Joe Morris

All recordings, especially those of improvised music, try to freeze the sound of a present moment, but invariably melt into the past and the future, real and imagined. Listening to this album, I can’t help but think of the classic meeting of Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins, where two titans of the same instrument across different generations displayed mutual love and respect through stylistic contrast and playful jousting. Or I create a fiction, of Django Reinhardt and Freddie Green crossing paths in some distant hotel, staying up late one night and pushing each other to new ideas. (I don’t make that allusion lightly – for the abundance of virtuosic extended technique, don’t miss the profound swing of the articulated lines and the chunky chords.) Taylor Ho Bynum, excerpt from the liner notes.

Jamie Saft is a virtuoso pianist, keyboardist, producer, and composer from New York. His stylistic versatility, multi-instrumentalist capabilities, and production skills have been featured with Beastie Boys, Bad Brains, HR, The B-52’s, John Zorn, John Adams, Laurie Anderson, Donovan, Antony and the Johnsons, and Iggy Pop. Saft leads the New Zion Trio, The Jamie Saft Trio, and The Jamie Saft Quartet.

In 1997, Joe Lynn Turner released Under Cover, a collection of his favorite hard-rock classics. It was such a success that he followed it two years later with the appropriately-titled Under Cover 2. Turner has surrounded himself with first-rate musicians – Vernon Reid, Al Pitrelli, Jeff Golub, Greg Smith – and has expanded his musical outreach, taking on such numbers as "Wishing Well" and "The Race is On," along with such album-rock favorites as "Helter Skelter," "Waiting for a Girl Like You," "The Boys Are Back in Town," "Born to Be Wild," "Fool for Your Lovin" and "Mississippi Queen."

Russell Morris redefined himself and the Australian Blues genre in 2013 with the release of the landmark album ‘Sharkmouth’. The stories, people and events of our collective history would see Russell collect the ARIA for Best Blues & Roots Album. He followed this success in 2014 with ‘Van Diemen’s Land’; an album whose panorama spanned colonial horrors to WW2 bombers and Japanese labour camps; dramas on river and sea and character portraits from Birdsville to Kings Cross. It went on to receive another ARIA nomination for Best Blues & Roots Album & win multiple Australian music awards. In 2016, Russell completed his trilogy with the release of ‘Red Dirt, Red Heart’; filled with tales of bushrangers, jails, desert road trips and indigenous heroes. Again he collected the ARIA for Best Blues & Roots Album. Ghosts & Legends: Songs From The Blues Trilogy is a personally curated album of songs from Russell’s multi-award winning blues trilogy.

It would have been better, of course, if this 1984 production of Donizetti's Anna Bolena, or at least its title role, had been filmed 20 years earlier, when Joan Sutherland's voice was in its spectacular prime. But like her Canadian Opera Norma, dating from 1981, this is a better-late-than-never documentation of one of the most remarkable voices of the 20th century.