P 26

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, as part of his regular duties as kapellmeister in Hamburg, composed 19 passion settings, alternating the four Gospel texts so that a new setting of a given text appeared once every four years, as his predecessor Georg Philipp Telemann had done. Until the discovery of the Berlin Sing-Akademie collection in Kiev in 1999, all that remained of this considerable body of work were bits and fragments of individual pieces, most of them extant because they were used in other contexts.

This compilation features some of the best solo material from the Parliament/Funkadelic crew during the late '70s and '80s under the direction of George Clinton. Ever the entrepreneur, Clinton had farmed his aggregate of loose booties to no less than five respective (major) labels. While technically Parliament was recording for Casablanca and Funkadelic was signed to Warner Bros., Clinton's short-lived Uncle Jam imprint was issued and distributed by Columbia/Epic. It is here that listeners find the 15 tracks – nine of which are making their debut in the digital domain – that comprise Six Degrees of P-Funk: The Best of George Clinton & His Funky Family (2003).

Born in Weimar, Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714-88) was the fifth child and second surviving son of JS Bach and his first wife Maria Barbara. By his own account he had no other teacher for composition and keyboard except his father. Nevertheless, the majority of Emanuels earliest works owe more to the influence of Telemann and other exponents of the new galant style, while already suggesting his own progressive instinct. At the age of twenty-four, after seven years studying law, Emanuel decided to devote himself to music. In 1738 he accepted the position of keyboard player at the court of the Prussian crown prince the future Frederick the Great.

Today, the five-string cello is treated as an exotic and rarely-played cousin of the standard cello. However, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was simply one of the many instruments used in the family of bass violins, and was particularly important for virtuosic sonatas and solos.