Elegy (2008)

American pop/jazz-rock group. One of the biggest-selling bands in U.S. history, hailing from the Windy City (Chicago, Illinois). Formed in 1967 as "The Big Thing", they were one of the first groups to successfully fuse rock with a horn section…

The legacy of the Krautrock primeval rock, which is still active as one of the oldest German bands. On the occasion of the 50th birthday of the German cult herb rock band Bröselmaschine, MIG-Music put together a sensational box with five CDs and two DVDs that fully documents the history of this unique group from 1968 to 2017.
The anthology contains the four studio albums from 1971, 1976, 1978 and 1984 as well as a concert recording of the Burg Herzberg Festival in 2006. The concert and a performance at the Rockpalast (2005) can be found on the two DVDs. An impressive 48-page booklet with detailed liner notes and many photos make this carefully remastered compilation a special gem. It is exciting and entertaining to accompany this extraordinary band over the decades in different formations.

The legacy of the Krautrock primeval rock, which is still active as one of the oldest German bands. On the occasion of the 50th birthday of the German cult herb rock band Bröselmaschine, MIG-Music put together a sensational box with five CDs and two DVDs that fully documents the history of this unique group from 1968 to 2017.
The anthology contains the four studio albums from 1971, 1976, 1978 and 1984 as well as a concert recording of the Burg Herzberg Festival in 2006. The concert and a performance at the Rockpalast (2005) can be found on the two DVDs. An impressive 48-page booklet with detailed liner notes and many photos make this carefully remastered compilation a special gem. It is exciting and entertaining to accompany this extraordinary band over the decades in different formations.

In one of my earlier reviews of recordings of Nørgård’s music, I remarked that his musical and stylistic progress is far from a straight line. This composer is used to surprising even his staunchest admirers with unexpected twists and turns. This is certainly valid when considering his string quartets - ten at the time of writing. It may be worth reminding ourselves that his first essays in the genre are available on Kontrapunkt 32015 played by the Kontra Quartet. It’s a disc still worth looking out for.

In a second disc of Ives’s songs, the unbeatable partnership of Finley and Drake again enthral their listeners and bring them to the emotional core of each work. The range of style and approach in Ives’s text-setting is startling—from simple, sentimental ballads to complex and strenuous philosophical discourses, sometimes encompassing the most dissonant and virtuosic piano parts, sometimes with the accompaniment pared down to an almost minimalist phrase-repetition. Even those composed in a superficially conventional or ‘polite’ tonal idiom usually contain harmonic, rhythmic or accentual surprises somewhere.

While pianist-arranger-composer Toshiko Akiyoshi headed a fine big band in New York after moving cross-country in 1982, the orchestra that she led in Los Angeles in the 1970s was arguably her greatest accomplishment. The three-CD Mosaic Select set Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band collects all of the music originally released on the RCA albums Kogun, Long Yellow Road, Tales of a Courtesan, Insights, and March of the Tadpoles. With such major players as Akiyoshi’s husband Lew Tabackin on tenor and flute, trumpeters Bobby Shew and Don Rader, trombonist Britt Woodman and altoist Gary Foster among the many soloists in the all-star band, the orchestra could swing as hard as any of its competitors. In addition to the more boppish pieces, Akiyoshi often wrote works that displayed her Japanese heritage, utilizing Eastern harmonies and instruments along with her husband’s flute. Many of the highpoints of her career are on this perfectly conceived Mosaic release.

This is the Keith Jarrett Trio's – featuring bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette – elegy for their former employer Miles Davis, recorded only 13 days after the maestro's death. The lonely figure in shadow with a horn on the cover contrasts with the joyous spirit of many of the tracks on this CD, yet there is still a ghostly presence to deal with – and in keeping with Miles' credo, Jarrett's choice of notes is often more purposefully spare than usual. There is symmetry in the organization of the album, with "Bye Bye Blackbird" opening and the trio's equally jaunty "Blackbird, Bye Bye" closing the album, and the interior tracks immediately following the former and preceding the latter are "You Won't Forget Me" and "I Thought About You." The centerpiece of the CD is an 18-and-a-half-minute group improvisation, "For Miles," which after some DeJohnette tumbling around becomes a dirge sometimes reminiscent of Miles' own elegy for Duke Ellington, "He Loved Him Madly." As an immediate response to a traumatic event, Jarrett and his colleagues strike the right emotional balance to create one of their more meaningful albums.

Pehr Henrik Nordgren (1944-2008) is considered by many composer-colleagues, musicians and music experts as one of the leading and most interesting composers of his generation. Works on this recording (Horn Concerto, Violin Concerto Nr 4 and Rock Score) are all recorded before, but now updated to super audio CD with new soloists on ALBA records. The whole league of performers including the orchestra itself are Ostrobothnians, where the composer settled to work too.