Jazz music series 1: Don't mean a thing if it ain't got that doo-wup

Originally formed around ten years ago in the heart of the Angus Glens, in the childhood home of the legendary Bon Scott, EMERALD SUNDAY started life as a cover band. Driven by prolific songwriter and lead guitarist Alan Hunter, the band started to introduce their own material into their live sets, and things have snowballed from there.

Three years as a Delphian artist have seen Sean Shibe record music from seventeenth-century Scottish lute manuscripts to twenty-first-century works for electric guitar, picking up multiple editor’s choices and award nominations for each release, as well as the Royal Philharmonic Society’s prestigious ‘Young Artist of the Year’ accolade.

Singer and songwriter Monica Pereira has had a varied background: born in Guinea-Bissau with a childhood spent in Portugal and an adolescence in Paris, her diverse musical influences abound in her album "Mulher Do Sol", a 14 track effort featuring appearances from Debademba, Sidiki Diabaté, and Fatim Diabaté.

"All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend" is the debut studio album by young Norwegian female singer Aurora Aksnes. The album received general acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 80, which indicates "generally favorable reviews", based on 8 reviews.

"Trapt" is the second studio album and major label debut by the American Rock band Trapt. With three hit singles, the album ascended to number 42 on the Billboard 200 chart, and went on to spend more than 80 weeks inside the Billboard 200. It was certified gold by the RIAA on May 15, 2003 then platinum on November 24 of that same year,making it Trapt's most successful album to date. By 2005, the album had sold 1.5 million copies in the U.S.

Melodic Rock band One Desire from Finland makes its debut with this self-titled release, helmed by Jimmy Westerlund, a producer, composer and artist with several gold and platinum albums to his credit.

One of the last albums from the short lived Australian Jazz Quartet, now expanded to a quintet, this release was recorded in both Hollywood and New York City and showcases the group's unique take on these quintessential American show tunes by Rodgers & Hammerstein.

"I'm a Berliner," John F. Kennedy once chanted at the Brandenburg Gate. Of course, JFK could not have predicted on the cresting wave of the Cold War that this sentence could apply to his compatriot Chris Dahlgren even more comprehensively than to himself half a century later.

Binker Golding truly is the saxophonist of the moment. A highly skilled musician, accomplished composer, and occasional conductor, Golding has performed with everyone from Moses Boyd and Yussef Dayes to Evan Parker and Denys Baptise. 'Abstractions of Reality Past and Incredible Feathers' is his first quartet album, and typically, it goes against the grain.

Many interwar Norwegian composers tried to create a new national music by combining elements of authentic folk music with new techniques. Eivind Groven was considered one of the most innovative composers in this quest, integrating the structure of folk dances from his rural upbringing into familiar formal principles. Both symphonies make use of techniques of so-called ‘progressive transformation’, which led fellow composer Arne Nordheim to declare: ‘While others made instrumentations of folk tunes, Groven created sounds, for example in his [two] symphonies which, in my opinion, are quite unique.’

Vocal Point, founded in 1991 by two students Dave Boyce and Bob Ahlander, is Brigham Young University’s premiere 9-man a cappella ensemble. Directed by McKay Crockett, Vocal Point wows audiences everywhere with their vocal firepower, innovative arrangements, and remarkable vocal percussion.

This is a previously unreleased 1966 live club performance from Yusef Lateef, the brilliant multi-instrumentalist whose mixing of jazz and Eastern music was a great influence on some of the finest musicians of the era including John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders.

Roberto Sierra’s refined compositional voice is subtly combined with contemporary musical techniques and his Puerto Rican heritage in the three works recorded here.

B.B. King is joined by some of the best British and American blues musicians of the day on these all-star sessions recorded in London in 1971. Among the many guests include Ringo Starr, Alexis Korner, Dr. John, Klaus Voormann, Gary Wright, Steve Winwood and other members of Humble Pie and Spooky Tooth. Several of these guests contribute songs to the album, fleshed out by a couple of blues chestnuts and an original number written by King and Dave Clark.