At His Lord's Command

Five albums from Joe Satriani – picked seemingly at random but not unappealingly – are collected on this budget-priced 2013 box set. The albums here – Surfing with the Alien, Engines of Creation, Strange Beautiful Music, Is There Love in Space?, Super Colossal – arguably showcase Satriani at his best, even if they don't focus on any particular time…

Soon after his return from America, at the height of the war in 1943, Britten wrote incidental music for a radio play by Edward Sackville-West on the Homeric subject of Odysseus’s return to Penelope. Drawn from the complete score with barely any amendment of the original, and compressed into a 36-minute cantata, with Chris de Souza tailoring the text and Colin Matthews, Britten’s last amanuensis, most tactfully editing the music, the result is extraordinarily powerful. The most important role is that of the narrator, here masterfully taken by Dame Janet Baker who brings the story vividly to life despite the stylized classical language (e.g. “Odysseus, Lord of sea-girt Ithaca” or “His fair wife, white-armed Penelope”). Rather confusingly Athene also appears as a soprano, with the radiant Alison Hagley sounding totally unlike Dame Janet. She is one of a godly quartet of singers who contribute Greek-style commentaries – vocal passages which regularly add to the atmospheric beauty of the piece.

One of the great up-and-coming hard rock singers of our time, Ronnie Romero has announced the release of a unique covers album, "Raised On Radio". The album features covers of classics that have meant something special to Romero over the years and helped forge this talented singer's musical style. Songs by legendary acts like Survivor, Bad Company, Foreigner, Queen, Led Zeppelin, and more are given Romero's talented vocal treatment here. Joining Romero is a stellar cast of musicians, including Srdjan Brankovic (The Big Deal, Alogia) on guitar, Javi Garcia on bass, Andy C (ex-Lords of Black) on drums, and Alessandro Del Vecchio on keyboards, who also handled production, mixing and mastering.

In the early 1970s the island of Jamaica, and in particular its reggae musicians, developed a love affair with small Japanese motor bikes. Honda bikes were eulogised in Big Youth’s ‘S90 Skank’ and Dillinger’s ‘CB200’, whilst their rival was lauded on Shorty The President’s ‘Yamaha Skank’, to name the most obvious examples. The plot of the film ‘Rockers’ revolved around how transformative a motorbike could be, providing a livelihood whilst projecting an image of success in the ghetto. Vivian ‘Yabby You’ Jackson had been fiercely independent as a singer and producer, and the success of his early self-pressed productions, mostly on the Prophets or Vivian Jackson labels, had given him a sense of hard earned autonomy.

Albums came less frequently from Stanley Clarke in the 1990s as film scores took up more and more of his time. Not only that, the ideas and functions of film music play a large role in East River Drive, where selections come as often as not in the form of cue-like vamps, as well as two actual themes from Clarke's scores for the films Poetic Justice and Boyz N the Hood. Oddly enough, Clarke's music benefits from his film immersion, for his compositional ideas are sharper and more sophisticated here, and he applies them to a range of electric music idioms.

Surfing with the Alien belongs to its era like Are You Experienced? belongs to its own – perhaps it doesn't transcend its time the way the Jimi Hendrix Experience's 1967 debut does, but Joe Satriani's 1987 breakthrough can be seen as the gold standard for guitar playing of the mid- to late '80s, an album that captures everything that was good about the glory days of shred…

Yehudi Menuhin - The Complete American Victor Recordings (2016) {6CD Box Set Sony Music 88875198542}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 1.06 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 806 Mb
Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 27 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2016 RCA / Sony Music | 88875198542
Classical / Violin

Between his birth in New York on 22 April 1916 and his death in Berlin on 12 March 1999, Yehudi Menuhin, the son of humble Russian immigrants, grew from a brilliant child prodigy violinist, who made his public concert début in San Francisco in 1924, aged just 7, into not just one of the 20th century s finest and most celebrated artists (as a conductor as well as a soloist), but also a peace campaigner, civil rights activist, spiritual guru and revered senior statesman of the musical world, who ended his days as the Right Honourable the Lord Menuhin of Stoke d Abernon, with a seat in the House of Lords, yet also found time to establish two music schools, a violin competition and an international scheme for taking music out of the concert hall and into the wider community.