Adam Liaw's Asian Cookery School

For his second album for Chandos, the flute virtuoso Adam Walker explores the music of British composers with pianist Huw Watkins. Vaughan Williams’s Suite de ballet was commissioned by the French flute virtuoso Louis Fleury (who had given the première of Debussy’s Syrinx). The work uses eighteenth-century French dance forms, a common practice in ‘neo-classical’ composition. Bax’s Four Pieces rescue music from an abandoned ballet originally conceived for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Sir Lennox Berkeley’s Sonatina was originally written for treble recorder; James Galway’s championship of the piece made it a staple of the flute repertoire. Howard Fergusson’s Three Sketches were composed intermittently over a period of twenty years. The theme of the third piece is a Hindu melody, ‘Koyalinya bole ambuvan’ (Cuckoos sing in the mango tree). Sonatas by York Bowen and William Alwyn complete this varied and engaging programme.

The Sons Of Adam—a lean, mean rock’n’roll machine from the Hollywood rock scene of the mid-1960s—quite literally blew the competition off the stage. Led by influential lead guitarist Randy Holden (Other Half / Blue Cheer), the Sons boasted an affable frontman in Jac Ttanna (Genesis) and an incomparable rhythm section in Mike Port and Michael Stuart-Ware (Love). Schooled in surf, emboldened by the British Invasion, the band had a fearsome reputation as a live act. In this unprecedented anthology, Saturday’s Sons features a previously unreleased 1966 full concert performance from San Francisco’s famed Avalon Ballroom, a recording so powerfully dynamic that few listeners will doubt the band’s masterful live presence. The quartet enjoyed a brief but incandescent three-year career which is fully documented on this compilation with rare 45s, studio outtakes and demo recordings, including fiery surf material from their early incarnation The Fender IV, and the legendary single “Feathered Fish”, donated to the band by Love’s Arthur Lee.

French Works for Flute is the Chandos début of Adam Walker, ably accompanied by James Baillieu. The pair is joined by the violist Timothy Ridout in Duruflé’s Prélude, récitatif et variations.

Mother Mojo was an excellent follow-up to Satan & Adam's first-rate debut, Harlem Blues. The duo hasn't abandoned their minimalist guitar and harp blues, but there is a loose energy that keeps the music fresh and consistently engaging.
The pair's sound is beefed up intermittently by percussionist Sammy Figueroa, but their telepathic sense of interplay emerges unscathed. Satan, billed as Sterling Magee when he recorded for Ray Charles' Tangerine label during the late 1960s ("Seventh Avenue," a remake of Magee's "Oh Wasn't She Pretty" from that era, is irresistible) owns a wonderfully raspy voice not unlike Brother Ray's. He powerfully delivers the churning title cut, the message songs "Freedom For My People" and "Ain't Nobody Better Than Nobody," and a torrid remake of Solomon Burke's "Cry To Me."

Adam Shulman's festive release on Cellar music takes a clutch of well-loved Christmas melodies and reflects them through the lens of a 70s funk/fusion group. Recorded at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco in the same room as Herbie Hancock's seminal album Headhunters with Shulman on Rhodes, Wurlitzer, organ and synths, Jesse Levit on saxophone, Jason Muscat on bass and Jeff Marrs on drums.