Geo From January 2014 Italy

It is with much pleasure that Glossa is able to announce the release of a further new recording featuring the marvellous vocal talents of that queen of Baroque music, Roberta Invernizzi: La bella più bella. Known for her dazzling and elegant displays in the music of the later Baroque – Handel and Vivaldi come to mind, but also her Naples-related travelogue on the recent I Viaggi di Faustina – the Milanese singer has also nurtured, across her career, the more delicate and nuanced art of the Italian song repertory from the early 17th century, a time when courtly and polyphonic expression were giving way to the “moving of the emotions” by a solo singer accompanied by a single instrument. Renato Dolcini guides us through the musical evolution of this form in his illuminating booklet essay.

Death metal, as a genre, hasn’t made too many leaps since its birth into the field. But like the old saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and Massacre’s new piece takes that motto to heart with their new album Back From Beyond…

Roots band Birds of Chicago formed in 2012 as a collaboration between Chicago's JT Nero (JT & the Clouds) and Vancouver's Allison Russell (Po' Girl). Although both singer/songwriters were actively leading their own projects, their combined efforts were convincing enough to make a go of it and they set about recording their debut. Though a talented songwriter in her own right, a big part of the Birds of Chicago sound came from the material Nero had written specifically for Russell to interpret, and it was their combined voices that won over fans on 2012's self-titled Birds of Chicago LP.

acques‐Martin Hotteterre was a virtuoso recorder player at the court of Louis XIV the Sun King, in the distinguished position of Musicien de la Chambre du Roi. He was a famous composer as well, mainly for his own instrument, for which he wrote numerous works, in which he integrated Italian elements, such as instrumental brilliance and prevalence for longer melodic lines, in the courtly French style of dance forms and lavish ornamentation.

Suzi Quatro is a performer as famous for her image as her music; Quatro was rock & roll's prototypical Bad Girl, the woman in the leather jumpsuit with the enormous bass guitar (well, it looked enormous, given that Quatro is only five feet tall), looking sexy but ferocious as she banged out her glam rock hits in her '70s glory days. Quatro is a woman who titled one of her albums Your Mamma Won't Like Me for a reason. But there's more to Suzi Quatro than all that, and she seems determined to show off the full range of her 50-year career in music on the box set The Girl from Detroit City. Quatro is a rocker but she's also a showbiz lifer, and the music spread over these four discs is the work of someone up to do a little bit of everything, and along with Chapman/Chinn thunderboomers like "Can the Can," "49 Crash," and "Daytona Demon," you also get vintage garage rock (three numbers from Quatro's first band, the Pleasure Seekers, including the gloriously snotty "What a Way to Die"), easygoing pop numbers like "Stumblin' In" (her hit duet with Chris Norman of Smokie)…