Ray Russell

With her sixth album, Catherine Russell journeys to the blue heart of the great African American songbook. Swinging forth with soulful interpretations, Catherine taps the golden age in Harlem, as befits this vibrant daughter of jazz. Vocalists Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday, and Dinah Washington provide inspiration where tunesmiths like Benny Carter, Irving Berlin, Andy Razaf and Fats Waller once ruled the roost of a renaissance which continues to reverberate. Russell is a native New Yorker, born into musical royalty. Her father, the late Luis Russell, was a legendary pianist/composer/bandleader and Louis Armstrong's long-time musical director.

Leon Russell was born in Lawton, Oklahoma in 1941. He studied classical piano as a boy and took up trumpet in his teens. Not too many years later, he was on the road as a sideman to Jerry Lee Lewis and Ronnie Hawkins and ended-up on the west coast.

It took a long time for Johnny Ray Jones and his friends to get Feet Back In The Door finished and bring it to market. The process actually started back in 1995 when Jones joined musicians Tony Braunagel, Marty Grebb, Joe Sublett, and Johnny Lee Schell got together, formed a group, and recorded four songs that somehow never got released. Thankfully the project didn’t just disappear and they were able to complete the album by recording around busy schedules during 2015 and 2016, and now the album is available, and let me tell you, it’s a damn fine album.

Daryl Runswick is a musical polymath, a top Jazz double bass player he has played with the likes of Stan Sulzmann, Alan Branscombe , Henry Lowther and Tony Coe to name but a few but is also a TV composer, was bassist and then pianist for Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth and is also a highly regarded contemporary classical composer.

Strictly Romancin, Catherine Russell s fourth album for World Village, is a paean to natural attractions: to a lover, an art form, to one s family heritage. Our heroine explores love s foibles, failures and bliss, from amorous to humorous. This acclaimed vocalist embodies the lost art of song savvy, inhabiting the lyric and allowing each melody to shine. On this fourteen song collection, Russell takes us on a journey from Harlem dance hall to Parisian Café, from Store Front Church to Uptown Cabaret blurring distinctions between the carnal and the eternal in a musical tour-de-force.

Jazz Cello is the 1960 album by Ray Brown, who brings the cello into the world of jazz that most did not expect to hear. Originally released on Verve, this was released on CD by Verve Music Group on 25 March, 2003.