Big I.d.e.a.s.

Whether called Dixieland, traditional jazz or New Orleans jazz, it is the happiest music in the world, a music that exudes joy and found its perfect symbol and world ambassador in Louis Armstrong. Originating out of the south (particularly New Orleans), the style in its various forms was a major force in the 1920s. While overshadowed by swing in the 1930s, Dixieland made a comeback in the early 1940s with Lu Watters Yerba Buena Jazz Band being one of the first revival bands. Whether played by veterans such as Bunk Johnson and Kid Ory or newcomers of the time such as Pete Fountain and the Dukes of Dixieland, the music has been a permanent part of the jazz landscape ever since.

A new release from Big Big Train is never just another release in the world of prog. Since 2009’s The Underfall Yard, the band has been one of the leading bands of third-wave prog, the signal marker and bellwether. Indeed, every release from Big Big Train for the past decade has manifested itself as a fundamental shift—a very rethinking of who and what we are as a community—of the genre itself. While there are innumerable great prog acts out there, none quite match Big Big Train when it comes to innovation, to creativity, and to cohesion…

The resulting 2 box set, unlike any other available today, groups together the main vocalists in the story of jazz from the first half of the 20th century. Each of these 20 CDs offers in more or less the same proportion, the purest of African-American song with gospel and blues singers, from truculent Ma Rainey to majestic Bessie Smith, sophisticated Sarah Vaughan to popular Louis Prima, the folk-related tones of Charlie Patton to the honeyed voice of Frank Sinatra.

Awesome 100 CD set containing a plethora of classic Big Band sounds from the era when Benny Goodman's 'Let's Dance' became the motto of an entire country…in fact, the whole world! The Big Band Box takes you from the formation of the original Big Band of Fletcher Henderson to the 17-piece line-up of Stan Kenton's Progressive Jazz. This 100-CD set is a fantastic tour through almost all the big bands / directors of note from the 1930s to 1950.

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, 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.

Norwegian folk musician Sinikka Langeland, singer and player of the kantele (the Finnish table harp) is a distinctly non-traditional traditionalist, redefining "folk" in successive projects. 'Maria's Song' finds her in the company of two distinguished classical musicians - organist Kare Nordstoga and "giant of the Nordic viola" Lars Anders Tomter - and on a mission to restore Marian texts to sacred music, weaving folk melodies in between the timeless strains of J S Bach. Langeland made a lot of friends with her sparkling ECM debut Starflowers: "There are jewels everywhere on this arresting example of ego-free music-making. One of the albums of this or any other year" raved the Irish Times. Where Starflowers brought Langeland into the orbit of jazz improvisers, Maria's Song is a meeting and cross referencing of folk and 'classical' energies, and also a righting of historical 'injustice': Religious folk songs are amongst the most distinctive elements of the Norwegian folk tradition, yet the Virgin Mary rarely appears in them.

Filling in a gap in Frank Sinatra's history, Legacy's 2015 box A Voice on Air collects over 100 radio broadcasts recorded between 1935 and 1955. This is the first collection to chronicle this era – over 90 of its 100 tracks are previously unreleased – and it's pulled from a variety of sources, including the Sinatra estate's vaults, the Library of Congress, and the Paley Center for Media, each strand assisting in sterling re-creations of original broadcasts from Frank's bobbysocks days, World War II, and the nascent saloon singer of the '50s. Sinatra wound up singing some of these songs in the studio but not necessarily in these arrangements, a wrinkle that would be tantalizing enough but a good portion of A Voice on Air is devoted to songs he only sang on the air.

The Likes of Us is the fifteenth studio album by English progressive rock band Big Big Train, released on 1 March 2024. It is the band's first album of new material with singer Alberto Bravin and keyboardist Oskar Holldorff who joined in 2022 and 2023 respectively, as well as the first album since The Difference Machine without singer David Longdon, who died in 2021. It is their first album to be released on progressive label InsideOut Music, which the band signed to in July 2023, having self released several of their albums before.