Shadowfax The Dreams OF Children

Shadowfax. Nice name for a progressive rock band. At least that's how they started off. Named after Gandalf's a horse in Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings. They are often classified as new age, but their first album really wasn't, it was rather quite like a more rocking version of Oregon and had a mixture of hard and soft songs. And really their latter albums weren't completely although they lost some of their harder edge and devoted themselves to more mellow fair…

Shadowfax paved the way for many of today's popular world music groups. Beyond their basic instrumentation of lyricon, guitar, violin, bass and drums, there was always a wondrous variety of percussion instruments, usually indigenous to the various cultures that the music attempted to imply. This release is a carefully considered best-of, with three cuts from each of their four Windham Hill releases, in chronological order, and it spans their full range of styles, from fusion/electric to off-center vocal pieces (like the title cut) to cross-rhythmic multi-cultural rave-ups. Musically, Chuck Greenberg's sterling lyricon playing always seems to stand out, and the successive violinists were often brilliant as well…