Olivia Gaines

Known as a protégé of T-Bone Walker and former guitarist for Bobby Blue Bland, Roy Gaines continues to stake out his solo career with the combination spark of Texas blues and soul. New Frontier Lover features not only a tight rhythm section but a top-notch horn section, allowing Gaines to cover the blues and soul ground with equal ease.

Earl Gaines started his career as the singer with Louis Brooks & His High Toppers, scoring an R&B hit in 1955 with "It's Love Baby (24 Hours a Day)" for Excello. More solid sides followed for Champion, Deluxe, Hollywood, Ace and Sound Stage 7 into the late '70s before hanging up his spikes. Not unlike his Excello labelmate Roscoe Shelton, he was lured out of retirement and cut new albums in the mid-'90s for Apaloosa and Magnum before cutting this one for Black Top in 1998. Smartly produced by Fred James, who also contributes all the fine guitar work, this leans more toward the blues than soul side of Shelton's musical equation, but his gritty style is best illuminated on tracks like "Is It Good to You Baby," "Two Lovers Are Better Than One," "Every Night of the Week" and the title track…

The forest has always been an important place for Olivia Gay. She wanders through the woods alone, listening not only to its silence but also to its murmurs. It is a place of creation where her cellist’s instincts are awakened and where she can find peace and quiet outside the city. She joined forces with the Office national des forêts (ONF) in 2022 to raise public awareness of such spaces by inviting spectators to concerts given in the heart of the forest or in natural site. This album continues this project and includes works by Jacques Offenbach, Camille Pépin, Edward Elgar, John Luther Adams and Max Richter; the programme as a whole is under the aegis of Antonin Dvořák’s magnificent Silent Woods , which also lent its name to this initiative.

Olivia Ruiz rose to fame in 2001 as a contestant on the first edition of the TV reality show Star Academy, the French equivalent of American Idol. Subsequently, Ruiz exploited her popularity to secure a record deal and pursue a solo career. Certainly, her Star Academy background has been both a curse and a blessing for Ruiz. On the one hand it allowed her to become a recording artist; on the other it made her immediately suspicious to critics and music lovers, because of the dubious musical merits of such shows. It is thus an unexpected and pleasant surprise to realize than in her solo albums Ruiz is firmly bent in disowning the Star Academy stigma, enthusiastically embracing instead the French chanson genre. More surprising still is the fact that she actually fully succeeded in her goals with the release of her second album, La Femme Chocolat. A marked improvement, both artistically and commercially, over her 2003 debut, J'aime Pas l'Amour, La Femme Chocolat sold over a million copies and turned Ruiz into one of the best-paid French female singers of her generation.