Master of the Swedish royal chapel and a leading composer in Sweden in the first half of the 18th century, Johan Helmich Roman studied in England with Pepusch, compiler of the music of The Beggar’s Opera. His music shows distinct traces of his experience in England, where he also met composers such as Handel and Geminiani. He was a prolific composer in various genres. The best-known composition by Roman is his Drottingholm Music for the royal wedding of the Crown Prince of Sweden and his Prussian bride in 1744.

Two years after releasing her CD dedicated to Book I of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Céline Frisch now presents the second volume of this musical landmark. Bach compiled Book II in 1744, twenty-two years after Book I. It took until 1801 for both volumes to be printed: from then until the present day they have inspired countless composers. After a series of recordings with the Ensemble Zimmermann, an ensemble she cofounded with Pablo Valetti, Céline Frisch returns to her very favourite music, the harpsichord recital. Through these preludes and fugues, she reminds us that far from being technical exercises, the Well- Tempered Clavier is a work of pure pleasure and constant renewed discovery.

Released just as punk was taking hold on the public's imagination in America and making groups like Jethro Tull seem like dinosaurs on their way to extinction, Bursting Out became a seemingly perpetual denizen of the cutout bins for years afterward. However, it happened to be a good album, a more-than-decent capturing of a live Tull concert from Europe. The sound is remarkably good, given the group's arena rock status at the time, and the repertoire is a solid representation of the group's history, going all the way back to "A New Day Yesterday" from their second album and up through 1978's Heavy Horses, with stops along the way for "Bouree," "Aqualung," "Locomotive Breath," "Cross-Eyed Mary," and a compact reprise of Thick as a Brick. Some of these tracks work better than others – the tendency here is to play loud and hard, and sometimes that just doesn't translate well on record; seeing "Locomotive Breath" probably worked better than hearing it.

Highlighting Dionne Warwick's quiet and more contemplative moments, Love Songs is a solid overview covering not only her later years on Arista, but also material from various other labels and her collaborations with Burt Bacharach. Many of the moments remain untarnished with the passage of time, with the original recordings of "Walk On By," "Alfie," and "I Say a Little Prayer" cleaned up and sounding clearer than ever. While "Anyone Who Had a Heart" and other earlier performances would have been ideal for inclusion, later songs like "That's What Friends Are For" and "Heartbreaker" help to bring things into the later years nicely. And though the song sequencing is a bit erratic, that's something easily overlooked and can be manually corrected. Love Songs is not a collection for the die-hard fan, but casual listeners will find it immediately accessible and an enjoyable listen from start to finish.

Levee Town is the 5th studio album by Sonny Landreth. Released on Sugar Hill Records Oct. 17, 2000 and re-released in an Expanded Edition on Landreth’s own LandFall Records April 21, 2009. This is slide guitar wizard Sonny Landreth's most ambitious work, and true to form it comes with no glossy fanfare (even the packaging is sepia tinted), just straight-ahead, well-crafted songs played with his usual intelligent, heartfelt playing. Like the photos that are easily passed over due to the quiet subtly of the sepia tones, the intricacy of his guitar work can easily be overshadowed by the flash that is inherent in the slide guitar. He takes the time here to do a number of acoustic songs and shows that there is more to him than a loud flash.

This 40-song assortment will definitely appease those who want a hefty one-stop of Dr. Hook's best material, but it also makes for a worthy summation of the band's career. All but the last two of Dr. Hook's Top 40 singles appear here, led by "Sylvia's Mother," "The Cover of the Rolling Stone," and "Only Sixteen," while excluding later efforts like "Girls Can Get It" and "Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk." All of their second-bests are also present, including fan favorites such as "More Like the Movies," "The Radio," "Jungle to the Zoo," and "On the Way to the Bottom."

