"alain Parson"

Though based in multiple musical realms, pianist Alain Mallet's ambitious Mutt Slang projects coalesce into a world that exudes 'exotic' yet ultimately feels familiar, the roots of its various components meeting somewhere deep within. Sharing the musical landscape with young musicians from Palestine, Brazil, Italy, Israel, Japan, Bulgaria, Panama, Ireland, Puerto Rico and the US, the complexity of their backgrounds - musically, ethnically, and otherwise, permeates the session, suffusing Mallet's compositions with an undeniable energy and life. "Mutt Slang is very much the result of this convergence of all the musics I love, of digging to get to their shared soul and rebuild something fresh, in order to discover where I belong and give others a chance to do the same." - Alain Mallet

Known as the ‘First Lady of the organ’, Marie-Claire Alain was a strikingly mature, creative and intuitive artist. Spanning four centuries of music, from Baroque masterpieces by the likes of Couperin and Grigny, through cornerstones of the French organ repertoire by Widor, Vierne and Messiaen, to two discs of works by her brother Jehan, this collection is testament to her vast and impressively wide-ranging recording legacy.

This 1990 Digital Recording is a must for Bach's CD Collector. Recorded using historic organs on which some were played himself by Bach. Marie-Claire Alain's playing here is more in historic and faithful to performance practice. The tempos and the registrations are well planned and the approach of playing is spontaneous and simple. The spirituality of the performer is so evident here.

It was in these terms that Ferruccio Busoni greeted the publication in 1908 of the 14 Bagatelles, in which Béla Bartók conveyed the violent aesthetic impact of his discovery of authentic Hungarian peasant music. Over the next 20 years, up to the magisterial Sonata of 1926, he indefatigably refined an innovative pianistic language: pungent, dissonant, percussive, with multiple new playing techniques, that was to influence the entire 20th century. A master of every style, from Haydn to Boulez by way of Chopin and Chabrier, Alain Planès is revealed here as a Bartókian of the front rank.

The chamber music of Bohuslav Martinu, more French than Czech, suggests the music Debussy might have written had he lived to experience the full flowering of the neo-classic movement. No one would claim that it has a large emotional range, but for the imaginative use of textures within a restricted environment it's unmatched. The simplest pizzicato seems to carry all kinds of suspense, even as the general mood of the music remains blithe, even sunny in the case of the Sonata for flute and piano, H. 308, written as Martinu waited out World War II on Cape Cod.

Double Vie est un album live du musicien, chanteur et compositeur français Alain Chamfort, enregistré au Casino de Paris en avril 1987 et sorti en mars 1988. Il contient les succès d'Alain Chamfort depuis 1979 ainsi qu'un medley de deux ses premiers tubes du début des années 1970 (Madona madona, Adieu mon bébé chanteur) et d'un titre de Claude François, C'est la même chanson.

Alain Jean-Marie is a French jazz pianist. He made his first recordings in 1969 (released in 1997 as piano biguines). At the same time he played regularly with the trio of Winston Berkley and Jean Claude Montredon. In 1973, he moved to Paris, where he accompanied jazz musicians such as Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt, Art Farmer, Johnny Griffin, Lee Konitz, and Max Roach. In 1979, he debuted with his own trio (Al Levitt on percussion, Gus Nemeth and later Riccardo Del Fra on bass). Since the 1980s, he has regularly performed with Barney Wilen, including as a duo on albums such as La Notenbleue (1986) and Dreamtime (1992). In 1986, he regularly accompanied Dee Dee Bridgewater. In 1987 he recorded the album Latin Alley in a duo with Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen…

His Debussy and Chopin recordings for harmonia mundi already offer ample evidence that Alain Planès is highly adept at selecting a period instrument best suited for the repertoire.