Oliver Noriek

Playing sideman to Rick Braun, Larry Carlton, Gato Barbieri, the Neville Brothers, and many others introduced guitarist/vocalist Steve Oliver to smooth jazz fans, but it was with Steve Reid's band that Oliver found a following. It was 1996 when Reid contacted Oliver at the last minute to fill in for a canceled opening act. Oliver hit the stage as a solo act and Reid was impressed with the guitarist's vocalese skills and summery sound. Oliver had come to vocalese not through King Pleasure or Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, but through Bobby McFerrin and Pat Metheny's work with Richard Bona and David Blamires, who sang along with guitar solos. Being a fan of the earthy Metheny sound, Reid hired Oliver after the gig and featured him in his touring band. Reid's Mysteries and Passion in Paradise albums featured Oliver not only as guitarist but songwriter as well. Oliver struck out on his own in 1999 with his debut, First View, released by Night Vision. The album spawned three hit singles on smooth jazz radio and earned the guitarist a Debut Artist of the Year award from Smooth Jazz News.

One of the most famous sets of recordings in jazz history presented here complete and in stunning quality transfers by John R.T. Davies himself. Sleeve notes by Oliver-authority Laurie Wright. The complete set of the recordings by Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds and Oliver himself. For bonus points, the two very rare King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton duets and the pair of sides by Butterbeans and Susie with King Oliver accompaniments. The only word for this CD is "Definitive". The first great black jazz band on record.

In addition to working together with living composers, the rediscovery of undeservedly forgotten works is an immense enrichment for us instrumentalists, who all too often find ourselves in the role of reproducing a few well-known pieces. It is for this reason that my joy was all the greater when one day Oliver Triendl told me about a genuine treasure: during his extensive research on composers from the Balkan region, he had unearthed a number of completely unknown works for bassoon and piano and immediately had the intuitive idea of recording them on CD. However, the result of his research was so extensive that several CDs could have been filled with the works he had found, and so we played through piles of sheet music for half a night until we finally arrived at our selection for this CD. With this CD, I hope to contribute to the expansion of the repertoire of my instrument, and also to promote a wider dissemination of the classical musical tradition of the Balkan region, which has so far been under-represented, and not only in the bassoon repertoire. – Theo Plath

After the signal event that was World War I, gifted young composers trooped into the French metropolis full of hope. In 1925, the publisher Michel Dillard coined the term L’École de Paris (‘The Paris School’) in reference to the foreign composers then living in Paris, principally the Hungarian Tibor Harsányi (1898–1954), Poland’s Alexandre Tansman (1897–1986), Bohuslav Martinů from Czechoslovakia (1890–1959), Russia’s Alexander Tcherepnin (1899–1977), and the Romanian Marcel Mihalovici (1898–1985), all of whose works he specialised in disseminating. These composers came to Paris from Eastern Europe and all, with the exception of Martinů [and Swiss composer Conrad Beck (1901–1989)], died there. All five initially addressed the difficult task of translating their countries’ folk music idioms into standard musical notation. Several works on this programme are heard in their world premiere recordings.

The friendship between Mátyás Seiber and Antal Doráti dates back to their youth, when they were the two youngest students in Zoltán Kodály's composition class in Budapest in the 1920s. Doráti was one year younger than Seiber and held him in high esteem from the beginning. In the memoirs, Így láttuk Kodályt [‘Thus We Saw Kodály’], he writes the following: "The two 'best' were Mátyás Seiber and Lajos Bárdos. Matyi [Mátyás] wrote a great string quartet at the time, which has survived. One of our tasks was to write variations on a Handel theme. In response to one of Seiber's slow-tempo variations, Mr Kodály said: 'That's nice'. In our eyes - at least in my eyes - that was the canonization of Matyi".

Oliver Nelson (on tenor and alto sax) meets Eric Dolphy (alto, bass clarinet and flute) on this frequently exciting sextet session with trumpeter Richard Williams, pianist Richard Wyands, bassist George Duvivier, and drummer Roy Haynes. Although Dolphy is too unique and skilled to be overshadowed in a setting such as this, Nelson holds his own. He contributed five of the six compositions (including "Screamin' the Blues," "The Meetin'," and "Alto-Itis") and effectively matches wits and creative ideas with Dolphy.