Deluxe version of the classic album "Street Fighting Years" as a 4-CD box set, including the original album remastered at Abbey Road plus a host of B-sides, edits and 12″ remixes. It also includes a previously unissued Verona live show from 1989 plus brand new book including a new interview with Trevor Horn.
Their first proper new release since the commercial breakthrough of Once Upon a Time (a live album intervened) and Simple Minds makes a decidedly, noncommercial follow-up. Street Fighting Years is a moody, dark affair. The music is yearning and most of the songs are politically charged lyrically. It was a move that could (and did) bring commercial failure. However, Street Fighting Years is an artistic and elegant album that might lack immediate choruses but draws in the listener…

Only in that brief moment in the '90s, when the record industry was grappling with the impact of alternative rock going mainstream and just as Brit-pop was hitting its stride, could the Manics release such a dark, difficult album on a major label, get it played on such pop-oriented programs as Top of the Pops and MTV’s Most Wanted, and make appearances at the Glastonbury and Reading festivals. And then, in a flash, it was over. Richey James went missing on February 1, 1995, and after that The Holy Bible was frozen in amber, forever seen as his last will and testament, just like how In Utero seemed like a suicide note in the wake of Kurt Cobain's suicide in April 1994.

The Stones forsook psychedelic experimentation to return to their blues roots on this celebrated album, which was immediately acclaimed as one of their landmark achievements. A strong acoustic Delta blues flavor colors much of the material, particularly "Salt of the Earth" and "No Expectations," which features some beautiful slide guitar work. Basic rock & roll was not forgotten, however: "Street Fighting Man," a reflection of the political turbulence of 1968, was one of their most innovative singles, and "Sympathy for the Devil," with its fire-dancing guitar licks, leering Jagger vocals, African rhythms, and explicitly satanic lyrics, was an image-defining epic.

Though Clark didn't live to see it, No Other has attained cult status as a visionary recording that employs every available studio means to illustrate the power in Clark's mercurial songwriting. He and producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye entered Village Recorders in L.A. with an elite cast that included Michael Utley and Jesse Ed Davis, Butch Trucks, Lee Sklar, Russ Kunkel, Joe Lala, Chris Hillman, Danny "Kooch" Kortchmar, Howard Buzzy Feiten, and Stephen Bruton. Clark's vocalists included Clydie King, Venetta Fields, Shirley Matthews, the Eagles' Timothy B. Schmidt, and Claudia Lennear. These musicians all brought their best to the material. As a whole, No Other is a sprawling, ambitious work that seamlessly melds country, folk, jazz-inflected-gospel, urban blues, and breezy L.A. rock in a song cycle that reflects the mid-'70s better than anything from the time, yet continues to haunt the present with its relevance…

Now here’s a challenge: to take the fugue, possibly the most complex compositional procedure in Western classical music, and to transform it to reflect the modern age. The ‘New Piano Trio’ - violinist Florian Willeitner, cellist Ivan Turkalj and pianist Alexander Wienand – has taken this task to heart. Rather than being in any way daunted by the towering achievements of the baroque period, these three classically trained and extremely open-minded musicians have risen to the occasion, and achieved a fine balance between the rigour of the art of fugue and the freedom of jazz in their album ‘What the Fugue’.

Krzysztof Komeda has legendary status in Polish jazz, and was also one of the pioneers of European jazz. His wider fame resides largely in his work as a film composer – he wrote the soundtracks for all of Roman Polanski’s early films, notably "Dance of the Vampires" and "Rosemary's Baby". Komeda died in 1969, tragically early, at the age of just 37, but left a hugely influential body of work. Joachim Kühn, now a jazz piano icon in his own right, is a great admirer of Komeda, whom he met in person in Warsaw in 1965. As part of the Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic concert series, curated by Siggi Loch, he performed a major tribute concert to him on 14 October 2022, at which he played in three formats: solo piano, with his New Trio, and alongside Poland’s Atom String Quartet.

Iiro Rantala plays the piano with “emotional magnetism and musical intelligence”; he has a “virtuosic prowess as an improviser capable of enormous idiomatic and emotional range.” (Downbeat) This praise from the American magazine’s review of the Finnish pianist’s third and recent studio-recorded solo album for ACT, “My Finnish Calendar” (2019) sums up the astonishing variety which people who know his playing well might almost start to take for granted. The citation for the 2016 JTI Jazz Prize in Trier also does well to define the way audiences take him to their heart: “Rantala can sweep listeners off their feet, he can be clown and magician, charmer and virtuoso, maverick and humorist.”

When accidents happen, they are normally over in seconds, sometimes minutes; this one has been going on for 20 years. It is two decades since the members of Emile Parisien’s quartet played a jam session together. At the end, they looked at each other in disbelief. They had not just been hit by a collective musical thunderbolt, they also knew they had just brought…well…something…into being. The common ground between them was jazz, but each had all kinds of seeds to sow in it, from classical music and contemporary sounds to rock, electronica and chanson. Saxofonist Emile Parisien, Pianist Julien Touéry, Bassist Ivan Gélugne and drummer Julien Loutelier rip up labels, break down barriers, upset codes, and yet they know exactly where they are headed. There is a shared obsession with narrative. “The central axis of the quartet has always been storytelling,” Parisien emphasizes.

Verdi, Wagner, Beethoven, Bach…Germany’s premer jazz bassist Dieter Ilg has instigated several creative projects, in which he has taken the great composers of Western classical music off in new directions. Here, alongside pianist Rainer Böhm and drummer Patrice Héral, his focus turns to Ravel.

I believe there is only one person who can truly, deeply know you, and that is yourself…even if, inevitably, it doesn't happen all of the time… In the vast, enigmatic expanse of our inner world lies a place we often overlook – a sanctuary untouched by the chaos of everyday life, where dreams and fears intermingle in a delicate dance. This is the realm that shapes our true selves, a place I call Wonderland. It is in this secret haven that our deepest illusions and most fervent hopes reside, guiding us through the labyrinth of life.