Nova Wightman

This album ranges widely over Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan’s substantial output of sacred music and gathers together a few pieces that haven’t made it into the studio, such as the lovely St Anne’s Mass. Many of the pieces have personal significance, including works written for the weddings of family members and a Requiem Mass for his father. The largest here, The Culham Motets—written for the consecration of a chapel—is ambitious music, full of colour, and MacMillan strikes the perfect note. The smaller works are beautifully done and Cappella Nova’s singing, captured gloriously by producer/engineer Philip Hobbs, is breathtaking.

Two wonderful LPs presenting Zoot Sims playing bossa nova songs, as well as jazz standards in a bossa nova mood arranged by Manny Albam and Al Cohn: New Beat Bossa Nova (Colpix SCP435), and its sequel, New Beat Bossa Nova Vol. 2 (Colpix SCP437). Recorded in 1962, these were among the first albums to combine bossa nova and jazz…

Sergio Mendes Trio, Baden Powell, Joe Pass, Oscar Peterson Trio, Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, Antonio Carlos Jobim and many others.
The Jazz Club series is an attractive addition to the Verve catalogue. With it's modern design and popular choice of repertoire, the Jazz Club is not only opened for Jazz fans, but for everyone that loves good music.

Bossa Nova translated as the "new beat" or "the new style", grew out of Rio De Janeiro in 1958. The instigators were a handful of artists with a desire to break from tradition, developing the samba rhythms with the influence of cool American jazz to find a music with such a warm soul and natural rhythm that no-one can help but tap and sway to its beat. Bossa Nova is palm trees swaying, it is like melting sugar in hot coffee, it is the setting sun and warm sand underfoot. It is the sound and beat of Brazil, it is one of the world's coolest musical styles and it remains to this day one of the world's great musical treasures.

Balancing mainstream adult pop, grittier rock, and the poetic influence of childhood idols Patti Smith and Kate Bush, Bermuda native Heather Nova charted in the U.K. and the U.S. with her first worldwide release, 1994's Oyster.