Jeff Scott Soto – one of today's premier Rock frontmen and vocalists – and a union of hotshot young musicians bring you a slamming blend of melody and muscle in some of the freshest power metal to surface in years present. Together they are SOTO, and their debut album “Inside The Vertigo” will blow your mind away. A neurotic blend of power metal, prog, groove-laden huge guitars, hooks and production, SOTO is a contender in today's modern Rock arena while capturing the essence of strong songwriting simultaneously.
Digitally remastered and expanded deluxe two CD edition of this album by the Norwegian trio. The first CD contains the original album plus five remixes. The second CD includes demos and live tracks. Stay on These Roads is the third full-length album by the pop band a-ha. It was released in 1988. Includes the singles 'You Are The One', 'Touchy', 'The Blood That Moves The Body', 'Stay On These Roads' and a different recording of their James Bond theme, 'The Living Daylights'.
Count Basie was among the most important bandleaders of the swing era. With the exception of a brief period in the early '50s, he led a big band from 1935 until his death almost 50 years later, and the band continued to perform after he died. Basie's orchestra was characterized by a light, swinging rhythm section that he led from the piano, lively ensemble work, and generous soloing. Basie was not a composer like Duke Ellington or an important soloist like Benny Goodman. His instrument was his band, which was considered the epitome of swing and became broadly influential on jazz.
BGO's 2015 two-fer pairs two mid-'70s albums from Jerry Lee Lewis – 1974's I-40 Country and 1975's Odd Man In – on a single CD. Jerry Lee Lewis didn't get much of a boost out of his 1973 return to rock & roll – a revival arriving on two separate LPs, one recorded in England (The Session) and one back home (Southern Roots) – so he slid back to country, scoring a hit with "Sometimes a Memory Ain't Enough" from the album of the same name. I-40 Country arrived a year later, easing into stores in 1974 under the guise of a truck-driving country LP. While these 11 songs do sound good on the open road, none of them are about big rigs or highways, nor do they roll along to a Bakersfield beat. No, they're straight-ahead barroom weepers punctuated by the very occasional novelty – so occasional, it doesn't extend beyond "Alcohol of Fame."
Although highly productive and respected in his lifetime as a composer of Lieder, Robert Franz (1815–92) has since become a peripheral figure in music history. One reason may be that he avoids dramatic contrasts and instead aims at an emotional ambiguity: ‘My representation of joy is always tinged with melancholy, whilst that of suffering is always accompanied by an exquisite sensation of losing oneself’, he once wrote to Liszt. As a consequence his music appeals to those who are able ‘to admire the nuances of a charcoal drawing without longing for the colours of a painting’, to quote from Georges Starobinski’s liner notes to this recording. As they began to explore the songs of Franz, Starobinski and the baritone Christian Immler were moved by their findings to devise a programme which includes 23 of the composer’s often quite brief songs. Using the poet Heinrich Heine as their guiding star, they present these – all Heine settings but from different opus groups – in the form of two ‘imagined’ song cycles.
A brilliantly realized follow-up to her Grammy-nominated 2013 effort, WomanChild, vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant's third album, 2015's For One to Love, is at its core a small-group jazz album featuring a thoughtfully curated set of standards and originals. However, with Salvant at the mike, backed here with nuanced skill by pianist Aaron Diehl, bassist Paul Sikivie, and drummer Lawrence Leathers, it's also a series of virtuoso performances, each one seemingly more engaging and emotionally resonant than the last. Conceptually centered around notions of romantic love – from conflicted, melancholic expressions to more bawdy, sensual ones – the album finds Salvant further demonstrating the poetic compositional skills and feminist themes that helped make WomanChild so much more than just a solid album from an accomplished jazz vocalist.