Housewives, househusbands, ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in between… Avril A is ready for relaunch. A - V - R - I - L
Never released Hi-NRG, synth-pop, wonky rock n' roll from a queer Manchester underground icon of the 80s and 90s. By day, Avril Eventhal was a housewife in North Manchester's Orthodox Jewish community. By night, she was the fabulous Avril A, a larger than life cabaret performer who found a loyal audience in gay venues across the country and was adored for her outrageous live shows. She celebrated her unconventional style, finding joy and space for creative reinvention with the queer community. Avril died in 2017, leaving behind a massive archive of material documenting every aspect of her career in songwriting and performance. For two years, Memory Dance has been working with Avril's niece and family on a digitisation and restoration project bringing these audio recordings back to life. With her signature leopard print dress and feather duster in hand she delivered an unforgettable song and dance routine - as it was billed, “an audio-visual assault on the audience”.

Dark Harvest Pt. 2 is the other side of the same journey, the season of growth after the breaking. If Part 1 was about descent and surrender, this is about the inner harvest that follows.

Dark Harvest Pt. 1 was born from a time when everything in my life was being dismantled. As things fell apart, a friend said to me, “There will be a dark harvest.”

Provocation! Anarchy! Scandal! All too often we encounter Arnold Schoenberg in writings as an enfant terrible, as a radical innovator who sacrificed late Romantic tonality for his highly complex system of “composition with twelve tones related only to each other”.

Like many education-hungry sons of the European nobility, the 18-year-old Prince Frederick August II embarked on his Grand Tour, which took him from Saxony to Venice in 1716, where he spent almost a year. The large entourage that accompanied the young prince on this trip included such great musicians as the violinist Johann Georg Pisendel, the oboist Johann Christian Richter and the composer Jan Dismas Zelenka.

When his mother brought Stanley Turrentine’s Salt Song LP back from a trip to Canada, Julien Lourau, then a teenager, was impressed by the scope of the sound and the groove of the saxophone. He was also charmed by the lush arrangements and funky sound of the record, typical of releases on the CTI label. Created by producer Creed Taylor, CTI left an imprint in the minds of 70s jazz fans much like Blue Note did in the 60s, and it even ended up releasing work by artists who started out on this mythical label such as Stanley Turrentine and Freddie Hubbard.

Rubicon Classics is pleased to announce the third solo album for the label from pianist Alexander Ullman, presenting here a programme of Edvard Grieg’s Moods, Songs and Lyric Pieces. The prize of the album, Alexander’s own transcriptions of music from the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, draw out the colour of the orchestra from the piano, perhaps more than the composer’s own.

At the heart of the story of jazz is the story of an interaction between two dynamic elements - the improvising musician, and the song. David Forman, well known as a concert photographer and one of the UK's foremost aficionados of jazz, has been composing songs for seventy years. Under the direction of renowned pianist and producer Mark Edwards, a fabulous team of creative jazz musicians have brought David's songs to life. David's compositions arise from the inspirations of his long and eventful life given shape and direction by his enduring love of the Great American Songbook tradition: unafraid to embrace sophistication but always adhering to the timeless appeal of direct melody.

Ben Astrachan (He/Him) is a musician based out of Chicago, IL. He plays in three other bands: Berta Bigtoe, Astro Heart, and Porkomorph. He was the Cofounder of all three! It's pronounced "Astra-Can."

Feminine Voices celebrates the female voice and the Christmas season, with a kaleidoscopic selection made up of the Magnificat, Ave Maria and carols, each of which is more wonderful than the last. Eight female composers feature in the programme that Christopher Lowrey and the singers of the Altera ensemble have devised, with works by Hildegard von Bingen, Imogen Holst, Germaine Tailleferre, Cecilia McDowall, Joanna Marsh, Barbara Strozzi, Elizabeth Poston, and a world premiere by Kerensa Briggs.

For their 2nd album, “United”, while searching for a creative way to combine both modern- and traditional jazz music, Dutch Jazz Collective (DJC) invited trombonist Ilja Reijngoud and tenor saxophonist Paul Heller, who both composed and arranged the charts for this album. It turns out to be a match made in heaven. It proves once more how effortlessly DJC combines both the modern and traditional styles of big band music. Unity is an essential part of making music - and society as a whole. In times like this it seems to be more relevant than ever.

Dudok Quartet Amsterdam’s catalogue continues to grow with the addition of another brilliant recording, delving into the music of Shostakovich and Saariaho. Shostakovich regarded his 3rd String Quartet as one of his best works and initially gave each of the movements titles such as ‘blithe ignorance of the future cataclysm’ and ‘Forces of war unleashed’, but then withdrew the titles shortly after completing the work. Why he did this we do not know, maybe he was wary of the Soviet authorities reading unpatriotic meanings into them. Whatever the reasons, the 3rd is a powerful statement containing the composer’s dry humour, with a good dash of sarcasm, the sinister and the passionate.

What’s a flutist to do when they love Ravel? Though Ravel gave the flute some of its finest orchestral moments, he wrote little for it as a solo instrument… Alas! Julien Beaudiment and Célia Oneto Bensaid answer this question by borrowing from the repertoire ten of the composer’s greatest works.

As Penderecki himself admitted, it was no easy task for a Polish composer to write a piano concerto in the shadow of Chopin. Yet in 2006 he completed his Resurrection Concerto. Bound to Penderecki by a long-standing friendship, Mūza Rubackytė presents a live recording with the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Keri-Lynn Wilson. For nearly a decade, the pianist has championed this monumental, powerful, and tormented score, whose melodic richness, bell-like sonorities, and dramatic intensity reflect the unique imagination of a composer marked by war, inspired by faith, and guided by humanism.

Once upon a time there was an uncommon, little blue planet, upon which was living a species fascinated by the beauties of the universe that was home to it.