Schilling, F.: Shell. Verkaufsargument Sieg. In: Sponsors 10 2015

Pokey LaFarge - Something In The Water (2015) {Rounder Records 11661-36919-02}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 235 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 97 Mb
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© 2015 Rounder Records / Concord | 11661-36919-02
Americana / Jazz / Blues

Some artists who evoke the styles of the past seem to have spent every waking moment of their adult lives struggling to sound as if they were born in a different decade. Pokey LaFarge, on the other hand, makes music that suggests he somehow passed through a wrinkle in time from 1929 to 2015, complete with his banjo in hand; LaFarge's music never seems forced, but flows from him naturally with an easy grace, a playful insouciance, and a confidence in his talent that stops well short of arrogance.

Roughly 18 albums into his career, jazz pianist Cyrus Chestnut delivers his HighNote record label debut with 2015's A Million Colors in Your Mind. With a title that borrows inspiration from a short story by Mexican author Maria Cristina Mena, the album finds Chestnut once again delving deep into his own colorfully chorded and swinging set of well-chosen cover songs.

The Rolling Stones Tour of Europe in 1982 was their first for six years and demand for tickets was huge. The two month tour began at Aberdeen’s Capital Theatre in late May and ended at the 700 acre Roundhay Park in Leeds, on 25 July. This is the show that you’re about to watch and listen to…

West German rock band Grobschnitt will see a very limited 17CD super deluxe box set of all 14 of their albums released later this month that comes with almost seven hours of bonus material. The box set is titled 79:10 and covers the entire output of the band from 1972 to 1989. Everything has been newly remastered and in total there is over 22 hours of material for fans to enjoy. The reason for ’79:10′ is that each of the 17 CDs has 79 minutes and 10 secs of audio, so they are packed with content!…

The sound world of Bach’s last great Mass has changed radically in recent decades; one-to-a-part performance practice is, as conductor Lars Ulrik Mortensen puts it, “changing our entire notion of Bach’s acoustic universe”. This bold claim is amply proven in an account of dazzling transparency, dance-like rhythms and utter clarity. Sometimes the balance seems not quite right, for example when organ continuo dominates, but some superb ensemble numbers pit voices against virtuosic instruments so each seems to outdo the other in joyous exuberance. The five soloists complement each other well, and the addition of just five extra singers is all that is needed to explode Bach’s universal vision into life.

The well-known painting of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach reproduced on the cover of this CD must be one of the most immediately attractive composer portraits ever made. The wide-brimmed hat, the fur-lined coat, the wisp of steely hair and, above all, the reddened but unmistakably genial face (displaying, if I’m not mistaken, his father’s nose) suggest a man one would want to accompany straightaway to the nearest coffee-house. But Friedemann was actually a little more complex than that, both as a person who could be lazy and argumentative and as a talented musician torn between the styles of the late baroque and early classical periods, so it is perhaps no surprise to find that there is considerable variety in the music on this disc.

The Big Town Playboys are a six-piece acoustic British rhythm and blues revival band playing American music of the 1940s and 1950s, though they were formed in the '70s. Personnel has changed over time, but the group leader is pianist/singer Mike Sanchez. The Big Town Playboys have released a series of studio albums, as well as a collaborative project with Jeff Beck (entitled Crazy Legs), re-creating the songs of Gene Vincent. Several of their songs also appeared on the soundtrack of the film, The Pope Must Die. They have performed as a backing band for Robert Plant, who contributed guest vocals on their album Roll the Dice They…