Featuring 4 works receiving their world premiere recording, Signum Classics are proud to annouce the new album ‘Dorothy Howell: Orchestral Works’ conducted by Rebecca Miller with the BBC Concert Orchestra. Until now these works have rarely been performed, and the majority of works are unpublished and only exist in manuscript form. “I hope this album can help to revive Dorothy’s music, to help her live on, to finally have the recognition she deserved and never received, and to secure this music’s rightful place in the centre of the classical music repertoire” – Rebecca Miller
Steve Miller has dug deep into his archives and found an unreleased, full-length concert recording, Steve Miller Band Live! Breaking Ground: August 3, 1977. The album captures Miller’s legendary 1977 lineup at the beginning of the band’s turn from playing ballrooms and theatres to arenas and football stadiums. Recorded at the Capital Centre in Landover, MD on multi-track tape and newly mixed and mastered by Miller and his veteran audio engineer Kent Hertz.
Coming off one of the biggest hit singles of his career (the modern rocker "Abracadabra"), Steve Miller seemed re-invigorated, as proven by 1983's Steve Miller Band Live set. Although the majority of the album's 10 tracks are renditions of past classics, Miller fans will undoubtedly enjoy spirited versions of such rockers "The Joker," "Jet Airliner," "Take the Money and Run," "Mercury Blues," "Gangster of Love," and the aforementioned "Abracadabra." Miller and his band choose not to stray too far from the song's original structures, but the audience's presence adds a noticeable sense of electricity and excitement.
This CD may be scoffed at by serious jazz listeners, and even by big-band devotees wary of modern "ghost band" performances, but the fact is that it sold over 100,000 pieces when it first appeared in 1983, and its CD version was among the very earliest compact discs ever released commercially in the United States (indeed, so early that the actual CDs had to be imported from Japan). The second-ever release by GRP Records, it put the label on the map, and it also stood as testimony to how good those original arrangements of the Glenn Miller Orchestra were. So how is it as music?