Eugene Ormandy Over a period of four decades, from the 1940s until the beginning of the '80s, Eugene Ormandy was a mainstay of the classical music world. As music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra for more than 40 years, beginning in 1938, he was one of the most popular conductors in America, and his recordings with that orchestra on the Columbia Masterworks label consistently outsold by a wide margin the recordings of the admittedly superior New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos. Ormandy was a supremely competent, often inspired conductor whose approach to music displayed extraordinary care and polish. Although never regarded as a musical trailblazer, he also presented the first recordings of several important works during his career, and helped several composers achieve wider recognition than they'd ever had before.

Paul Desmond's first genuine all-Brazilian album under the Creed Taylor signature was a beauty, a collection of songs by the then-moderately known Edu Lobo and the emerging giant Milton Nascimento, then only in his early twenties. All Desmond has to do is sit back and ride the Brazilian grooves while lyrically ruminating on whatever pops into his head. It sounds so effortless - until you try it yourself. The swirling, often gorgeous orchestral arrangements are by Don Sebesky (one CD edition mistakenly gives Claus Ogerman credit on the cover), Airto Moreira leads the samba-flavored percussion forces, and Lobo and his wife Wanda de Sah appear on three of Lobo's four songs. Lobo's "To Say Goodbye," "Circles," and "Martha and Romao" have exactly the brand of wistful sadness that Desmond could communicate so well; on the former, de Sah has to sing well below the register with which she is comfortable, and the strain is painfully obvious…

Put this in your mug and sip it. We’re excited to announce Night Lights, a new compilation collecting cuts from Prestige Records’ imprint Moodsville, featuring hauntingly beautiful late-night tunes from multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef, guitarist Kenny Burrell, saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Gene Ammons, and many more. The smoke-hued blue vinyl befits the album’s enchanting sonic landscape, complimented by original artwork from acclaimed illustrator Liam Cobb.

The Bandit Records legend could almost be fiction. The house passing as a home, the harem passing as a family, the rising star brutally murdered in his prime, the dream, the con: The end. Arrow Brown inhabited the same south-side Chicago landscape as Afro-Noir author Iceberg Slim’s ghetto characters, taking inspiration from the same sources that shaded Airtight Willie, White Folks, and Blue Howard. Drawn to the underground and fancying himself a rogue entrepreneur, Brown and his Bandit label operated somewhere in the space between money laundering outfit and sex cult. Brown poured proceeds from straight jobs held by his many “daughters” into sumptuously rendered, forward-looking soul records by the egotistically named Arrows and the Majestic Arrows, as well his seven-year-old son Altyrone Deno Brown, whose father hoped to push to Jackson-style child-fame heights. Putting beauty and genius in front of commercial viability, Arrow laid down lush, sweeping strings to lure the listener into a hipster fantasy world, sharply incongruent with the sometimes-criminal reality of the city that dreamt it. In 2005, novelist and essayist Jonathan Lethem called the entirety of the Bandit Records tale “Haunting… haunted… Like a little novel.” In its darker corners, 003 Eccentric Soul: The Bandit Label may more closely resemble true crime.

GROOVE HIP HOP R&B : 3CD set. Superfly 53-track collection features Soul II Soul, Des'ree, Billie, Eric B & Rakim, Shabba Ranks, Fatboy Slim, Mantronix, DNA featuring Suzanne Vega, D'Angelo, Young Disciples, Stereo MC's, Crystal Waters and others!

Xhol Caravan drops the Caravan for the simpler Xhol - but the jazzy psychedelic sound is as adventurous as ever - with a sharper focus on the jazzy elements that always lingered in the group's sound - which is fleshed out incredibly on these 3 lengthy tracks captured live in Altena in 1970! The saxs, flute, organ and kinetic drum work always at the core the German psychedelic/jazz/prog progenitors are given lots of room to vamp here - and the set overall is among the more muscular and outwardly jazzy work we've heard by them!

BBC Jools Holland 1999-12-04 & TFI Friday 1999-11-26. Track 11 is an unlisted track of 4 seconds of silence. The BBC tracks are known to come from the Later…With Jools Holland show, but this is not mentioned on the release.

Recorded live at Wembley Arena, London, June 9th 1991.

Maretimo Records is a German record label, music publisher & radio station, specialized in the styles: Lounge, Chillout, Latin & House Music. The company was founded by the multiple award-winning DJ Michael Maretimo. For more than 25 years he stands with great passion at the mixing desk.

With a title like Time & Eternity and graphics featuring the disembodied head of violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, you know you're in for an ambitious program. Kopatchinskaja's albums have been getting increasingly experimental as her career has developed, and this one is at no time boring, whatever you may think of the overall concept. Sample Crux, by Lubos Fiser, for violin, timpani, and bells, with the timpani pounding away as a kind of avatar of dread. This said the structure of the program is not quite as unconventional as it may at first appear to be.

The start of another Hyperion Lieder series is always cause for celebration. In advance of his bicentenary in 2011, we turn to a composer whose songs, against the vast bulk of his compositions in larger genres, were considered insignificant for well over a century.

New love, position, power, revenge, disguise, mistaken identity, complications and passionate devotion – the full spectrum of baroque opera seria is here in this new recording of Pergolesi’s ‘Adriano In Siria’. Franco Fagioli leads the cast, alongside Romina Basso, Yuriy Mynenko, Dilyara Idrisova, Juan Sancho and Cigdem Soyarslan, accompanied by the exuberant Polish orchestra Capella Cracoviensis under the baton of Jan Tomasz Adamus. Famed for his Stabat Mater, Pergolesi died aged just 26 but had already completed four opera seria; ‘Adriano in Siria’ is the third of these and has a libretto by Metastasio.

A best-of album by The Hollyridge Strings, an easy listening project planned by Capitol Records. This release features a colorful selection of artists, including The Beatles and The Beach Boys.

Three CD set charting the birth and early development of American hard rock. In the late 60s, the parallel emergence of psychedelia and the blues-based power trio format saw pop evolve into rock. In America, bands became harder, heavier, rawer and louder to a backdrop of the Vietnam War, street drugs and increasingly powerful amps. Commercially successful acts like Vanilla Fudge, Steppenwolf, Blue Cheer and Iron Butterfly spearheaded a new wave of bands whose sound would later be codified as heavy metal. Over three CDs and four hours of music, 'We're An American Band' charts hard rock's evolution during the late 60s and early 70s, culminating in Grand Funk's game-changing, chart-topping late 1973 single of the same name.

The roots of hard rock can be traced back to the 1950s, particularly electric blues. In the 1960s, American and British blues and rock bands began to modify rock and roll by adding harder sounds, heavier guitar riffs, bombastic drumming, and louder vocals. By the end of the decade a distinct genre of hard rock was emerging with bands like Led Zeppelin, who mixed the music of early rock bands with a more hard-edged form of blues rock and acid rock, and Deep Purple, who began as a progressive rock group in 1968 but achieved their commercial breakthrough with their fourth and distinctively heavier album, In Rock in 1970. Half a century later Hard Rock music is still one the favorite of millions of fans around the world and The Hard Rock Box showcases in 6 CD's many of the genre's most successful artists and songs.