Reissue with latest 2015 DSD remastering. Comes with liner notes. A bold little message from alto saxophonist Lenny Hambro – a very strong record that should have made him as much of a giant on his instrument as contemporary talents like Lee Konitz or Herb Geller! Hambro has some of the soulful edge of the latter, and lots of the crisp, modern chromes of the former – especially in the way he runs alongside some great guitar in the group from Dick Garcia – a player we mostly know for his work on the Dawn label at the time, but who really makes the record something special here. The rest of the combo features Wade Legge on piano, Clyde Lombardi on bass, and Mel Zelnick on rhythm – and Hambro's sax work is angular and very deft – already at the top of his game. Titles include the Legge originals "Slave Girl", "Message In Minor", "Moon Slippers", and "Hoof Beats" – plus Hambro's "Thanatopsis" and "The Lonely One".
The Tirith are one of the new UK-based Progressive / Classic Rock Bands. The band has a long history stretching back to the 70s, the present band reformed in 2010 and have been playing festivals and select gigs since 2011. The band is known for playing a wide variety of music within the Progressive genre and beyond. “Tales From The Tower” is a rare album of real songs performed, interpreted and recorded in the modern progressive idiom, and features the songs of Tim Cox and Richard Cory. Most of the songs on this album are from the time of the first incarnation of The Tirith, they are the classic Tirith songs of our youth.
Joy Division is one of the definitive bands from the rock culture. With their dark poetic inception and a sound marked by a new way of thinking about how music should be created, the Manchester band served as a model for countless artists. Today, just as it marks 35 years of the death of Ian Curtis (the legendary singer and lyricist of the group) The Many Faces Of Joy Division shows the hidden world behind the group, their rare recordings, side projects, their influences and the Manchester scene where the band bloomed. With a wonderful cover art, remastered sound and extensive liner notes, The Many Faces of Joy Division is an album not only for fans but for anyone who wants to understand the influence (and enjoy the music) of a truly transcendent bad, which made beauty out of sadness.
Them were one of the very best R&B acts to come out of the U.K. during the British Invasion era, as tight, wiry, and potent as their contemporaries the Rolling Stones, the Animals, and the Pretty Things. But as good as they were, their greatest strength was always their lead singer and main songwriter, Van Morrison, who even in his earliest days boasted a style that was raw and unapologetic but full of street smarts and imagination…
The "Under Stalin's Shadow" subtitle of this release may be confusing inasmuch as the opening Passacaglia from the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District dates from before the period when Stalin made Shostakovich's life a living hell, and the main attraction, the Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93, was finished ten months after Stalin's death. Actually the album is the first in a set of three; the others will cover the symphonies No. 5 through No. 9, all written during the period of Stalinist cultural control. But even here the theme is relevant: the pieces are linked by a dark mood that carries overtones (of a feminist sort in the case of the opera) of repression. And the Symphony No. 10 is decidedly some kind of turning point, with repeated (and finally triumphant) assertions of the D-S-C-H motif (D, E flat, C, B natural in the German system) that would appear frequently in the composer's later work.