Rock Singing

Live performance from American singer-songwriter Norah Jones, recorded in Poland during her 'Not Too Late' tour.
Sultry vocalist and pianist Norah Jones developed her unique blend of jazz and traditional vocal pop with hints of bluesy country and contemporary folk due in large part to her unique upbringing. Born March 30, 1979, in New York City, the daughter of Ravi Shankar quietly grew up in Texas with her mother. While she always found the music of Billie Holiday and Bill Evans both intriguing and comforting, she didn't really explore jazz until attending Dallas' Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. During high school, Jones won the Down Beat Student Music Awards for Best Jazz Vocalist and Best Original Composition in 1996, and earned a second Best Jazz Vocalist award in 1997.

Loosely based on the life and times of several R&B artists (The Dells, The Temptations, Frankie Lymon, Sam Cooke and others) The Five Heartbeats traces the rise and fall of a popular African-American 1950s singing aggregation. The story is told from the point of view of one of the "Heartbeats," played by Robert Townsend (who also co-produced, directed and co-wrote the script with Keenan Ivory Waynans). The film is an amalgam of anecdotes drawn from real-life experiences: the long struggle upward, the first rush of success, the dishonest record-company executives, the hard-nosed but nurturing managers, the sex, the drugs, the isolation and the precipitous downward slide. The film begins and ends in the 1990s, as the middle-aged "Duck" (Townsend) ruminates on the past and makes the best of the present.

Radio 1 shows its female side on 4 March. Isolde Lasoen and band stroll with the fine fleur of Belgian female singers by more than half a century of female songs. Angèle, Marie Daulne (Zap Mama), Slongs Dievanongs, Lady Linn, Stefanie Callebaut (SX), Charlotte Adigéry (WWWater), Few Bits and Isolde themselves get their best with Aretha Franklin, Blondie, Nina Simone, Cindy Lauper, Billie Holiday, Feist , Sade, Dolly Parton, Janis Joplin, Suzanne Vega and Beyoncé above.

Another quality Time-Life music collection with 500 originals from the period 1955-1964, the so called "Rock'n'Roll Era". In addition of this wonderful classics' parade, you will acquire a R'n'R encyclopedia, since each CD comes with an extensive description and historical data, in a 6 page booklet, scanned at 600 dpi. Enjoy excellent music and artwork.

Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele, Lita Roza, Winifred Atwell, Red Price, Tony Crombie, Alma Cogan, Bert Weedon, Beryl Bryden and Ray Ellington are part of the colorful line up of musical talent from a wide musical spectrum that stood at the cradle of British Beat. The '50s was an extraordinary decade in the history of British popular music. On the one hand it was still basically a forum for 'light entertainment' as conceived by Tin Pan Alley moguls and broadcast by Aunty BBC. The result was a kaleidoscope of revolutionary good-time looseness in the form of Skiffle.

This 98-minute documentary, written, produced, and directed by Adele Schmidt and José Zegarra Holder of the Washington, D.C. area's Zeitgeist Media, begins and ends at the 2011 Rock in Opposition festival in Carmaux, France, and between those two bookends tells the story of this idiosyncratic movement – or style, or whatever you want to call it – that was birthed in the late '70s and has against all odds persisted on and off to the present day…