"alain Parson"

A professional musician at a very early age, Alain Caron is a considerably accomplished bass player. He attended the Berklee College of Music. One of his first excursions into jazz was playing with the Vic Vogel Big Band during the 1970s. In 1977 he co-founded the group UZEB. Their first album, Live in Bracknell, was released in 1981. The following year saw the group putting out Fast Emotion. The next album was 1984's You Be Easy. 1985 saw them release Between the Lines. Two more live albums, Live a l'Olympia and Absolutely Live came out in 1986. The group released Noisy Nights and Live in Europe in 1988. The following year saw the release of UZEB Club. World Tour '90 was released in 1990. In 1992, Caron formed his own group, le Band and released the first album by that group, Alain Caron – le Band.

Alain Mallet is a veteran pianist who has been working with artists like Paul Simon, Phil Woods and others for over 25 years. Just a few short years ago, he finally decided to record his first album as a leader. Alain lists a diverse group of influences at work here, including Miles Davis, Peter Gabriel, Rachmaninov, Stevie Wonder, Salif Keita and others, and all that diversity shows through in his music. For example, opening track, “Till I Dance (In Your Arms Again)” opens with a Middle Eastern flavor, before there is a shift and the bands kicks into a Latin American rhythm in 5/4 time. Its this sort of mixing influences from all over the world that best describes the music on “Mutt Slang”, as different sections of tracks may take us to Africa, Israel, Latin America or some imaginative places that don’t quite exist outside the musical realm…

A solitaire in French is a single mounted jewel, a concept that seems less than apt for the rather hefty works recorded here by British pianist Kathryn Stott. But this fine recital holds together in another way: Ravel, who so often provides the temporal endpoint for traditional piano recitals, is here, to a greater or lesser extent, the launching point for the other three composers featured. Stott's reading of the neoclassical Le Tombeau de Couperin is beautifully precise and balanced, catching the economy of this Baroque-style suite to the hilt. That economy carries over into the later works, even the rarely performed Piano Sonata of Henri Dutilleux, a work that deftly fuses Ravel's sense of classical forms with a largely dissonant language. The opening Prelude and Fugue of Jehan Alain, actually two separate works that are reasonably enough combined here, is another seldom-played piece that makes an arresting curtain-raiser, and the final "Le baiser de l'Enfant Jésus" of Messiaen, part of the giant Vingt regards sur l'Enfant Jésus, is the splendid climax of the whole, its spiritual, dreamlike ascent at the end superbly controlled. Better still is the sound, recorded at Hallé St. Peters in Manchester: it creates a hypnotic effect all its own.

Comme l’indique son titre, Neuf, le neuvième album d’Alain Chamfort, renoue avec son instrument premier : le piano. Après la veine electro du précédent album, Trouble, le chanteur s’inscrit dans le registre de l’acoustique auprès de Steve Nieve, comparse d’Elvis Costello. L’album Neuf a la particularité de naître d’abord de l’idée d’un CD promo et d’une série de concerts à l’Opéra-Comique. Suivra une tournée avec Steve Nieve dans une formule piano-voix.

The number of Aho recordings has grown substantially since my 2009 MusicWeb survey, The Music of Kalevi Aho. Initially, that focused on BIS releases, as the label’s championed this composer’s work from the start – eClassical lists 35 albums so far – but others are showing interest, too. Which is why we’ve now set up a dedicated, easy-reference index, with links to every single Aho review published by MWI. Our feisty Finn, 70 this year, is a fast worker – I reviewed three of his latest albums just a few months ago – so all credit to BIS for recording his new pieces with commendable speed. Even then, there’s still a lot waiting in the wings.

Jean-Jacques Kantorow follows his critically acclaimed recording of music by Édouard Lalo with a second disc featuring two further works that were originally intended for Sarasate, the brief Fantaisie-ballet on themes from Lalo’s ballet Namouna, and the large-scale Concerto russe. The Concerto russe borrows themes from two wedding songs included by Rimsky-Korsakov in his collection 100 Russian Folk Songs.