So busy was Allen Toussaint in the wake of his late-2000s revival, he didn't wind up entering a recording studio to begin work on a sequel to his 2009 jazz album, The Bright Mississippi, until 2013 (2013's Songbook consisted of live recordings from 2009). A few solo sessions happened that year, followed by a round with a band and guests in October 2015 and then he died a few weeks later, passing away in Madrid, Spain while on tour. Producer Joe Henry, who helmed The Bright Mississippi, pulled together American Tunes for a posthumous release in the summer of 2016. Tonally, American Tunes isn't much different from its predecessor, yet its elegiac elegance doesn't come from a place of despair: it's a wistful look back at his past and home.

Marshalling orchestral and choral forces under the direction of Tonu Kaljuste, this new Arvo Part album, produced by Manfred Eicher and realized, like all Part’s ECM discs, with the composer’s participation, is a major event. Sacred music predominates, by turns monumentally powerful and tenderly fragile.

One of the most probing singer/songwriters of his generation, Ray LaMontagne achieves a cosmically sublime state on Ouroboros. Lined with imagery that feels drawn from riddle-like dreams, the freely flowing song cycle passes through ethereal jazz folk (“Homecoming”), fuzzily iridescent psychedelia (“While It Still Beats”) and radioactive blues (“Hey, No Pressure”). The tunes are spare, often consisting of just LaMontagne’s raspy whisper laid over standard rock instrumentation. Yet the way producer Jim James wraps them in echo-laden atmosphere and spacey effects lends the music a spellbinding sense of vastness.

The third studio meeting in nearly 17 years between Medeski, Martin & Wood and guitarist John Scofield has no easy referent to their earlier recordings – purposely. This quartet sounds like a real band on Juice, which is a mixed blessing. The positive aspect is that this longtime collaboration creates near instinctive communication. This is a much more inside date, though the rhythmic interplay between bassist Chris Wood and drummer Billy Martin is outstanding throughout.

Tommy Smith, the great Scottish saxophonist, composer, bandleader and educator, studied classical orchestration in the 1990s, and has played in plenty of challenging jazz/classical settings. But Modern Jacobite is his most ambitious journey yet, centred on an intricately woven three-movement symphonic work inspired by the Jacobite uprisings; it is bookended by a rapturous tenor-sax improvisation on Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise, and by Chick Corea’s famous Children’s Songs interleaved with Smith’s own Bairn’s Songs as personal variations on the same theme. The Jacobite pieces embrace violent, cinematic soundscapes for slewing brass and thundering percussion; deep cello themes that segue into pulsating tenor-sax ruminations; Scottish folk dances that become pipe-toned tenor jigs.

In 1971 George Duke, having just recently done his time with the Mothers of Invention, was engaged by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet. Beginning in April of that year, Duke made two recordings over a short timespan that on their release in 1973 as a double LP (against the desire of the artists, by the way), would be a major statement.

Critically-acclaimed international megastar Bruno Mars has unveiled his first piece of solo music in nearly four years. Written and produced by Shampoo Press & Curl, "24K Magic" (pronounced twenty-four karat magic) sees Bruno bringing the bounce to his newest single. The multi-GRAMMY-winning Mars has also announced his highly-anticipated third studio album - also dubbed 24K Magic - will arrive everywhere November 18th.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Perlman! Warner Classics is proud to celebrate Itzhak Perlman’s 70th birthday with several releases. Itzhak is adored by audiences around the world and is a musician whose powerful but sympathetic artistic personality provides a model for the players who have followed him. The center piece is the 77 cd box set Itzhak Perlman: The Complete Warner Recordings.

In June 2015, superstar tenor Jonas Kaufmann walked onto the stage of La Scala in Milan to perform a concert of Puccini arias. The concert made national news in Italy with the audience demanding five encores and a forty minute standing ovation.