Elements June 2019

Throughout his storied career, iconic pianist/keyboardist Chick Corea has explored a wealth of music from across borders both geographical and stylistic. Time and again over the decades he’s returned to what he calls his “Spanish Heart” – the Spanish, Latin and flamenco traditions that have indelibly shaped his unmistakable sound. Now, with his new album Antidote, recorded with his brand-new Spanish Heart Band, Corea once again delves deeply into the Latin side of his musical heritage with a stunning collection of musicians from Spain, Cuba, Venezuela and the U.S.

Turilli / Lione RHAPSODY - the new group featuring original RHAPSODY members Luca Turilli and Fabio Lione, completed by former RHAPSODY members Dominique Leurquin, Patrice Guers and Alex Holzwarth - recently announced the release of their debut album »Zero Gravity (Rebirth And Evolution)«, for June 28, 2019 through Nuclear Blast. Vocalist Fabio Lione states, "'Phoenix Rising' represents the bridge between our past and our artistic future, including some elements of the traditional symphonic metal school combined with heavy guitars, the modern sounds we love nowadays and an ethnic interlude featuring the unique voice of Mongolian artist Uyanga Bold. Once recorded, 'Phoenix Rising' got immediately stuck in our head and we found ourselves singing the chorus all day long. For all these reasons we consider it as the perfect opener for our debut album and for our upcoming live shows!" Guitarist/keyboardist/pianist Luca Turilli adds, "Fabio's emotional performance underlines the intense lyrics inspired by sacred geometry, quantum physics and the secrets of the ancient wisdom, telling about a human being and his dramatic process of self-realization after experiencing an inner quake and the impelling need to move beyond the illusion of duality and the loops related with the material aspects of life in order to reach a higher level of consciousness and find his place in the geometry of existence."

With The Spanish Heart Band – Antidote, Chick Corea explores his Spanish, Latin and Flamenco influences with the debut album by his new Spanish Heart Band. Due out June 28 on Concord Jazz, Chick Corea revisits songs from his classic albums My Spanish Heart and Touchstone with a multi-cultural octet, plus new compositions and guest appearances by vocalists Rubén Blades, Gayle Moran Corea, and Maria Bianca. With a band of incredibly versatile musicians and his usual wide horizons, Corea composed a set of music that draws from a wealth of sources – jazz and Latin music, naturally, but also classical, funk and fusion elements.

Jesus Christ - The Exorcist is a monumental project in Neal Morse’s already impressive discography. A progressive rock opera ten years in the making, it is written and produced by Morse and includes performances by Neal and an all-star cast of vocalists and musicians.

This year’s edition of Record Store Day, set for Saturday, April 13th, brings a new mono remaster of Pink Floyd’s sophomore album, A Saucerful of Secrets.

Previous Grapefruit genre anthologies have shown how the various strands of British psychedelia developed tangentially in subsequent years: I’m A Freak Baby observed how the blues-based, harder-edged element of the genre gradually morphed into hard rock/proto-metal, Dust On The Nettles examined the countercultural psychedelic folk movement, while Come Join My Orchestra looked at the post-“Penny Lane” baroque pop sound. Our latest attempt to document the British psychedelic scene’s subsequent family tree, Lullabies For Catatonics charts the journey without maps that was fearlessly undertaken in the late Sixties and early Seventies by the more cerebral elements of the underground, inspired by everyone from Bartok, Bach and The Beatles to Dada, Dali and the Pop Art movement. Suddenly pop music was no longer restricted to moon-in-June lyrics and traditional song structures. Instead, it embraced the abstract, the discordant and the surreal as pop became rock, and rock became Art.