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For Tony Award-winning performer Idina Menzel, the holidays haven’t always come without complexities. “My parents announced that they were separating on Thanksgiving morning,” she tells Apple Music. When Menzel gave birth to her son and got remarried, these moments granted her the opportunity to rewrite her version of the holidays. Billy Porter, Josh Gad, Ariana Grande, and husband Aaron Lohr help her usher in the season with a medley of rejuvenated favorites and spirited originals. “I wanted it to feel like you could be at a great holiday party back in the ’40s or ’50s,” Menzel says. “I also want you to be able to decorate your tree, put on the music, and feel excited for the holidays.” Here, Menzel talks through some of Christmas: A Season of Love’s most festive moments.

This recording, from 1985, presents bandoneon master Dino Saluzzi in a small-group setting, accompanied by some of the finest musicians in the ECM roster: Palle Mikkelborg (trumpet and flugelhorn), Charlie Haden (bass) and Pierre Favre (percussion). As usual with ECM releases, the recording is crystalline - their audio standards have always set the highest standards for sound reproduction, clear and pristine. It puts the listener right into the room with the players.

France, 1615: Louis XIII marries Anne of Austria, Infanta of Spain. The new queen arrives at the French court accompanied by her Spanish courtiers; French composers are inspired by the Spanish vogue and write airs de cour in this new language. Spain, 1701: Philip V marries a young princess of French descent, Maria Luisa Gabriella of Savoy. The Queen’s music master is none other than Santiago de Murcia, who - like Gaspar Sanz - tries his hand at pieces in French style in homage to his queen.

Not every grey is also an Eminence - but this person here definitely is: August-Wilhelm Scheer, baritone saxophonist and a passionate jazz musician, and for many years through the August-Wilhelm-Scheer-Foundation for Science and Art a sponsor of the jazz scene. He says, the jazz makes him free - like a bird in the air. If somebody like him who has earned his money as an enterpriser and university professor and impresses in more than one area, gets together with a legend of the jazz - or we better say, with another legend - something amazing can be expected. Especially, if the second legend is none less than Jimmy Cobb. Together one devotes himself to the work of a third, also a legend of jazz Thelonious Monk, to whom Scheer would like to raise a monument and give respect on A NYC tributes…