20th Century Maestros

Recorded in 2000 at the world's most important festival for 20th century music, the Musik Triennale Cologne, this concert programme successfully set out to capture the great wealth and diversity of modern classical music.

Robert Kajanus (1856–1933) is likely to be known primarily as a conductor rather than as a composer. He thus joins a list of other illustrious maestros whose conducting careers eclipsed their creative activities. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Jean Martinon, Paul Kletzki, Antal Dorati, and currently Esa-Pekka Salonen are just a few of the names that come to mind. Kajanus is recognized today chiefly as one of the early champions of Sibelius, and his recordings of most of Sibelius’s symphonies, though a bit hard to come by, can still be had.

On March 27, 2020, the dynamic young saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin delivers her masterwork, Pursuance: The Coltranes. A cohesive walk through the lineage of the jazz artform, Benjamin’s third full-length release as a leader pays homage to two of the greatest musical innovators of the 20th century, John and Alice Coltrane. As Abiodun Oyewole iterates as part of Benjamin’s rendition of Coltrane’s classic “Acknowledgment” off of the groundbreaking album ‘A Love Supreme’, “John Coltrane was a vessel, taking us to the house of god, he spoke to god in the language god knew, in the language of sound.

Eddie Shu & Bob Hardaway - Jazz Practitioners (1954-55) {Bethlehem Toshiba-EMI TOCJ-62084 rel 2001}
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© 1954-55, 2001 Bethlehem / Toshiba-EMI | TOCJ-62084
Jazz / Cool / Bop / Trumpet / Saxophone

Not that this artist isn't pretty cool; far from it. Credited either as Bob Hardaway or Robert Hardaway, he spent much of the 20th century at the top of the studio musician scene in Los Angeles, playing a bewildering array of woodwind instruments — even bass clarinet, English horn, and alto flute — on a tall stack of records that stylistically give the impression of having been snatched at random out of a burning used record store, the Partridge Family, Dinah Washington, Bonnie Raitt, and his efforts with the Eddie Shu/Bob Hardaway Jazz Practitioners among them.