Blues Alive is a live album by Irish guitarist Gary Moore, released in 1993. It is a collection of recordings taken from his 1992 tour and draws most of its material from Moore's then-recent Still Got The Blues and After Hours albums. The Japanese Limited Edition includes a bonus CD single.
As a leader, saxophonist and composer Gary Thomas is wildly ambitious. Throughout the 1980s and into the '90s, Thomas experimented with everything from free jazz and funk to heavy metal and hip-hop. Exile's Gate is another such exercise. There are two distinct bands accompanying him here. One is made up of Thomas on tenor with drummer Jack DeJohnette and guitarist Paul Bollenback with organist Tim Murphy and bassist Ed Howard. The other features the latter two musicians, Marvin Sewell on guitar and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. The first band plays Thomas' free-spirited and aggressive originals while the second plays standards for the most part. Only Thomas would think of putting the two approaches together on one record on alternate cuts.
Beethoven's five sonatas for cello and piano laid the foundations of twentieth-century musical thought. Under the fingers of Gary Hoffman and David Selig, these five monuments of musical history, though dating from the early nineteenth century, reveal all their premonitory dimension. For these two peerless musicians, this recording marks the culmination of an artistic partnership that began more than thirty years ago. Gary Hoffman and David Selig met in 1986 and have been programing Beethoven's sonatas for many years. Sometimes they even play them all in a single concert. Hoffman says, "I regret that the notion of individuality is being lost today. What is wonderful is to reveal the different 'characters' of the score. Even in Beethoven's quartets, there are voices that emerge from a sonic 'fusion'."
The oboe was a special instrument for Bruno Maderna, and he filled these three concertos (composed in 1962-3, 1967 and 1973) with solo lines in which sharply fragmented and fluently rhapsodic materials constantly interact. Heinz Holliger, in turn, pours all his unrivalled dexterity and capacity for infinitely varied expressive nuance into the performances here. Yet the music remains problematic.
Wild & greasy blues at its best, a two-song session for an anthology turned into an all-night, live-in-the-studio jam. Sounds like it was great fun.
Signing to Alligator in the mid-'80s, they released their debut album, Roughhousin', in 1986 and found themselves receiving national attention. They began playing urban clubs and festivals all over the country and eventually toured Canada, Europe, and Japan.