Seven (1995)

The Concord Jazz Guitar Collective was a 1995 project that united Howard Alden with fellow guitarists and Concord artists Jimmy Bruno and Frank Vignola. For Concord, a three-guitar date was hardly unprecedented; back in 1974, the label had brought Barney Kessel, Charlie Byrd, and Herb Ellis together as the Great Guitars. Despite the fact that they all play the same instrument, Alden, Bruno, and Vignola prove compatible on this outing, which also employs Jim Hughart on upright bass and Colin Bailey on drums. Although Bruno tends to be more aggressive and forceful than Alden, he can be quite lyrical when he wants to; and while Alden isn't as hard a player as Bruno, he definitely swings. The two have a strong rapport on uptempo numbers like Charlie Parker's "Ornithology," Sam Jones' "Bittersweet," and Benny Goodman's "Seven Come Eleven," as well as on more relaxed performances like Django Reinhardt's "Song D'Autumne"…

The Concord Jazz Guitar Collective was a 1995 project that united Howard Alden with fellow guitarists and Concord artists Jimmy Bruno and Frank Vignola. For Concord, a three-guitar date was hardly unprecedented; back in 1974, the label had brought Barney Kessel, Charlie Byrd, and Herb Ellis together as the Great Guitars. Despite the fact that they all play the same instrument, Alden, Bruno, and Vignola prove compatible on this outing, which also employs Jim Hughart on upright bass and Colin Bailey on drums. Although Bruno tends to be more aggressive and forceful than Alden, he can be quite lyrical when he wants to; and while Alden isn't as hard a player as Bruno, he definitely swings. The two have a strong rapport on uptempo numbers like Charlie Parker's "Ornithology," Sam Jones' "Bittersweet," and Benny Goodman's "Seven Come Eleven," as well as on more relaxed performances like Django Reinhardt's "Song D'Autumne"…

Dream Theater is an American progressive metal band formed in 1985 under the name Majesty by John Petrucci, John Myung and Mike Portnoy while they attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. They subsequently dropped out of their studies to concentrate further on the band that would eventually become Dream Theater…

Christoph von Dohnanyi is one of those conductors, like Wolfgang Sawallisch, Rafael Kubelik and Josef Keilberth, who were relatively ignored by the journalist school of music critics and later, usually after they are dead, lauded to the skies as undiscovered geniuses of the podium. Well, Maestro Dohnanyi is alive and well and with us and still conducting, mostly at the Zurich opera, and it is a good thing that his performances are being filmed, if not recorded, for posterity because he is a giant of the operatic podium, especially in the operas of Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner.

Andrew Hill was one of the greatest pianists of the '60s, but he never quite received his due. Hill was a skillful, cerebral musician that consciously positioned his music between hard bop and free. He was at his peak in the mid-'60s, as his playing and composing continued to explore new territory. All of his seminal recordings for Blue Note between 1963 and 1966 are collected on the limited-edition, seven-disc box set The Complete Blue Note Andrew Hill Sessions (1963-66). During those three years, he recorded with an astonishing array of talents, including Eric Dolphy, Freddie Hubbard, Sam Rivers, Joe Henderson, Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Richard Davis, Joe Chambers, John Gilmore, and Kenny Dorham. The box features 15 alternate takes, including ten previously unreleased cuts and a composition that has never been released…

A mysterious, and quite possibly unauthorized, CD release of 23 hard-to-find tracks from Nelson's early career. It's actually debatable how "rare" some of these items are; there are seven songs from his 1962 LP Album Seven By Rick, which made the Top 30 and can probably still be found today without breaking a leg. For those who want some more Rick than the greatest-hits collections offer, this does have the three fairly unremarkable tracks he released on Verve in 1957 before hooking up with Imperial, all of which were hits ("Teenagers Romance," "I'm Walking," "You're My One and Only Love"). The Album Seven cuts are respectable rockabilly-pop, and there are "single versions" of the hits "Believe What You Say" and "Be Bop Baby," although the version of "Be Bop Baby" here sounds different (and inferior) to the one you usually hear on oldies stations, and which was released by Rhino as "the single version" back in the 1980s.