Originally formed in Yorkshire, England, in 1966, Smokie hit the British pop charts several times during the late '70s with updated psychedelic pop, influenced by the band's stay on Mickie Most's Rak Records as well as the writers of most of the band's hit material, Rak's Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. Vocalist Chris Norman, bassist Terry Utley, guitarist Alan Silson, and drummer Ron Kelly had played in the Elizabethans, but formed the band Kindness in 1970. The quartet recorded many singles during the late '60s and early '70s, but failed to show any chart activity. By 1973, Kelly had left the band and was replaced by Pete Spencer.

We are a prog-jazz-rock group from São Paulo, Brazil, formed when Ricardo Santhiago, his brother Gustavo and cousin Giovanni Lenti started studying music. In 2017, the son of Gong's guitar player Fabio Golfetti, Gabriel, joined the band. Our influences range from 70's prog, to classical Hindustani, modern jazz and Brazilian music. While our instrumental sound is complex, it is very accessible.

Umlaut are from Melbourne, down under and needless to say, their name is actually Umläut. There's not much to be said about this one except they seem like very interesting and funny crowd. The band members are Clinton Bär McKinnon Julian Langdon, Angus E. Leslie, Shane Lieber, Adam King and Olaf Scott, McKinnon (the multi-instrumentalist) being a leader of the band. Occasionally, a certain Mike Patton is appearing as a guest - not surprising, since Umlaut is closely related to Patton's project - not an offshoot, but a band sharing members. Hence, every Mr. Bungle fan would probably enjoy the music of Umlaut - don't let the easygoing attitude fools you, the guy are doing serious music - dense, powerful, with avant edge.

A solitaire in French is a single mounted jewel, a concept that seems less than apt for the rather hefty works recorded here by British pianist Kathryn Stott. But this fine recital holds together in another way: Ravel, who so often provides the temporal endpoint for traditional piano recitals, is here, to a greater or lesser extent, the launching point for the other three composers featured. Stott's reading of the neoclassical Le Tombeau de Couperin is beautifully precise and balanced, catching the economy of this Baroque-style suite to the hilt. That economy carries over into the later works, even the rarely performed Piano Sonata of Henri Dutilleux, a work that deftly fuses Ravel's sense of classical forms with a largely dissonant language. The opening Prelude and Fugue of Jehan Alain, actually two separate works that are reasonably enough combined here, is another seldom-played piece that makes an arresting curtain-raiser, and the final "Le baiser de l'Enfant Jésus" of Messiaen, part of the giant Vingt regards sur l'Enfant Jésus, is the splendid climax of the whole, its spiritual, dreamlike ascent at the end superbly controlled. Better still is the sound, recorded at Hallé St. Peters in Manchester: it creates a hypnotic effect all its own.

Like a prayer that comes from the heart "… stood the mournful Mother weeping" whispers the chorus after the orchestral introduction of Antonín Dvorák 's most celebrated choral work, the Stabat Mater Op. 58. As the work builds to include the four vocal soloists, the obsessively repeated main motif of a descending chromatic line begins to work its magic on the rapt audience.

Gloria Maria Milagrosa Fajardo Garcia de Estefan, known professionally as Gloria Estefan (born September 1, 1957) is a Cuban American singer, songwriter, and actress. Known as the "Queen Of Latin Pop", she is in the top 100 best selling music artists with over 100 million albums sold worldwide.

This is an awesome 2-CD collection of folk, freak-folk and folk-rock rarities from Holland, mostly recorded in the mid-to-late 1970s, when folk-rock and psychedelic folk from abroad had really suffused the Dutch music scene. There are obvious influences from British folk-rockers like Fairport Convention, but also from the Celtic folk revival, and from the freak-folk and sunshine pop scenes of the US and UK. Great stuff, mostly sung in Dutch, but with a few English-language songs that give a glimpse of just how hippie-dippy this stuff actually was. If you like rare, weird, lovely music, you'll want to check this out. (DJ Joe Sixpack, Slipcue Music Guide)

Since 1830, teachers at the Paris Conservatory and French instrument makers ensured that the oboe established itself anew and increasingly as both an orchestral and popular solo instrument in France. This became particularly noticeable at the turn of the 20th century under the influence of Saint-Saëns, Franck, Vierne, Pierné, who wrote important works for woodwinds - precisely also for the oboe.

