Raga Guitar

This is an unusual ensemble for Indian classical music. First of all, instead of a soloist accompanied by the tabla drums and the sitar-like tampura, there is a trio plus accompanists. The trio consists of three unusual instruments: bansuri flutes (played by Renu Mojumdar), a modified guitar (played by Vishwa Mohan Bhatt), and the Middle Eastern santur hammer dulcimer (played by Tarun Bhattacharya). The guitar is especially interesting. It has a short neck, four melody strings, three drone strings, and 12 sympathetic strings.

The Beatles played their last advertised public concert on 29 August 1966 at Candlestick Park, San Francisco. The American tour had been unsatisfactory. The group had tired of uncritical audiences who came only to scream and onstage It was proving impossible for them to do justice to their increasingly sophisticated material. Exhaustion and the pressures of fame had finally taken their toll. They returned to Britain determined to concentrate on pushing he boundaries of pop music in the recording studio. They had matured as artists and were ready to enter a new phase in their career, a feeling passionately expressed at the time by John Lennon, ´we can create something that's never been heard before, a new kind of record with new kinds of sounds.

From The Ashes is a 1999 collaborative album between violinist Dr. L. Subramaniam & guitarist Larry Coryell. The music is a combination of Subramaniam's Indian classical influences and Coryell's jazz and pop textures. This was released on the Water Lily Acoustic label.

This 1969 release has more in common with the Beatles and 1960s psychedelic pop-rock than the jazz music of that era. "The Oimels" from the eclectic Wolfgang Dauner Quintet highlights three internationally acclaimed European musicians: keyboardist Dauner, a German jazz institution, his fellow Stuttgarter Eberhard Weber on bass and guitarist Sigi Schwab. With Schwab’s sitar and the band vocals, Take Off Your Clothes to Feel the Setting Sun shows its Beatles influence. Gershwin’s My Man’s Gone Now is reinterpreted in a Latin rock feel with lots of effects, while Come On In On In starts off with Weber’s electrified cello melding into an Indi-country rock rhythm guitar riff and a raga-like vocal line before ascending into chaos. The final track, appropriately a Beatles cover of A Day in the Life, is reworked into a minimalistic masterpiece.

Jackie DeShannon’s status as a singer is assured. Her vocal range, diversity and skill, as exemplified by her original and stunning performances of ‘Needles And Pins’, ‘When You Walk In The Room’, Bacharach and David’s ‘What The World Needs Now Is Love’ and the generational anthem ‘Put A Little Love In Your Heart’, will be well known to readers of this article. But her status as a songwriter also deserves to be celebrated – something that Ace have done for us with this 27-track cracker, “Break-A-Way”.

Jackie DeShannon’s status as a singer is assured. Her vocal range, diversity and skill, as exemplified by her original and stunning performances of ‘Needles And Pins’, ‘When You Walk In The Room’, Bacharach and David’s ‘What The World Needs Now Is Love’ and the generational anthem ‘Put A Little Love In Your Heart’, will be well known to readers of this article. But her status as a songwriter also deserves to be celebrated – something that Ace have done for us with this 27-track cracker, “Break-A-Way”.

John Williams has always liked to experiment musically, and on this fascinating CD the classical guitarist takes great delight in mixing pop, jazz, classical and rock influences into a mesmerising, melodic whole. Enjoy.

A really wonderful collection of the Australian-English guitar master. You will find in 2 CDs all John Williams' recordings under the Fly & Cube label from the 70's, which are among his most commercial and accessible releases.