Last Knights

The music for Blue Night was inspired by the lively, colorful, elegant world of fashion designers, models, photographers and beautiful locations, like Miami Beach, where today's photos are being shot…The music thrives on rhythms and a very jazz-influenced groove piano. Arrangements, programming and keyboards are the work of the composers Jay Heye and Curtis McLaw. They've added guitar and saxophone to produce some rich sounds and some very tight arranging. Sensual jazz, light house grooves and some fine piano playing turn this into a first-rate CD debut.

The music for Blue Night was inspired by the lively, colorful, elegant world of fashion designers, models, photographers and beautiful locations, like Miami Beach, where today's photos are being shot…The music thrives on rhythms and a very jazz-influenced groove piano. Arrangements, programming and keyboards are the work of the composers Jay Heye and Curtis McLaw. They've added guitar and saxophone to produce some rich sounds and some very tight arranging. Sensual jazz, light house grooves and some fine piano playing turn this into a first-rate CD debut.

Back in 1975, prog-rock virtuoso Rick Wakeman, at the time also an ‘on-off’ keyboardist with the group Yes, released the third of his solo albums. Like the previous two albums (The Six Wives of King Henry VIII (1973) and Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1974)) it was not short of ambition, planning to tell, in musical form and mood, the story of King Arthur, Queen Guinevere and the Knights of the Round Table…

Rick Wakeman's third solo album is among his best, as he employs his vast array of keyboards to their full extent, musically describing the characters pertaining to the days of King Arthur's reign. With orchestra and choir included, although a little less prevalent than on Journey, he musically addresses the importance and distinguishing characteristics of each figure through the use of multiple synthesizers and accompanying instruments. "Lady of the Lake" is given a mystical, enchanted feel, perpetrated by a more subtle use of piano and synthesizer, while the battle of "Sir Lancelot and the Black Knight" is made up of a barrage of feuding keyboard runs and staccato riffs, musically recounting the intensity of the duel. But it's on "Merlin the Magician" where Wakeman truly shines, as the whimsy and peculiarity of this fabled figure is wonderfully conjured up through the frenzy of the synthesizer.