Summer's Blood

The three members of Niacin each have high profile reputations. Bassist Billy Sheehan worked with Mr. Big, Talas, & David Lee Roth. Keyboardist John Novello worked with Chick Corea & Andy Summers, & drummer Dennis Chambers worked with Santana, George Clinton, & Stanley Clarke. As Niacin, they write songs that allow them to show off their musical gifts & powerful, soulful style. The sum of the parts makes the band a unique & identifiable force. The album features 2 unreleased studio tracks 'Front & Center' & 'Gelatin'.

There is only a slight difference between a street-corner blues singer and a sanctified street singer, since both need to hold a crowd and make a few bucks (no matter what they do with the money when the day is done), and as this four-disc collection of so-called guitar evangelists from the 1920s, '30s, and early '50s makes clear, playing slide for the Lord sounds pretty much like playing slide for the other side. If anything, the guitar preachers represented here might be even more out there and eccentric than their secular counterparts, making this box set a delightful addition to the standard country blues record collection. Blind Willie Johnson, the apex of the guitar evangelists, is well represented here with classic late-'20s tracks…

If you know the great orchestral works of English modernist composer Gerald Finzi – his cello and clarinet concertos, his Eclogue, and Grand Fantasia & Toccata for piano and orchestra – you don't know the half of Finzi. And even if you know his great setting of Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" for tenor, chorus, and orchestra, you still don't know the best of Finzi. For the best of Finzi, try this two-disc set of his five-song cycle to poems by Thomas Hardy. Like Schubert with Müller, Finzi had a particular affinity for Hardy and his special brand of pantheistic pastoral pessimism and his settings have a depth of understanding and an authenticity of utterance that make them especially effective and affecting.