Canadian thrash metal veterans Sacrifice return in 2025 with their first new album in more than sixteen years. Volume Six, the band’s sixth album overall and second since reforming in 2006, features ten new originals and a cover paying homage to the Toronto scene from which they originally emerged.
Working once again with engineer Darius Szczepaniak - who was also at the helm for Sacrifice’s 2009 effort The Ones I Condemn - Volume Six was recorded, mixed, and mastered at Phase One Studios in Scarborough, Ontario. Tracked over a period of sessions between September 2023 and May 2024, the eleven-song offering was produced by vocalist/guitarist Rob Urbinati and features the band’s original lineup, with lead guitarist Joe Rico, bassist Scott Watts, and drummer Gus Pynn as well as Urbinati…

A&M's 1977 collection The Best of Joan Baez doesn't chronicle her most influential work, but that doesn't mean it's not without merit. Far from it, actually. This is a concise recapping of her poppier recordings for A&M, which include such classic Baez moments as her original "Diamonds and Rust" and a definitive reading of Robbie Robertson's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." The rest of the album splits the difference between covers (including Stevie Wonder's lovely "I Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer" and Dylan's "Simple Twist of Fate") and originals, providing an entertaining, enlightening encapsulation of her '70s recordings.

Legendary hard rock guitarist Leslie West – best known for his work with Mountain and the Vagrants – shows that he's not about to start slowing down despite a career that's spanned six decades with this set of passionate, blues-influenced rock & roll. Still Climbing features West offering up his trademark meaty guitar riffs and gale-force vocals while accompanied by a handful of guest stars, including blues guitar legend Johnny Winter, Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti, Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider, and modern-day bluesman Jonny Lang. Along with a handful of fresh original songs, Still Climbing also includes new interpretations of "When a Man Loves a Woman," "Over the Rainbow," and "Feeling Good."

Few female singers matched the hard-swinging Anita O'Day for sheer exuberance and skill in all areas of jazz vocals: her splendid improvising, wide range, dynamic tone, and innate sense of rhythm made her one of the most enjoyable singer of the age. O'Day's first appearances in a big band shattered the traditional image of a demure female vocalist by swinging just as hard as the other musicians on the bandstand, best heard on her vocal trading with Roy Eldridge on the Gene Krupa recording "Let Me Off Uptown." After making her solo debut in the mid-'40s, she incorporated bop modernism into her vocals and recorded over a dozen of the best vocal LPs of the era for Verve during the 1950s and '60s. Though hampered during her peak period by heavy drinking and, later, drug addiction, she made a comeback and continued singing into the new millennium.

The singularity of Dionne Warwick is defined by what the singer isn't as much as what she is. Although Warwick grew up singing in church, she is not a gospel singer. Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan are clear influences, but she is not a jazz singer. R&B is also part of her background, yet she is not really a soul singer, either, at least not in the sense that Aretha Franklin was. Sophisticated is a word often used to describe Warwick's musical approach and the music she sings, but she is not a singer of standards such as Lena Horne or Nancy Wilson. A pop singer of a sort with an aching yet detached alto voice, In all likelihood, Warwick could only have emerged out of the Brill Building environment of post-Elvis Presley, pre-Beatles pop in the early '60s. That's when she hooked up with Burt Bacharach and Hal David, songwriters and producers who tailored their unusually complicated songs for her distinctive instrument.

Flower Travelling Band was Japan's answer to Led Zeppelin meeting Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath at the Ash Ra Temple. Simply put, they played grand, spacey, tripped-out hard rock with a riffy base that was only two steps removed from the blues, but their manner of interpreting those steps came from an acid trip. Flower Travelling Band was an entity unto itself. There are five tracks on this set, originally released in 1971 as the band's second album proper. It has been reissued on CD by WEA International in Japan, with the cover depicting a silhouette drawing of the Buddha in meditative equipoise filled in with sketches of an inner universe mandala of the sacred Mount Meru, stupas, and the hash smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, Japanese sci-fi robot cartoons, and more…

In the late 1970s, Jean-Michel Jarre's albums Oxygène and Équinoxe sold in their zillions, demonstrating that electronic music could be embraced by mainstream tastes. Almost 40 years later, the list of Jarre’s collaborators on Electronica 1: The Time Machine reads like a who’s who of electronic music, including Massive Attack, Moby, Air, Vince Clarke, Laurie Anderson and John Carpenter. True, by assembling such a stellar lineup, Jarre is reminding us of his status as a pioneer. But this does not feel like a cynical exercise - perhaps because Jarre was shrewd enough to work in person with his collaborators rather than remotely by sharing digital files. Jarre’s soaring washes of chords are present on tracks such as Conquistador (with French techno artist Gesaffelstein) and Zero Gravity (one of the last recordings of the late Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream)…