The North with Norma Winstone, Wheeler with Words, showcases international collective of top jazz musicians from Denmark, Sweden, Canada and the UK,celebrating the legacy of one of the most significant composers of the past fifty years, Kenny Wheeler (1930-2014). Long-time Wheeler collaborator and legendary UK vocalist Norma Winstone is the featured artist of the group. Winstone collaborated on numerous ECM recordings with Wheeler, including his iconic Music for Large and Small Ensembles and their celebrated “Azimuth” trio albums with pianist John Taylor. Winstone’s lyrics beautifully match the melancholy of Wheeler’s melodies and her voice is certainly entwined in the fabric of his music.

Monk's Dream is the Columbia Records debut release featuring the Thelonious Monk Quartet: Monk (piano), Charlie Rouse (tenor sax), John Ore (bass), and Frankie Dunlop (drums). Jazz scholars and enthusiasts alike also heralded this combo as the best Monk had been involved with for several years. Although he would perform and record supported by various other musicians, the tight - almost telepathic - dimensions that these four shared has rarely been equalled in any genre. By the early '60s, bop had become considered passé by artists as well as fans looking for the next musical trend. This is coupled with the fact that discerning Monk fans would have undoubtedly recognized many of these titles from several live recordings issued at the end of his tenure on Riverside. Not to belabor the point, however, but precious few musicians understood the layer upon layer of complexities and challenges that Monk's music created…

This Esoteric Recordings edition is newly remastered from the original tapes and includes four bonus tracks recorded for the original Airwaves library music project. The reissue also features an illustrated booklet with new essay and interview with Gordon Giltrap.
For over forty years Gordon has enjoyed the well-deserved reputation as one of Britains greatest guitar players. He made his first recordings in the 1960s as folk artist, but by late 70s he had crossed into the Progressive Rock genre. A trio of albums on the Electric Records label earned Gordon much praise and an ever-increasing fan base. In 1979 he released the album The Peacock Party for PVK Records, a highly successful project. 1982s Airwaves was his next album…

Nightsessions (1998). Three tracks lasting over sixty six minutes in total, more vintage kit on the cover, analogue sounds, mellotron for fans of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream. ‘Apocalypsis ll’ and most of this CD in fact is very much Tangerine Dream in ‘Encore’ and ‘Sorcerer’ mode. Spooky atmospherics and strange alien animal noises lurch from the speakers. Calm descends and electricity arcs across the atmosphere to be joined by sonic booms then a beefy sequence jerks into life. The lead lines could have been taken from ‘Encore’, ‘Force Majeure’ or even ‘Romance 76’ by Peter Baumann. After about ten minutes there is a welcome return to the spookyness so that we can get our breath back though the heart keeps pounding. The atmospherics sound a little like Edgar Froese’s ‘Epsilon In Malaysian Pale’ but with a bit more bite…

Compiled from pieces that were clearly composed much earlier as well as from more recent works, the Deuxième Livre pays homage to its two masters and calls for tonalities that it had not yet employed; it evokes the past and the great lutenists of that time with the Pavane and yet also contains important innovations. It is truly a transitional work: published at the very dawn of the century, it opened the doors to the important stylistic changes that French music would undergo during the Age of Enlightenment.

François Devienne (1759-1803), sometimes nicknamed the French Mozart, was equaled famed for his talents as a flautist and a bassoonist. He was one of the first professors at the Paris Conservatoire, established in the early years of the Republic. Devienne devoted a large proportion of his compositions, in several different forms, to the two instruments of which he was a virtuoso exponent. The programme presents several of his trios, which combine the violin and the cello with the two wind instruments in turn. These works possess all the charm of the galant aesthetic that developed in the late eighteenth century, along with a certain penchant for virtuosity.

Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets, and Heine. The Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition presents all Schubert’s Lieder, over 700 songs, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Thanks to the Bärenreiter’s Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (New Schubert Edition), Tübingen, which uses primary sources, the performers have been able to benefit from the most recent research of the editorial team.

As the founding father of Finnish music, Jean Sibelius is the measure of all things to such an extent that an outside observer may easily miss the abundance of talented masters who also practiced the art of composition quite successfully in the land of a thousand lakes. One of them was Erkki Melartin. Not ten years younger than the composer of Finlandia, he also left us a significant oeuvre that repeatedly begs a comparison to his older colleague – of course, it is a comparison whose results are subject to debate. To be fair, we can discover a phrase here or there that reminds us of Sibelius; occasionally, some of Mahler's vocabulary may have sneaked in as well; but the persona whose legacy is six mighty symphonies has blazed his own independent trail away from the Romantic tradition, leading us relentlessly to an unheard cosmos.