Big I.d.e.a.s.

1923-1927 (1990). Pianist Bennie Moten led one of the finest jazz bands on record in the 1920s, a group that included many of the top musicians of the Midwest. On the first of four Classics CDs - all of which are recommended to vintage jazz collectors - that reissue the master takes of all of Moten's recordings, the band quickly evolves from a sextet in 1923 to a solid 11-piece orchestra. Despite a few novelty effects (including clarinetist Woody Walder occasionally getting weird sounds by playing only the mouthpiece of his horn), even the most primitive numbers on this set are quite enjoyable. Highlights include the original version of "South" (Moten's big hit), "Goofy Dust," "Thick Lip Blues" and "Sugar"…

Let's be frank: Let's Be Frank, Trisha Yearwood's tribute to Frank Sinatra and the Great American Songbook, is a lifetime in the making. Growing up in Georgia, Yearwood spent a childhood listening to the songs of Ol' Blue Eyes and dreaming about how she could one day make them her own. With Let's Be Frank, Yearwood brings her trademark country pipes to reinvent 11 classic tracks, as well as writing an original tune with husband Garth Brooks, "For the Last Time." "I've wanted to do this for over 20 years," Yearwood tells Apple Music. "Finally, the stars all aligned." Here, the Grammy winner and Grand Ole Opry member takes us through her labor of love, track by track.

This is an attractive eight-CD set (+ Bonus CD), whose discs are also available as eight separate releases, that could have been a great reissue but settled for being merely quite good. To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the first jazz recording, RCA released a disc apiece covering each of the past eight decades. In listening to the music straight through, one becomes aware of RCA's strengths and weaknesses as a jazz label. Victor was one of the most important jazz labels during the 1920s, '30s and '40s, catching on to bebop a little late (1946) but still documenting many classic recordings. By the 1950s, the label's attention was wandering elsewhere; it missed free jazz almost completely in the '60s, and in the last three decades has only had a few significant artists, mostly Young Lions whose output sounds conservative compared to the earlier masters…

Grammy and Emmy-winning musician and actor Harry Connick, Jr. today announces his first album for the famed Verve Records label. True Love: A Celebration of Cole Porter will be released on 25 October.

Jerry González took a global view of jazz in creating his unique brand of improvised music. While his trumpet and flügelhorn reflected the influence of Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, his personal cultural roots gave him a natural understanding of Afro-Cuban rhythms. As he explained to The Detroit News, "I am bilingual - I speak Spanish and English. I can play the blues and I can play the rumba." Launching his musical career in 1970 as a member of Dizzy Gillespie's band, González briefly joined Eddie Palmieri in the group El Son the following year. He soon left to join timbale player Manny Oquendo's band, Conjunto Libre…

For the first time, Little Steven’s music from the ground-breaking first original series, Lilyhammer, which ended in 2014, has been collected together and will be released as two separate albums – Lilyhammer The Score – Volume 1: Jazz and Volume 2: Folk, Rock, Rio, Bits And Pieces – on CD, digital and 180g black vinyl on 12 July via Wicked Cool/UMe.

Countertenor Max Emanuel Cencic has emerged as a new star of the specialty partly through fearless programming, and this collection of Arie Napoletane, Neapolitan arias or arias from Naples, is no exception. There really isn't a "Neapolitan school." Rather, Naples was on the musical cutting edge in the second quarter of the 18th century, and the arias here represent both a classic opera seria style, in the pieces by the massively prolific Alessandro Scarlatti, and music by the composers who pointed the way toward the melodically simpler future of Gluck and eventually Mozart, like Leonardo Leo and Leonardo Vinci. These latter are hardly household names, and Cencic, offering several recorded premieres, renders a valuable service simply by finding and choosing the deliberate and sensuous arias heard here. Moreover, the album's stylistic contrasts play to Cencic's strengths.

Five-time PROG magazine award winning BIG BIG TRAIN are proud to announce the release of EMPIRE! Empire is a Blu-ray/2CD digipack release with a 16-page booklet, which captures the final show of Big Big Train's autumn 2019 UK tour. Recorded at the Hackney Empire in London, the twelve song set runs to almost 115 minutes and features the full Big Big Train live band plus the five-piece brass section. The show includes material from The Underfall Yard, English Electric, Folklore, Grimspound and Grand Tour studio albums.