Itc Juanita Font

Juanita Hall is best-known for being a stage actress, playing Bloody Mary in South Pacific. However on this 1958 set for Counterpoint, she shows that she could effectively sing blues. Mostly sticking to songs from the Bessie Smith songbook (including "You've Been a Good Old Wagon," "Gimme a Pigfoot" and "Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out"), Hall's extroverted and shouting style fit the music quite well. Pianist Claude Hopkins arranged for the sextet and gathered quite an all-star backup group that includes tenor-saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, clarinetist Buster Bailey and trumpeter Doc Cheatham. Well worth getting.

Juanita Hall is best-known for being a stage actress, playing Bloody Mary in South Pacific. However on this 1958 set for Counterpoint she shows that she could effectively sing blues. Mostly sticking to songs from the Bessie Smith songbook (including "You've Been a Good Old Wagon," "Gimme a Pigfoot" and "Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out"), Hall's extroverted and shouting style fit the music quite well. Pianist Claude Hopkins arranged for the sextet and gathered quite an all-star backup group that includes tenor-saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, clarinetist Buster Bailey and trumpeter Doc Cheatham. Well worth getting.

Works of Manuel de Falla - widely regarded as the most distinguished Spanish composer of the early twentieth century - are strongly influenced by Spanish folk music in which the guitar is central. Although he composed only one piece for that instrument his inspiration was flamenco and early Spanish music, including the guitar works of Gaspar Sanz. The guitar also features in Falla‘s first great success, the opera ‘La Vida Breve’. For this recording, we have selected and transcribed works in which the influence of the guitar was dominant thus translating these pieces back to their original source of inspiration.

Inspired by such classic concept albums as Willie Nelson's Red-Headed Stranger, Sturgill Simpson's The Ballad of Dood & Juanita is the Grammy-winning singer/songwriter's third album in twelve months, and his most ambitious project to date. Written and recorded in less than a week, and featuring the same ace musicians who played on last year's Cuttin' Grass albums, the record tells a classic American story of a Civil War-era couple torn apart by violence and reunited by love—what Simpson calls "a simple tale of either redemption or revenge."