This is one of Ella Fitzgerald's most enjoyable recordings from her later years. With pianist Tommy Flanagan, guitarist Joe Pass, bassist Keter Betts, and drummer Bobby Durham serving as a backup group (not a bad band), she swings everything from "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "It Don't Mean a Thing" to "Lemon Drop" and even Carole King's "You've Got a Friend." Her ballad interpretations are only topped by her scatting talents. This set serves as a perfect introduction to the mature Ella Fitzgerald.

Limited 29 disc (28 CDs + DVD) box. As a tribute to the one and only Dutch Blues legend Harry Muskee, 2016 will see the release of Alles Uit Grolloo. The box set contains all the original studio albums by Cuby + Blizzards plus the official live albums and all other projects of Muskee. Especially for this release the first albums are mastered in their mono versions. Even releases that have long been deleted, such as Kid Blue, Old Times Good Times, Forgotten Tapes, Afscheidsconcert and Red, White & Blue, are present here. Next to the 27 albums the box set contains a disc with rarities and a DVD with the Classic Albums documentary on the legendary "Groeten Uit Grollo" album.

This captures over an hour's worth of John Zorn's search for the improvised song form. Several lineups from 1983 are documented here. The first eight tracks feature Zorn with Christian Marclay spinning and Peter Blegvad speaking. The text is unremarkable (for example, Honey-Cab's "…tell her everything I know/ In ink as black as carbon/ On paper white as snow"), but Blegvad's sonorous delivery works well with the chaos that the other two musicians spit and spin out, combining into tides of noisy mischief.

Transformation: Music by Roger Smalley is a full-length album, released on CD, by Tall Poppies Records in late 2017, of previously unrecorded works for percussion, piano and electronics by composer and senior honorary research fellow at the UWA Conservatorium of Music, Roger Smalley (1943-2015).

Cedar Walton is a great jazz master whose bop-based style has influenced younger pianists over many decades. Also known for his great composing, this time Walton chose to do, for Venus Records, a songbook by legendary film composer Victor Young. Aided superby by super-bassist Buster Williams and – a sharp drummer of a younger generation, Walton plays Young's beautiful songs with relaxed elegance and modern jazz flair.

Breakup albums have their own top shelf in the popular music canon, from Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks to Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak. Staying-together albums, on the other hand, are more rare and more difficult to execute. Maybe that's because overcoming hardship and working through differences require diligence and daily renewals of faith, more subtle and internally directed practices than the emotional release separation allows. On her fourth album (and third with her stalwart band, The Party Line), Nora Jane Struthers walks listeners through the first year of her marriage to her bandmate, multi-instrumentalist Joe Overton. She points to every rock and buried tree root, and shows how mutual care and openness got the couple to the first summit on their path.

Mac Rebennack, who would gain fame under the pseudonym Dr. John, had become a valued composer, as well as a skilled keybordist and guitarist by his late teens. He played with bands in his home ity of New Orleans, cooking up a gumbo of rhythm & blues, boogie, and rock & roll peppered with unleashed horns and a Creole flavor. His work was influenced greatly by pianist/songwriter Professor Longhair, who is regarded as a trailblazing pioneer of New Orleans-style R&B.

LP – aka Laura Pergolizzi – is taking the one-country-at-a-time approach to world domination. After a string of record deals that yielded very little by the way of actual releases, the US singer-songwriter penned her latest track Lost On You during a time she describes as “one of her lowest points”. Fast-forward 18 months, and the song has topped the charts in 15 countries across Europe.

There are some great mixes of "Rain"; two mixes of "In My Arms" and a fantastic remix of an Erasure classic "Sometimes". Also you get 3 live tracks as well as a B-side. "First Contact" was written for the Star Trek Next Gen film of the same name. Its a great song and the fact that you get it and the instrumental version as a hidden track make this purchase worth while.

Dance music trio The Chimes (producers Mike Peden and James Locke from Edinburgh and vocalist Pauline Henry, born in Jamaica) enjoyed critical and commercial success at the beginning of the 90's on both sides of the Atlantic and further afield with their eponymous album and the clutch of singles that were released from it. The group blended together modern R&B, Soul, Pop and Dance sensibilities with Henry's expressive vocals which put them amongst the acts at the forefront of the UK's Soul/Dance scene of the time.

Solar Project releases their by now 12th concept album titled "Ghost Lights" under the label New Music - Green Tree. The spectrum of Solar Project's music can be described best as progressive rock, sensitive, interleaved, driving, with enduring arcs of suspense and surprising turns, disturbing and bewitching.
The album sets into music the human behavior misdirected by "ghost lights". The title track "Ghost Lights" describes the systematic destruction of planet Earth by mankind in search for power and wealth. "Prey" illustrates the meaningless hunt to urge and the associated urge to kill. "On The Run" questions the mental state of man, who is sawing off the branch they are sitting on. "Chivvy" uncovers the brutal recklessness of man among themselves. "Fen-Fire" brands the non-existing perception of global problems and the resulting dire consequences.

Multiquarium Big Band feat. Biréli Lagrène: Remerbering Jaco is a tribute to Jaco Pastorius’s music, made by André Charlier (drums) and Benoit Sourisse (piano) from the Multiquarium Big Band, one of the best French Big Bands. Jaco Pastorius is a big star in the Jazz-Rock scene (and beyond), an icon for bass players all around the world, the one who brought to electric bass the possibility of becoming in some cases, a soloist instrument in a band. Jaco Pastorius made very famous solo albums and wrote amazing big band music. He played with Pat Metheny, Joni Mitchell but was also a very important member of the famous Jazz-rock band, Weather Report with Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, Peter Erskine (who contributes some spoken word to this album!) The virtuoso gypsy guitar player, Biréli Lagrène, has been invited to play electric fretless bass on the album.

This double CD from EMI features the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by their Finnish principal conductor at the time (1970s), Paavo Berglund. It doesn't have to be that a conductor originates from the same country as the composer whose works he or she is conducting, but it often happens that this combination seems to produce performances of greatest sensitivity. So it is here, as Berglund conducts 10 works by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The discs include quite familiar works like En Saga, one of Sibelius' first compositions when he was in his late 20s. We also have Pohjola's Daughter, The Bard and two of the four Lemminkäinen Legends, and a beautiful version of Luonnotar sung by the Finnish soprano Taru Valjakka. The rest of the discs is made up of less frequently heard pieces. We have the five-movement suite from the incidental music Sibelius wrote for Adolf Paul's play King Christian II (1898); the Spring Song (Vårsång) of 1894; the suite of incidental music from Maeterlinck's Pelleas and Melisande.