4CD career overview of The Long Ryders compiled with both Sid Griffin and Tom Stevens from original tapes (where they exist) - Sid has contributed a track by track breakdown for the set.
Featuring all the original albums as well as demos, singles and rare live recordings. Remastered by Andy Pearce the recordings and in Sid’s opinion have never sounded so good. With a booklet designed by Phil Smee containing many rare photos and memorabilia.
The Long Ryders were formed by several American musicians influenced by Gram Parsons and The Byrds, with country and punk rock influences. The band featured Sid Griffin on guitar, autoharp, and bugle, Stephen McCarthy, guitar, steel guitar, mandolin, and banjo, Des Brewer, as bassist, (later replaced by Tom Stevens) and Greg Sowders, playing drums and percussion…

Hard core ZZ Top and Texas Blues fans know who Rocky Hill is. Very few others do, however, and that's a shame.
Rocky Hill was the brother of ZZ Top bass player and vocalist Dusty Hill, and in fact played in a psychedelic Blues band with Dusty in the late 60's. That band, a trio called American Blues, also included a certain drummer by the name of Frank Beard. Right there you had two-thirds of the future ZZ Top ready to go.
After the band broke up (with three albums to their credit) Beard joined a band being put together by a guitar player/singer named Billy Gibbons. When their bass player left Beard suggested his American Blues bandmate Dusty Hill, and the rest is history…

Que Viva Mingus! is an album dedicated to Mingus' considerable output of Latin-influenced jazz. The selections here include well-known Mingus compositions like "Los Mariachis," "Dizzy Moods," "Ysabel's Table Dance," and "Cumbia and Jazz Fusion," as well as some more obscure titles like "Slippers" and "Moods in Mambo," the album's oldest number, dating from 1949. Among the standout soloists are Randy Brecker on trumpet, John Stubblefield on tenor sax, Steve Slagle on soprano and alto saxes, Ronnie Cuber on baritone sax, and Dave Kikowski on piano. This is exciting, joyous, raucous, and still modern-sounding music, as fresh and challenging as the day it was written. And you can even dance to some of it.

What do you get if you take The Nice and replace Keith Emerson for Patrick Moraz? The answer is simple Refugee, an excellent Symphonic Prog band. The previous story is well known, Keith Emerson, the heart and soul of The Nice left the band to form the first Prog supergroup ELP, so in that instant The Nice ceased to exist. They managed to survive until 1973 with to inferior releases "Elegy" and "Autumn from Spring" which mainly consist of older material and reworks of older tracks including a ghost keyboardist who was already playing in another band. But Lee Jackson and Brian Davidson wanted to revive the band, so they searched for another keyboardist who could replace Keith and they found him. The Swiss born virtuoso Patrick Moraz left Mainhorse so they recruited him and the result was incredibly solid…

Esoteric Recordings are proud to announce the release of newly remastered and sonically enhanced editions of the albums recorded for the RCA and Arista labels by Vangelis. All of these reissues come in deluxe digipak designs, with new masters personally supervised by Vangelis.
The magnificent "Heaven & Hell" was the first album by Vangelis to be released by RCA Records in 1975 and was also the first album to be recorded at his personal studio in London, Nemo. This epic work in two parts featured the English Chamber Choir (conducted by Guy Protheroe) and Vangelis' first collaboration with Jon Anderson, "So Long Ago, So Clear".
This Esoteric Recordings release (undertaken with the full approval and supervision of Vangelis himself) features a booklet that restores the original album artwork.

Nick Saloman of the Bevis Frond once again invites us to join him in the obscure pleasures of little-known pop, R&B, and jazz instrumental sides of the '60s and '70s with this collection. A number of the selections featured on Return of the Instro-Hipsters are so obscure that even Saloman isn't sure just who is responsible for them (though he offers some educated guesses on the artists behind such names as Sharks, Oliver Bone, and the Masked Phantom), but there are a good share of solid grooves and kicky melodies to be found here from a number of gifted little-knowns. If you went to the movies in the '70s, "Soul Thing" by Tony Newman will sound familiar, while flautist Harold McNair solos over a Dave Brubeck-influenced piano groove on "The Hipster," Jerry Allen demonstrates new uses for game calls on "Fuzzy Duck," Thunder Road's synthesized version of "Peter Gunn" beats Art of Noise's variation on the theme by more than 15 years, "The Brooke Bond Beat" by Cliff Adams may be the most swingin' tea commercial ever, and the Outer Limits serve up some tough, moody rock, appropriately titled "Black Boots".

Masterpieces of Baroque piano literature, in critically acclaimed recordings by pianists with a fine sensibility for the 18th century. Recordings made between 2005 and 2023; new booklet essay; an ideal budget introduction to the world of the Baroque keyboard, full of elegant dances and virtuoso playing.

The core works include Beethoven's 4th piano concerto live with Karajan in 1952, Mozart's Double Piano concerto with Geza Anda, and Mozart's 19th piano concerto with Ferenc Fricsay in 1952, as well as Bach's toccata and Beethoven's 18th sonata, and piano works by Schubert and Mozart included in the 1952 live performance, making this the definitive album of Haskil's art! Above all, the Schumann piano concerto with Carl Schuricht in 1955 is a masterpiece among masterpieces in which everything Haskil has to offer.

Alone among Frenchwomen of her era, Louise Farrenc (née Dupont) (1804-1875) achieved real fame as a composer during her lifetime. She was also a brilliant pianist and was the only woman teacher of any instrument at the Paris Conservatoire in the whole of the 19th century. She had come to this rare acclaim as the result of a liberal upbringing amongst a family of noted painters and sculptors living in an enclave of similarly artistic and intellectual families at the Sorbonne. She studied with Reicha from her teens, but her lessons had to be private because women were not allowed to study as regular pupils at the Conservatoire. She wrote three symphonies; Nos. 1 & 3 are contained on an earlier issue from cpo featuring the same artists, the NDR Radiophilharmonie (Hannover) conducted by Johannes Goritzki, also available (and favorably reviewed) here at Amazon. This CD contains the middle symphony and two much earlier overtures, simply called 'No. 1' and 'No. 2.'

This substantial 25CD set offers a fascinating journey through one century of Russian Chamber Music. All Russian composers were active in this genre and often composed their most profound, personal music for it.

The Sanremo Music Festival 2020 (Italian: 70º Festival della Canzone Italiana di Sanremo 2020) was the 70th annual Sanremo Music Festival, a television song contest held in the Teatro Ariston of Sanremo and organised and broadcast by RAI. The show was held between 4 and 8 February 2020.