Robert Simpson

Robert Randolph grew up playing sacred steel music – basically gospel played on pedal steel guitar – on the House of God church in Orange, New Jersey, and began taking his joyous, gospel-infused music out to clubs and into the world.

Jesse Stone, still reeling from the murder of his fiancée by crazed assassin Mr. Peepers, must keep his emotions in check long enough to get through the wedding day of his loyal protégé, Suitcase Simpson. The morning of the wedding, Jesse learns that a gala 75th birthday party is to be held for folk singer Terry Jester. Jester, once the equal of Bob Dylan, has spent the last forty years in seclusion after the mysterious disappearance of the master recording tape of his magnum opus, The Hangman's Sonnet…

With this and several other albums issued in 2019, Eloquence celebrates the art of Thurston Dart, the harpsichordist, conductor and editor who played a leading role in the early-music revival in postwar Britain. After his death in 1971 at the age of just 49, his fellow harpsichordist Igor Kipnis paid fulsome tribute to 'a man of many parts', whose 1954 volume on The Interpretation of Musichad attained testamentary authority among his fellow musicians, matched by the skill, style and flourish of his many recordings: 'He was the ideal musicologist-performer.'In 1960 Dart convened and directed a six-strong ensemble of trumpets and trombones to record a sequence of music written for performance at the court of King James I by a twenty-piece band of sackbuts and cornetts known as the Royal Wind Music. Part-books of their repertoire were edited and in some cases reconstructed by Dart and his colleague Trevor Jones, and the result is a splendid compilation of dances and fanfares by members of the king's musicalretinue including the violist and lutenist 'Giovanni Coprario' who, born in London in 1570 as John Cooper, changed his name in the early seventeenth century, doubtless to add foreign lustreto his reputation.