In January 1967, a 24-year old Aretha Franklin signed to Atlantic Records and began one of the most legendary runs in music history, releasing five U.S. hit singles in that year alone. Rhino celebrates the 50th anniversary of Franklin’s historic signing with an opportunity to hear her classic Atlantic masters like never before.

The Charlotte, North Carolina-based bands, second full-length album, The Electric Man, on Bright Antenna Records, produced by Joey Waronker (Beck, Brandon Flowers, Yeasayer, Atoms for Peace, Air), finds singer/guitarist Drake Margolnick and drummer Michael Finster taking listeners on a journey from light into darkness and back again. Reaching new emotional depths through a few life-changing events over the past year, the 12-track album delivers atmospheric rock with passionate vocals, pop-minded melodies, rapturous orchestral soundscapes, and themes that run the gamut from love and loss to fear and despair to hope and happiness. Several songs, including the album’s title track, were inspired by the death of their close friend and former band member, Grant Harding, in 2015.

You can often judge musicians by the company they keep. Float the Edge, the latest album from pianist-composer Angelica Sanchez, features her alongside two of the most sought-after rhythm-section musicians on the scene: veteran bassist Michael Formanek and rising-star Tyshawn Sorey, both acclaimed leader-composers in their own right. To be released via Clean Feed Records on March 25, 2017, Float the Edge sees this earthy, expansive trio perform Sanchez’s compositions, as well as several free improvisations.

Chopin and Debussy were two seekers of the absolute who, in their art distilled to the quintessence, succeeded in erasing all traces of their workmanship and their supreme compositional technique. The connections between them are as numerous as they are subtle, never obvious, yet so very profound. The achievement of Javier Perianes here is to have teased out the artistic thread linking two geniuses who soar high above their respective centuries.

The harmonia mundi label, once well known for specializing in the French Baroque repertoire, makes a welcome and triumphant return to this treasure trove of musical delights. For their first release on harmonia mundi, Sébastien Daucé and the Ensemble Correspondances present a sumptuous interpretation of the six-voice motets composed by Marc-Antoine Charpentier for the House of Guise.

On 9 April 1786, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach conducted a charity concert in Hamburg featuring three of his finest and most representative works: the Symphony Wq 183/1 (1780), the Magnificat written in 1749 in the hope of succeeding his father as Kantor in Leipzig, and finally the stupendous Heilig (1776) for double choir, of which he wrote: ‘It will be my swansong of this kind, and will serve to ensure that I shall not soon be forgotten after my death.’ He was right: 300 years after his birth, this album with the same programme proves as much.

Following an incredible success with his debut album In The Lonely Hour – including four GRAMMY Awards, both an Academy Award & Golden Globe, three Brit Awards, and amassing over 8 billion streams to date – Sam Smith is back with his upcoming sophomore record „The Thrill Of It All“. His first single off the record "Too Good At Goodbyes" debuted #1 on multiple global charts.

The album „snowmelt“ is Neset's most ambitious, cherished and personal project to date. In these concentrated works, Neset has sought out chaos and dissonance, he has also been drawn to lyricism and tenderness, and then worked at finding a balance between the extremes, using compositional methods which subliminally bring out the continuities between them. Neset says of this work that he aspires to is to “find the point when everything makes sense.” For the listener, the search for that point will bring its own rewards.

Blues is not for the faint-hearted. Since the genre first drew breath, its greatest practitioners have embraced the darkness, spinning tales of hardship and death, hellhounds and devilry. If the sleeve of Witchy Feelin’ suggests that Kim Simmonds, too, has a tendency towards the macabre, then Savoy Brown’s iconic leader is happy to confirm it. “Blues has always dealt with themes of the Devil, witchcraft and so forth, and I’ve always written along those lines. At least three of the songs on Witchy Feelin’ have that hoodoo vibe…”