Portrait Display

Weighing in at four discs and 63 songs, Group Portrait offers an excellent, comprehensive overview of Chicago's prime period. Be forewarned: this does not dip into the group's early-'80s hits or post-Peter Cetera recordings, choosing to end the story before their 1982 comeback…

In this 3-DVD set, you’ll start with how to create an accurate layout — and how to train yourself to see. Then, follow along as Darrel shows you how to take the skills you learned in “Core Concepts and Exercises” to draw an entire portrait from start to finish.

Philips's collection of major works that have propelled Gavin Bryars to New Music stardom is an effective overview of his music. The longest work is his Cello Concerto, handsomely played by Julian Lloyd Webber with a big, colorful tone and sustained intensity throughout its contemplative half-hour. A comparable mood pervades the bright tintinnabulating textures of the whimsically titled One Last Bar, Then Joe Can Sing. Similar as well, in their attractive serenity and suppressed sadness, are many of the other works here, prime among them the viola concerto in all but name, The North Shore, a tone painting of the rugged cliffs of northeast England. Adnan Songbook, settings of six poems by Lebanese poet Etel Adnan, are beautifully sung by soprano Valerie Anderson and delicately scored for a small ensemble. Bryars's biggest hits, The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, have inspired him to numerous reworkings and capsuled fragments. They're represented by Titanic Lament, depicting a hymn tune dissolving into gray, watery textures, and two very different four-minute versions of Jesus' Blood, both with Tom Waits.

During the last 10 years of his life Alfred Deller made approximately 50 recordings for Harmonia Mundi, and here, 25 years after his death in 1979, the label celebrates and commemorates the work of this uniquely gifted and influential artist. By all accounts of his colleagues (several tributes are included in this set's liner notes)–and evidenced by nearly every note he sang–Deller was a master of expression, of breath control, of the most gentle phrasing and subtle shadings of pitch, always in service of the text and in devotion to the beauty of the musical line.

John Lee Hooker was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The son of a sharecropper, he rose to prominence performing an electric guitar-style adaptation of Delta blues. Hooker often incorporated other elements, including talking blues and early North Mississippi Hill country blues. He developed his own driving-rhythm boogie style, distinct from the 1930s–1940s piano-derived boogie-woogie.

Duke Ellington called his music "American Music" rather than jazz, and liked to describe those who impressed him as "beyond category. He remains one of the most influential figures in jazz, if not in all American music and is widely considered as one of the twentieth century's best known African American personalites. As both a composer and a band leader, Ellington's reputation has increased since his death, with thematic repackagings of his signature music often becoming best-sellers. Posthumous recognition of his work include a special award citation from the Pulitzer Prize Board.

10 CD box set containing sixteen original LP albums by the legendary jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck, including 'Time Out', which was the first jazz album to sell more than a million copies and featured the best-selling jazz single of all time, "Take Five". These classic albums were recorded between 1946 and 1960 and document arguably the most important years of Brubeck's career…