Happy Frame Of Mind

Jazz musicians of any renown will eventually tour and record in Japan, but Midge Williams must be the only American artist whose recording career actually began there. She recorded in both Japanese and English in the '30s, working with local groups in China as well as Japan - all signs of the accomplished versatility that would later make her in demand with great jazz bandleaders such as Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, and Teddy Wilson. This singer was not always content to be a vocalist in someone else's band, no matter how big their names were, so she also fronted her own group known as Midge Williams & Her Jazz Jesters.

Among the most revered and in-demand pianists of the post-bop era, Horace Parlan remains one of the most well represented jazz musicians of the 1950s and 1960s, having produced both an extraordinary array of albums as leader, and concurrently contributed to a quite staggering selection of highly regarded albums by other premier jazz musicians. This 4CD boxset collates all of Horace Parlan's solo-albums from the 1960s, on which he performed as leader, alongside his finest contribution to a fellow musician's record. A pioneer who adapted his disability into a distinctive style, Parlan remains one of the finest jazz-men of the age, and this superb collection of his best work serves as both a dynamic reminder of his prowess, and as a fully-formed starting point for any inquisitive beginner.

It is not always easy to avoid writing a shade smugly about the arrangements Mozart made of choral works by Handel. Nowadays, increasingly, we try to listen to such works as Acis and Galatea and the Cecilian Ode in the form in which Handel composed them; to hear them through the prism of the classical musical consciousness is disconcerting. For once we feel that we know better than Mozart. Well, so we do, about Handel and the way he makes the best effect (at least on us); but a different kind of historical awareness is needed here, one that puts us into the frame of mind of late eighteenth-century Vienna and its perception of Handel.

3CD, 60-track set exploring the UK’s psychedelic scene in the late 1980s. A sequel to the critically acclaimed ‘Another Splash Of Colour’.