Léo

There's something about the purling, snarling and booting of a baritone sax that can create pleasant disturbances in the listener's spine and rib cage. Leo Parker came up during the simultaneous explosions of bebop and rhythm & blues. Everything he touched turned into a groove. Recording for Savoy in Detroit during the autumn of 1947, Leo was flanked by Howard McGhee and Gene Ammons, who at this point seems to have been operating under the influence of Lester Young. Leo does his own share of Prez-like one-note vamping, bringing to mind some of Lester's Aladdin recordings made during this same time period. Leo's Savoys originally appeared on 78 rpm platters, then on 10" long-playing records…

Pan flutist Leo Rojas (full name: Juan Leonardo Santillia Rojas) was born in Ecuador in 1984 and is best known for winning the 2011 season of the German casting show Das Supertalent. Rojas moved to Spain in 2000 and then to Germany, living in Berlin with his Polish wife; he often performed as a street musician until a passer-by informed him about the casting show. He became a contestant in the show's fifth season, succeeding to the semi-finals with his rendition of "El Condór Pasa" (best known in a 1970 version by Simon & Garfunkel) and then winning the show with a cover of "Einsamer Hirte," a hit song written by James Last and performed by Gheorghe Zamfir in 1977.

Richard Perry's 1978 production of the self-titled Leo Sayer album is one of the artist's most serious and heartfelt, though it only generated a minor hit in the cover of the Boudleau Bryant/Felice Bryant tune "Raining in My Heart." With Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham on electric guitar, Waddy Wachtel on slide guitar, and Ben Benay on acoustic, the performance and production of that particular song offers much on an album that is equally impressive. James Brown/Russell Smith's "Dancing the Night Away," with David Lindley's important and unobtrusive fiddle and steel guitar, and "Stormy Weather," the Tom Snow/Leo Sayer collaboration which opens the album, all work in unison, providing evidence that Sayer had superstardom just within his grasp.

Drugs and addictions defined most of Leo Parker's adult life, finally claiming it entirely in February of 1962 when he was only 36 years old. Only months earlier in 1961, in two sessions held on October 12 and October 20, Parker had played his heart out in what would have been his second album for Blue Note Records that year, and it had appeared that the baritone saxophonist was well on his way to a much deserved career comeback. The sessions, however, weren't released until almost 20 years later. Rollin' with Leo, presented here in remastered form, is a wonderful portrait of this unsung but brilliant player, whose huge, sad, but almost impossibly strong tone always felt like it carried the world on its shoulders…

Leo was born in San Vito degli Schiavoni (current San Vito dei Normanni, province of Brindisi), then part of the Kingdom of Naples.
He became a student at the Conservatorio della Pietà dei Turchini at Naples in 1703, and was a pupil first of Francesco Provenzale and later of Nicola Fago. It has been supposed that he was a pupil of Pitoni and Alessandro Scarlatti, but he could not possibly have studied with either of these composers, although he was undoubtedly influenced by their compositions. His earliest known work was a sacred drama, L'infedelta abbattuta, performed by his fellow-students in 1712.

That globetrotting composer Camille Saint-Saëns wrote La Princesse jaune in 1872, exemplifying the current craze for all things Japanese. Kornélis, played by the tenor Mathias Vidal, dreams only of the Land of the Rising Sun. Under the influence of a hallucinogenic potion, he becomes infatuated with Ming, a fantasy princess. His cousin Léna – the soprano Judith van Wanroij – despairs of this passion and does not dare to confess her own feelings to Kornélis, who eventually comes to his senses. The running time of this opera enables us to offer a coupling in the shape of a previously unrecorded version of Saint-Saëns’s six Mélodies persanes, thus extending the guiding thread of a yearning for exotic horizons in another direction. Leo Hussain conducts the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse in both works.