Ball Martin Facilitating

After a couple of blatant throwback offerings to the days when heavy metal was joined at the hip with AOR, right down to the campy Sci-Fi oriented album art work that was all the rage circa 1985, former Swiss cover band turned melodic power metal outfit Crystal Ball found themselves in the unique club of Nuclear Blast signed acts…

After a couple of blatant throwback offerings to the days when heavy metal was joined at the hip with AOR, right down to the campy Sci-Fi oriented album art work that was all the rage circa 1985, former Swiss cover band turned melodic power metal outfit Crystal Ball found themselves in the unique club of Nuclear Blast signed acts…

Martin Barre is an English rock musician best known for his work with progressive rock band Jethro Tull, with whom he recorded and toured from their second album in 1969 to the band's initial dissolution in 2012. In the early 1990s he went solo, and has recorded four studio albums and made several guest appearances.

The Mass in E flat was most likely composed for the 1804 Marienfest in Eisenstadt, an annual event celebrated with great pomp and splendor to honor the Fürstin Maria's name day, usually on the weekend following the Mariä Geburt observance (September 8). For the Marienfest, the Fürst usually hosted a banquet, a ball, and a concert, in addition to a military parade and fireworks. He also commissioned a new Mass each year (the late masses of Haydn and the Mass in C of Beethoven owe their existence to the Marienfest).

Dutch reissue label Disky's Golden Greats series of triple CDs of the works of major pop singers takes advantage of the European copyright law that releases recordings more than 50 years old into the public domain. When it comes to people like Billie Holiday and Judy Garland, that puts a substantial number of the artists' recordings at the label's disposal for no charge. Dean Martin is another story. Something of a late bloomer, he didn't start to take off as a recording artist until 1953, when "That's Amore" became his first gold record. But given that this album was released in 2002, that and Martin's later hits were off-limits to Disky.

Some people believe that Eric Clapton introduced the acoustic guitar to pop and rock music with his 'Unplugged' album in 1992. Others think it was MTV who started their legendary concert series of the same name in 1989. The truth is the acoustic guitar, beyond baroque and classical music, has always been there. But in the 1960s the instrument gained an enormous boost in popularity as the instrument of choice favoured by folk legends such as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan to accompany their songs. The decade would see more and more pure instrumentalists placing the acoustic guitar completely at the centre of their music. When the makers of the WDR Rockpalast decided to give this a forum in 1979, they could rely on four great musicians from their own country Germany who had made fingerstyle guitar enormously popular.