Reid Anderson Quartet Dirty Sh

1000 Hands: Chapter One is the fifteenth studio album by English singer-songwriter and musician Jon Anderson, released March 2019. The album originates from sessions for a project to have been called Uzlot (a northern English pronunciation of "us lot") that Anderson had been recording in Big Bear, California, with Brian Chatton in around 1990. Chatton wrote most of the music, played keyboards and also sang. Anderson asked his then Yes bandmates Chris Squire and Alan White to play on the project too. At the time, Yes were preparing for a tour and Anderson put the master tapes in his garage and, as he has recounted, gave them very little thought for many years. In 2016, producer Michael Franklin contacted Anderson about using the tapes and finishing an album. Further recordings followed at Solar Studios in Orlando, Florida. Along with some newly written material, the final result is 1000 Hands.

“You have the sense when listening to Haydn that you’re in very good company; though he’s a great genius, he somehow seems like one of us”. The words of Philip Setzer. Beautifully recorded, exceptionally well played, the Emerson’s traversal of seven quartets of Haydn offers a wonderful musical journey – 1772 to 1799 in terms of chronology; in terms of musical values and growth, well, Haydn’s inventiveness and imagination are simply remarkable.

Lithuanian composer Mikolajus Ciurlionis, equally well known as an artist in his native country, wrote some daring and experimental works before his early death from pneumonia in 1911, at the age of 35. He wrote music with bold tonal disconnections and even some that seems to anticipate Schoenberg's tone row technique, well in advance of the Austrian composer. Both his artworks and his music suggest synaesthetic tendencies. This release of string quartet music, however, consists of student works composed by Ciurlionis in and around the time he attended the Leipzig Conservatory, and it doesn't give a good idea of his style.

While entirely consistent with the previous two volumes in a series of recordings of Schubert's quartets, the Mandelring Quartet's third installment is entirely inconsistent with almost every previous recording of Schubert's quartets. In this 2006 coupling of the late G major Quartet with the early G minor Quartet, the Mandelring displays the same qualities that distinguished its previous recordings: strength, drive, and overwhelming intensity. The opening Allegro molto moderato of the G major Quartet has more power in its attacks, more edge in its sonorities, and more vigor in its rhythms than even the Alban Berg's forceful account, while the following Andante un poco mosso has more raw excitement than any previous version.

Dirty Blues Band (1967). While the Dirty Blues Band's self-titled debut is nothing more than an ordinary late-'60s blues-rock record, it has its value as a curiosity. That's due to the presence of a 19-year-old Rod Piazza on lead vocals and Glenn Ross Campbell, formerly of the great but obscure psychedelic group the Misunderstood, on steel guitar. Unfortunately, Campbell, who had been unleashing unearthly astral leads in the Yardbirds-like Misunderstood less than a year prior to the September 1967 recording of this LP, sounds far less imaginative and special in this context. His steel leads are decent, but nothing to make you sit up and pop your eyes…

Kronos Quartet's groundbreaking 2002 collaboration with composer Terry Riley, Sun Rings, is available as a recording for the first time via Nonesuch Records on August 30, 2019.

Celebrating 40 years as a performing ensemble, the West Coast saxophone quartet ROVA of Bruce Ackley on soprano saxophone, Steve Adams on alto & sopranino saxophones, Jon Raskin on baritone saxophone, and Larry Ochs on tenor saxophone, reworked compositions from all members transversing their past 34 years, in an absolutely impressive and diverse album.