From Motown With Love

Though incredibly busy running RCA Victor's Nashville operation, Chet Atkins still found some time and enterprise to perform some musical experiments on his own. It was a simple idea, really, replacing the two lower strings on his electric guitar with the E and A strings from an electric bass, thus lowering the tone by an octave and creating a fuller balance. With this idea, Atkins' disarmingly easygoing fingerpicking facility threatened to put every bass player in Nashville out of business, but the so-called "Octabass Guitar" evidently wasn't pursued much further. Indeed, only on side one of this LP do listeners hear the new instrument on a series of mostly jazz and pop standards – including the newly minted Joe Zawinul soul/jazz vehicle "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy."

After the surprise success of 1962's Dr. No, the producers of the budding James Bond series began to establish what would become its trademark elements, with its debonair anti-hero frolicking libidinously through increasingly amped-up foreign intrigue and exotic locales. Musically, this soundtrack represents perhaps their most crucial decision: hiring band leader/budding composer John Barry as scorer. Abandoning the first film's calypso kitsch for an orchestra powered cocktail of elegance and jazzy sophistication, Barry immediately gave the Bond saga a focused musical language that would become arguably its most consistent element over the decades and amidst a revolving series of lead actors and increasingly improbable cinematic predicaments. While anchored by a medley that includes Monty Norman's "James Bond Theme," this soundtrack also introduced another longstanding Bond tradition, the pop-ballad title track/single, here penned by Lionel Bart and sung with urgent conviction by British crooner Matt Munro. This digitally remastered new edition features new liner notes, as well as artwork and stills from the film.

If there would be a list of afro-cuban orchestras then it would start with the 1973 founded “institution” Irakere. What makes this recording a highlight of the many releases of the band is the tracklisting – from Scott Joplins“Ragtime” over Mozarts “Adagio” right up to Chucho Valdes’s “Misa Negra” – it reads like the Who’s Who in music history.

Grouped together, as they are on the double-disc From Q with Love, producer/arranger/conductor Quincy Jones' love songs sound an awful lot alike. The high-gloss production, the silky smooth harmonies, the lead singers – who all happen to bear a strong vocal resemblance to Jones' most famous client, Michael Jackson – and even the tunes themselves have a one-note, suite-like sweep to them that can be mind-numbingly tedious after a couple hours. It helps that From Q with Love is loaded with hits from Jones' past 30-plus years (Patti Austin and James Ingram's "Baby, Come to Me" and "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?," Ingram's "One Hundred Ways" and "Just Once," Jackson's "Human Nature," and a handful of tracks from Jones' 1989 golden showpiece Back on the Block.

The Queen's Six return to Signum with a new album of romantic pop song arrangements. Conceived with US producer TJ Armand, the album of new a cappalla arrangements sets traditional classics such as Bob Dylan’s ‘Make you feel my love’, and Young and Heyman’s ‘When I fall in love’, next to more unusual songs such as Huey Lewis and the News’ ‘The Power of Love’, and Limahl’s ‘Never Ending Story’.