2019 Covers

Avid Jazz continues with its Three Classic Albums plus series with a re-mastered 2CD release from Miles Davis complete with original artwork, liner notes and personnel details. "'Round About Midnight", "Milestones", "Kind Of Blue" and plus two live versions of "So What".

The young mezzo-soprano Adèle Charvet joins Alpha for several projects. In 2017 she received the Prize of the Verbier Festival Academy. While she has already attracted attention in the opera house, Adèle Charvet is also passionately interested in the song repertory. For her first album, she has devised a very personal programme, deriving in part from her musical partnership and friendship with the pianist Susan Manoff.

South Of Reality, The Claypool Lennon Delirium’s epic sophomore album might be just the antidote this sick world needs. Music so potent it could repel an asteroid impact from space, these seasoned warriors of psychedelia have crafted timeless songs that may as well be chiseled in stone. The monolithic dream team’s record was produced by Les Claypool and Sean Lennon themselves, and engineered and mixed by Les Claypool at his own Rancho Relaxo studio in Sonoma County, California. Grab your goggles and a month’s supply of Kool-Aid because The Claypool Lennon Delirium is about to take you for a ride on a rock ‘n’ roll rocket ship, and frankly you may never come back!

The young mezzo-soprano Adèle Charvet joins Alpha for several projects. In 2017 she received the Prize of the Verbier Festival Academy. While she has already attracted attention in the opera house, Adèle Charvet is also passionately interested in the song repertory. For her first album, she has devised a very personal programme, deriving in part from her musical partnership and friendship with the pianist Susan Manoff.

Robag Wruhme is a producer who likes to take his time over his LPs - Venq Tolep comes a full eight years after his previous album Thora Vukk (also out through Pampa). When you listen to this thing the care that Wruhme has put into his craft is most evident. The cornerstone of Venq Tolep is a pretty, minimal tech-house style similar to DJ Koze, and the tracks in this mode (‘Venq Tolep’, ‘Komalh’) contain carefully-crafted synth tones and crisp drum programming. Ambient music and contemporary classical composition are also in play on Venq Tolep, styles which only add to the record’s sweet vibe.

Renowned Montreal/Cairo-based composer Sam Shalabi returns with his exhilarating and utterly genre-bending big band Land Of Kush. The trenchantly-titled Sand Enigma is the orchestra’s long awaited fourth album - its first in six years, following 2013’s The Big Mango, Shalabi’s critically-acclaimed love letter to Cairo, written and recorded during the Arab Spring. While the intervening years have obviously been devastating and disenchanting in so many ways, Sand Enigma bristles with defiant exuberance, restless creative energy, and electrifying cross-cultural expression. The album is a wildly diverse and hugely compelling tour de force of modern composition that pulses with emotion and experimentation, blending avant-garde, psychedelic, Middle Eastern, out-jazz, electronic and improv/free music tropes to stunning effect…

Jeff Mills really loves the Moon, and once again here he returns to the subject in order to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Moon landing. Moon - The Area Of Influence is quality Mills material in that style we know and love, worthy of delivering on the grand cosmic dreams of the Moon concept. Shifting between spaced-out synth endeavors and cosmic techno workouts, this is one of the legendary Techno missionary's finest and most focused LP's.

The young mezzo-soprano Adèle Charvet joins Alpha for several projects. In 2017 she received the Prize of the Verbier Festival Academy. While she has already attracted attention in the opera house, Adèle Charvet is also passionately interested in the song repertory. For her first album, she has devised a very personal programme, deriving in part from her musical partnership and friendship with the pianist Susan Manoff. Both of them have drawn on their New York childhoods: ‘Long Time Ago’ weaves together the threads of our lives’ says Susan. Adèle continues: ‘The musical journey is immense, from the central repertory of American music – Barber, Copland, Ives – to cabaret songs (Heggie and Bolcom), with a detour by way of England: Britten, Vaughan Williams … For example, Jake Heggie’s Amor describes the journey across the city of faux-naif sex maniac. The police, the ice cream vendor, the gospel choir all shout “AMORI” when they see him. Samuel Barber’s Solitary Hotel is like an Edward Hopper painting in music, Aaron Copland’s At the River invites pilgrims to the church meeting: “Yes, we’ll gather at the river” … The programme unfolds like a wheel, a cycle that traverses the cardinal points of life.’

Omar Akram's piano-driven, instrumental music elegantly defies borders and has played a crucial role in defining modern New Age and World music. In 2013, he became the first Afghan-American to win a Grammy Award with ''Echoes Of Love''. In 2013, he also released ''Daytime Dreamer,'' presenting an enchanting blend of World, New Age and electronica music that lures listeners with masterful musicianship and his well-traveled wisdom. ''Destiny'' was produced by the legendary Walter Afanasieff and features an eighty-piece symphony orchestra conducted by Shardad Rohani (Yanni: Live at the Acropolis).