There is an energy that a strong family dynamic can stir. A parent viewing the world through their children’s eyes generates a wide spectrum of feelings. It is with his family as a source of strength that bassist and composer Joe Martin created the music for his new recording, Étoilée. Martin, himself a product of a musical upbringing, lives with his Parisian-born wife in Brooklyn where they have been raising their young Franco-American family of two sons and a young girl, whose middle name Étoile inspired the name of the recording.

Jazz is a repertory music much like most of the classical canon and similar to classical music’s greats, e.g. Beethoven and Stockhausen, the names of the genre’s pen masters are instantly recognizable. From Ellington and Monk to Silver and Braxton, compositional genius comes in many forms in jazz.

Hailed by veteran jazz journalist Dan Ouellette as “a vital young artist who is delivering a singular style of music steeped in a variety of idioms,” composer and bandleader Miho Hazama leads her boundlessly creative 13-piece m_unit in its third triumphant offering, Dancing in Nowhere. “Her music is complex, teeming with unexpected twists and jolting turns as well as pockets of frenzy that lead into wonder,” remarked Ouellette, assessing a growing body of work that includes the 2013 m_unit debut Journey to Journey and the 2015 follow-up Time River.

An aspect of the jazz music business that tends to be ignored is touring. There are only so many venues with budgets and booking agents. Artists who manage to find both are either popular sensations or lucky, especially in a country as spread out and diverse as the United States. It takes a lot of motivation, courage and a devil-may-care attitude to strike out on the road on your own. Brass wizard John Raymond felt that the investment he and his Real Feels bandmates had put into their music should be heard by a larger audience, no matter the cost.

ERASURE (Andy Bell and Vince Clarke) will release World Be Live - a 24-track live album recorded in London in February during the band's World Be Gone tour on 6 July 2018. World Be Live completes a trilogy of albums that began in 2017 with the release of Erasure's seventeenth studio album World Be Gone, and continued with World Beyond, their post-classical reworking of the songs from World Be Gone recorded in collaboration with Echo Collective and released in March this year.

What can be encompassed in music within 60 minutes? Africa, Japan, Germany. London, Vienna,the Balkans … Four virtuoso recorder players, i Frautisti, will guide you through this one-hour odyssey. Since their getting together in 2009 at the Royal College of Music in London, the female ensemble have given premieres of a number of pieces, directly written for them.

The birth of this cd is due to the desire of Florian Wielgosik, solo tuba of the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra, to make the tuba better known. Indeed, in most people's minds, this instrument occupies a role reduced either to the brass band or to limited interventions within the framework of a symphony orchestra. Florian Wielgosik therefore wanted to give an impression, through a choice of very diverse composers and works (German, Polish, Argentinean, French), of some of the music in which the tuba can express itself differently from that of the Solo tuba, the one in front, but more as a participant in chamber music, more intimate and mixed with the others in a humble and fertile exchange. All this is found in this testimony he offers us.

John Knowles Paine was the first American-born composer to earn widespread recognition for his large scale symphonic works. But his smaller-scale compositions- in particular his beautifully crafted piano pieces- have been largely forgotten. With this albums lovely and wondrously performed music, the acclaimed pianist Christopher Atzinger seeks to redress such unjustified neglect. Being the eldest of the fabled Boston Six band of composers, Paine was also the first to receive advanced training in Europe. Some have called him the finest American composer of his time. And, as the nations first American-born music professor, the curriculum he developed at Harvard was adopted by academic music departments across the country and has profoundly influenced advanced American musical training ever since.

That Vienna is one of the capitals (if not THE capital) of music is undisputed. With this recording, Elena Gaponenko has dedicated an entire album to the city on the Danube and the composers who have worked there. Really interesting is the time frame that these works originate from, they span exactly 25 years, from 1815–1840. In her introduction to this CD Elena Gaponenko writes: “This recording should honour this enchantingly beautiful city as a great guardian of culture, as it has brought so many musical icons together and allowed them to develop creatively.”

Dmitry Kabalevsky found his mature style and achieved international success with his first opera Colas Breugnon, the overture of which was soon picked up as an orchestral showpiece in the West. The Second Symphony was likewise championed by conductors such as Arturo Toscanini, its bittersweet sense of drama and lyricism comparable with Prokofiev. Dedicated to the 15th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the First Symphony illustrates progress from oppression to liberation, while the later Pathetique Overture is a rousing and highly effective reminder of Kabalevsky’s skill in orchestration.

This CD sketches a portrait of the musical reality of the British Isles during the first half of the 18th century. The eight concerti grossi in this programme have been chosen for the features they possess in common, a primordial position being accorded to the work of Francesco Scarlatti. These are pieces of Italian origin in sonata form; the concerto grosso being the émigré of this programme.

12 Stories, the debut album from Grammy and CMA-nominated singer-songwriter Brandy Clark. Teaming up with producer Dave Brainard (Jerrod Niemann, Ray Scott), Brandy used her writing gift and distinctly country voice to craft 12 Stories, a record that has touched everyone lucky enough to hear it.