of Ibrahim's originals…Ibrahim was still in the process of finding his own sound at the time, although his improvisations (which use repetition and vamps effectively) have their interesting moments. Still, Ibrahim's later work is more significant. ~ by Scott Yanow

Over the course of the past three decades alto saxophonist and composer Jim Snidero has been constantly pushing himself to explore new territories and expand his outlook. In 1989, his extraordinary album Blue Afternoon made its way into The Penguin Jazz Guide: The History of the Music in the 1001 Best Albums. Later on he made his mark in the sax-with-strings department, not only playing at the top of his game, but also composing and arranging all of the music on the project. Most recently he’s impressed more than a few listeners with a spate of fine albums on Savant.

Break Loose, the first album of the band founded in 2014 Marie Mokati to last no stylistic boundaries. Time heard a gentle folk melody, then an experimental rock song and everything fearlessly about to blow up conventions and reinvent. One common thread that runs through continuously, is the honesty of the story, which tells the singer, bandleader and composer Marie Daniels from her life and from observations.