Ardour Teebs

Brainfeeder kingpin Flying Lotus has a talent for stargazing. The label's ranks include jazz fusionists (Thundercat, Austin Peralta), psych-rap futurists (Samiyam, Teebs), and the endearingly inscrutable (Matthewdavid) existing together in dazzling constellation. But when Baths signed to Anticon, Brainfeeder lost their experimental pop artist, the kind of producer who could marry head-swiveling beats to ghostly vocals.
Consider that niche filled. Lapalux, aka Stuart Howard, makes a similar type of sparkling deconstructed pop. He fits the Brainfeeder aesthetic perfectly, as he likes to envision his songs as aural paintings– a visual tie-in obviously appealing to a synaesthete like FlyLo. Lapalux's snares first started snapping on his remix of Thundercat's "For Love I Come"…

Jaga Jazzist, the Norwegian multi-instrumental boundary-busters, may occupy a niche, but it feels like an enduringly spacious and fertile one, where sounds that recall everything from Weather Report to big-band jazz, krautrock, Radiohead or even the Pat Metheny Group intertwine. Last year’s 20th anniversary retrospective was fascinatingly diverse, but Starfire – conceived in composer Lars Horntveth’s new Los Angeles home, rather than in Oslo – is a more densely layered and studio-dominated deployment of this band’s awesome resources. The title track is classic Jazzist: a sound like the Shadows driven by a marching-band thump skids through power-chord guitar hooks and Zappaesque melodic zigzags; the atmospheric Big City Music is a masterly balance of quickfire rhythm-section ingenuity and the instrumental diversity of guitars, keys and brass. The tunes remain quirkily dramatic and the thematic scene-shifting spectacular, but a little thinning-out would have let Jaga Jazzist’s uniquely mercurial music breathe more.

Jaga Jazzist, the multi-genre, multi-instrumental Norwegian collective, celebrate their 20th anniversary with this limited-edition vinyl box set. The box includes 2001’s sparingly jazzy Livingroom Hush album, out-takes from it, and a collection of producers’ remixes from 2012’s Live With Britten Sinfonia.

This is three-CD compilation released by Mellow Records as a King Crimson tribute. Among the performers are some of the most prominent contemporary progressive bands, with a wide variety ranging from the old-fashioned spaghetti-prog of Germinale or Malibran to the jazzcore ardour of Anatrofobia and Caboto. Some of the cover versions are quite calligraphic while others reshape the compositions more deeply (Nema Niko and Comfort bring in some electronica, Mariposa show their chamber-punk attitude - and their awful English pronounciation, Mosaic Orchestra almost have a fanfare sound), but they're all substantially faithful and well-played, with many great renditions and a very good overall result.

The British mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, twice nominated for a Grammy, here performs a collection of songs by Robert Schumann, which combines two song cycles from the extremely prolific song year 1840 with several songs from the composer’s last years. She is accompanied by Eugene Asti. Sarah Connolly fell in love with Schumann’s songs in her youth. She has sung them since her early days as a performer and in the booklet she and Eugene Asti write, ‘at the heart of Schumann’s music on this recording lie a profound melancholy and a personal and completely honest, open-hearted empathy for the poetry, which is totally disarming. All the stories and situations depicted in these songs were so much a part of the composer’s own life experience that we just cannot help but be touched and moved by them. Perhaps it is for these reasons that our love for Schumann is especially great, and we feel privileged to be able to share this extraordinary music with you’.

EMI Classics releases an exciting new recording of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances and The Bells. These two Rachmaninov masterpieces, performed by one of the world’s most renowned orchestras under their celebrated principal conductor Sir Simon Rattle. This is a rare chance to hear Sir Simon’s interpretations of these great works. Towards the end of his life, the composer himself said of The Bells “I worked on this composition with feverish ardour; and it remains of all my works the one I love the most”. Of the Symphonic Dances, written shortly before his death, he said “I don’t know how it happened, it must have been my last spark”.

Redesigned since it was first seen at the London Coliseum in 2011, Deborah Warner’s elegant and untricksy production of Tchaikovsky’s lyrical romance transferred last autumn to the Metropolitan Opera. Offering as it does a beautifully detailed and sensitively characterised reading of the piece, Chekhovian in atmosphere and period, it merits a warmer critical reception than it has received on either side of the Atlantic.

Tchaikovsky’s most famous work, The Nutcracker, is presented in this stunning new recording by the world’s greatest orchestra, the Berliner Philharmoniker, under the baton of their celebrated conductor Sir Simon Rattle. This musical fairytale follows Clara and her unusual prince and protector, The Nutcracker, through adventures and exotic delights in the magical Kingdom of Sweets.