Louise A. Jackson

In a time when the gospel world was reckoning with the 1972 passing of gospel titan Mahalia Jackson, Detroit singer Louise McCord leaned into her legacy. Accompanied by the Rance Allen Brothers in engineer Richard Becker’s Pac-Three Studios, McCord, in actuality, broke away from the conventions of Jackson’s more traditional gospel. She opts instead to charge forth toward a deeper, funkier path, most glaring on the album’s single “Better Get a Move On,” written by Stax staff writer Bettye Crutcher.

Among Handel's seventeen English oratorios, Theodora (1750) is unique. The story is not taken from the Bible, it is set in the Christian era, there is no national triumph and it does not end in joy. At the end, the hero and heroine are dead, the community with which the audience identifies is in mortal danger, and the final chorus is in a minor key. As a musical drama, it is the direct ancestor of Dialogues des Carmélites . At the age of 65, Handel produced a work that was too radical and complex for most of his audience. Today, Theodora is regarded as a benchmark "thinking person’s opera", both deeply stimulating and powerfully moving.

Craft Recordings is celebrating the Gospel Truth with a new reissue campaign dedicated to that Stax Records imprint. Every week, the label drops a digital reissue of a Gospel Truth title culminating in the vinyl, CD, and digital release in September – Gospel Heritage Month – of a newly-curated singles collection. Various digital playlists and lyric videos will also be unveiled throughout the course of the series.

Among Handel's seventeen English oratorios, Theodora (1750) is unique. The story is not taken from the Bible, but is about a Christian martyr. The characteristics of the oratorio are very negative: there is no national triumph and does not end in joy, hero and heroine are dying, the community with which the audience identifies is in mortal danger, and the final chorus is in a minor key.

One of the most prolific and influential film composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Germany's Hans Zimmer began his music career in London, producing and playing synths for a variety of new wave and punk bands in the early 1980s. After founding a recording studio with film scorer Stanley Myers, their work on films such as 1985's My Beautiful Laundrette fused the traditional orchestral aesthetic of film composition with state-of-the-art electronics and proved influential on countless soundtracks to follow.

This is a superb retrospective, despite his very considerable physical disabilities, of one of the very greatest piano jazz masters in the late twentieth century. There are ten studio and eight live recordings captured during a period of high productivity between 1994 and 1997. All the tunes are composed by the pianist who we hear in solo, duo, trio and sextet modes.