Polaroîd/Romans/Photo Review by Rolf Semprebon
Thierry Muller, who previously released a couple of avant-garde electronics records as Ilitch, came back in 1985 with this new project, Ruth, which oddly enough does not include Muller's Ilitch collaborator, Ruth Ellyeri. At first glance, Ruth's pop sensibilities and up-tempo rhythms seem to be a 180-degree about-face from the bruising soundscapes of Ilitch, and yet there is still a heavy use of electronics and certainly a lot of creativity to make this more than just dance music. A similar analogy might be Cabaret Voltaire's shift in the early '80s from its original distorted industrial music to much cleaner sounds with a dance beat and female vocals, often spoken, but still retaining some earlier avant-gardisms. Ruth's music falls somewhere in the new wave techno-pop dance music camp, though with enough oddness that it doesn't come off as some slick sellout. "Waiting for Mabelle" from Ilitch's 10 Suicides is even reworked here as an upbeat avant disco number, smoothed of all the rough edges. Marc Duconseille's horn arrangements on the opening track, "Thriller," as well as the title track, add a cinematic quality to the music. The haunting cover of Can's "She Brings the Rain" focuses more on textures, as the intensity builds through the song, hinting more at Muller's earlier work, as does the much longer track "Tu m'Ennuies," with spoken word over keyboard squall. The CD also throws in some bonus tracks. Of these, the piece "Sans Mot" as well as the short hidden track at the end of the CD are in the experimental vein of Ilitch, and both quite good, whereas the two versions of the title cut, one an early demo of it without vocals, seem more like filler.

If there were ever any doubts as to Ralph Towner’s consummate abilities, though one would need to travel far to encounter them, they can only have been put to rest with the release of Blue Sun. A near highpoint in Towner’s extensive discography, it might have shared the summit of 1980’s Solo Concert were it not for a few frayed threads. Towner’s compositions are already so harmonically dense in their solo form that other instruments merely externalize what is already so internally apparent to them, so that the intimate pickings of “The Prince And The Sage,” “Mevlana Etude,” and “Wedding Of The Streams” hover most clearly before our ears. At the same time, there is something skeletal about his playing that cries for flesh. Not for want of completeness, nor out of lack, but rather through the his balance and inward posture, a flower-like duplicity that embraces both blooming and wilting in the same breath.

Palestrina's musical output was large, and included not only masses, motets, hymns, and lamentations, but also spiritual and secular madrigals. Indeed the compositional techniques of the madrigal inform mach of Palestrina' work. The controlled emotion of his religious music, the sense of expressive restraint in his word-setting, are owed to his knowledge and experience of the madrigal.

IN 1988 FORMER ROLLING STONES guitarist Mick Taylor began what was to be a significant series of collaborations with L.A. based Carla Olson, first with their “Live at the Roxy” album Too Hot For Snakes, the centrepiece of which is an extended seven-minute performance of “Sway” included on this album. It was followed by Olson’s Within An Ace, which featured Taylor on seven songs. He appeared on three songs from Reap The Whirlwind and then again on Olson’s The Ring of Truth, on which he plays lead guitar on nine tracks, including a twelve-minute version of the song “Winter”. Further work by Olson and Taylor can be heard on the Olson-produced Barry Goldberg album Stoned Again. This is the best of their collaborations.

The “shadow of SIBELUS” has been unnecessarily comprehensive and long in Finnish music. Of course, male colleagues have come up, although not always very big. Instead, female composers have had to wait a long time, but fortunately now is their time too.

Most music lovers have encountered George Frederick Handel through holiday-time renditions of the Messiah's "Hallelujah" chorus. And many of them know and love that oratorio on Christ's life, death, and resurrection, as well as a few other greatest hits like the orchestral Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music, and perhaps Judas Maccabeus or one of the other English oratorios. Yet his operas, for which he was widely known in his own time, are the province mainly of specialists in Baroque music, and the events of his life, even though they reflected some of the most important musical issues of the day, have never become as familiar as the careers of Bach or Mozart. Perhaps the single word that best describes his life and music is "cosmopolitan": he was a German composer, trained in Italy, who spent most of his life in England.

The Savage Poetry, released in 2000, is a re-recording of the album Savage Poetry, originally launched in 1995 as a demo by German power metal band Edguy. This version is also seen and referred to as their fourth official studio album…