IN+OUT Records has unearthed another treasure of Eugen Cicero: „Lullabies“, a trio studio recording from 1995 with Decebal Badila on bass and Ringo Hirth on drums. This album was originally only released for the Japanese market and is now available for the first time.
This is an intriguing set, featuring the combination of drummer Andrew Cyrille, flutist James Newton and bassist Lisle Atkinson, a different kind of power trio. The music ranges from fairly free flights to "Inch Worm" (arranged by Sheila Jordan) and two versions of "A Tribute to Bu" (for Art Blakey). Due to the variety of the material (mostly originals) and the consistent brilliance of Newton, this CD is recommended to fans of advanced jazz.
A former member of Betty Carter's band, Green shows on this set that the word on him was correct; he's both an aggressive and sensitive stylist, able to rip through songs and make quick, yet correct chord changes. Yet he can also play a passionate ballad and not rush through it, instead developing and then completing his solos impressively.
La Discotheque Ideale Classique brings together the masterpieces of 47 composers (Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Handel, Ravel, Wagner …) performed by the greatest artists of the prestigious Erato-Warner Classics catalog. The 100 CDs of the box, which contain more than 100 hours of listening, allow you to rediscover the essential works of the classical repertoire.
"When the ci-hitty gets into a bu-hoys sy-hist-em, he loses his a-hankerin' for the cou-huntry." So intones W.C. Fields in his Yukon-based Victorian absurdist two-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933). However, if the city you lived in was Salzburg, Austria, the idea of "a-hankerin' for the cou-huntry" was a popular one, and Salzburg's court composer Johann Michael Haydn paid tribute to it through these two little "Abbey operettas" written not for a civic theater, but for the theater at the Benedictine University in Salzburg. Haydn's singspiel Die Hochzeit auf der Alm (The Wedding on the Alpine Pasture, 1763) was intended as a mere opener to Salzburg scribbler Florian Reichssiegel's ponderous five-act Latin tragedy Pietas conjugalis in Sigismundo et Maria; however, it was the singspiel that won the day.