A nice collection of work by the team of Toquinho and Vinicius De Moraes - featuring tracks from their Philips recordings.
Guitarist and composer Toquinho (b 1946) and Vinícius recorded as a duo during the '70s (until Vinícius's death). Together they created exuberant, joyful music that was also very popular - in Brazil and abroad.

This might be the best debut album ever delivered by an American blues band, a bold, powerful, hard-edged, soulful essay in electric blues with a native Southern ambience. Some lingering elements of the psychedelic era then drawing to a close can be found in "Dreams," along with the template for the group's on-stage workouts with "Whipping Post," and a solid cover of Muddy Waters' "Trouble No More."

Lost classic for the collectors of Italian Library Funk: One of the most sought after cult LPs on the tiny Devega label from Milan, produced in 1972 for license purposes only. The German progressive band Joy Unlimited plays a terrific mixture of funk 'n'soul , jazz, psych rock and Latin moods, with clever arrangements and perfect grooves. 12 excellently produced soundtracks for an imaginary film of the counterculture, including many cool DJ spins like "Parabolica", "Soul Gravy", "Jamara" or "Blue Box", spiced with killer breaks & electronic effects. First CD release of this album, carefully remastered and with the original cover design.

This vaunted "new" chapter in the exploits of serial killer/cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter is actually the first, essentially a remake of Manhunter, Michael Mann's adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel in which Dr. L. is but a supporting player. But where Mann used a nervous, often ironic rock and postpunk pop score, Danny Elfman's largely orchestral soundtrack here punctuates the film's creep factor with tense arpeggios and crashing rhythms. Nothing wrong with that, per se the old school masters succeeded following a similar tack for decades. But Elfman is no Bernard Herrmann here. In fact, there's often precious little to remind us that this is the same composer who served up such goth-modern standouts as Batman, Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, and Darkman. It's a score that's masterfully atmospheric, yet strangely sterile - and one that occasionally dithers uncomfortably close to McGoth.

Petra is one of the most successful Christian rock bands ever, a veritable institution whose name (taken from the Greek word for "rock") has come to reflect not only their music, but their staying power as well, even in spite of Christian radio's reluctance to program their brand of loud, slick arena rock.
Opening with a blues-inflected "Get Back to the Bible," the original eponymous Petra album hearkens more to Southern rock bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd than to the arena-type groups that they became more associated with, both in vocal style and in musical texture. Who knew that guitarist Bob Hartman could sing? Though the Southern rock theme is predominant here, the style is not very unified on this record, and it is obvious that the group was under pressure to keep things more subdued and "sensible" to be in line with the teachings of the major theologians of the day…

An expanded 2CD reissue of the debut LP from Trapeze featuring the single ‘Send Me No More Letters’, plus ‘Suicide’, ‘Nancy Gray’ and ‘Another Day’ plus a stack of bonus tracks, demos and live sessions.

21 years after their landmark first appearance as a genre exploding piano-bass-drums trio, the ever adventurous The Bad Plus have reinvented themselves as a dynamic quartet with the addition of guitarist Ben Monder and saxophonist Chris Speed. This new iteration of the group makes its vital eponymous debut now, as always, challenging convention by pushing their inimitable approach to jazz in boundary-breaking new directions. Though the components may have changed, what remains is The Bad Plus’s unique musical language and their undeniable drive and intent. Having re-contextualized their own chemistry, The Bad Plus not only affirms the band’s continuing relevance and longevity, it burns bright on its own terms as an extraordinarily powerful debut from an all-new creative force to be reckoned with.

Produced by the band themselves, and recorded in Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which sits in the Palais du Louvre, Alpha Zulu is everything Phoenix does best: effortlessly catchy melodies married with always-innovative production, resulting in what is destined to be one of 2022’s albums of the year. Indeed, Alpha Zulu – the band’s first album since 2017’s critically acclaimed record Ti Amo – is an immediate reminder of what has made Phoenix one of the most beloved artists of the last two decades, reinforcing the band’s enduring – and continued – influence on pop culture.

Dave Koz reunites with the original cast of the longest-running jazz-based Christmas Tour on this album, marking the 25th Anniversary milestone of the tour in 2022. Produced by the legendary Philippe Saisse, the album features all newly recorded Christmas favorites and one original song from Koz, who has previously released 7 holiday-themed albums, and heartfelt performances by contemporary jazz icons, trumpeter Rick Braun, guitarist Peter White, and the original co-creator of the tour, pianist David Benoit.

Veteran blues pianist (and longtime Howlin' Wolf sideman) Emery Williams Jr. - known professionally as Detroit Junior - has had a renaissance of sorts in the past decade, releasing three albums on Blue Suit Records, and now this one, Blues on the Internet, on Delmark Records. Williams is a throwback to the classic Chicago blues piano style, and his warm, expressive vocals fall somewhere between a hoarse Ray Charles and a latter-day Bob Dylan, while his songwriting, although hardly innovative, is solid and workmanlike, avoiding most of the obvious blues clichés. His intent isn't to move blues into the 21st century so much as preserve the way it was played in Chicago in the 1950s (where Williams played alongside the likes of Jimmy Reed, Eddie Boyd, Eddie Taylor, and Little Mack Simmons), and he succeeds wonderfully on original tracks here…

One of the most inventive singers of the 20th century, Sarah Vaughan's voice was simply one of the wonders of the world. Unfortunately, her producers (particularly early in her career) all too often gave her trivial material to record, but when she got a hold of quality songs, no one could outsing her. This set has several examples of Vaughan's immense talent, including the old standard "I'll Be Seeing You," which Vaughan transforms into a vocal masterpiece. Notice how her singing coasts elegantly over the varied rhythms of the bop classic "Green Dolphin Street" almost as if she were a member of the horn section. There are more extensive single-disc collections of Vaughan on the market, and this one is hardly essential, but it does make a decent introduction to a great singer.

In the CD programme Psychedelic Gems, psychedelic and progressive bands and their background are featured bands, whose overall output of published or unpublished material would not be sufficient to justify a CD on their own. Most of them played during the late sixties and early seventies, having published no more than a demo tape or a single, which is why several of them are presented together on one CD. Each group - so far all of them coming from German-speaking countries - is accorded a full-page colour picture of the cover of their single, a band history in German and English and, if space is available, a photo of their label. In contrast to bootleg labels such as Visions of the Past, Electrick Loosers or Prae-Kraut Pandaemonium, all licenses were legally obtained from the artists or their record companies. Overlapping releases are therefore nothing to be surprised about. Together with the one of the Garden Of Delights series…