Love Stories is an orchestral album, revealing Elias’ mastery and preeminence as a multifaceted artist – a vocalist, pianist, arranger, composer, lyricist and producer. Sung almost entirely in English, the album features three original compositions plus seven superb arrangements of pieces from bossa nova’s golden age, including songs made famous by Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
The work of an artist often suggests that of an alchemist. In her new album, Aire, Mexican singer and composer Magos Herrera transformed the grief, fears, and loneliness of a deadly plague into a luminous collection of songs representing "a celebration of our humanity and the healing power of music."
Paula Cole’s tenth album, Revolution, fulfills the promise of her 1994 debut. Titled Harbinger, it hinted at what was to come in the singer-songwriter’s life and career. It didn’t so much foreshadow her subsequent accomplishments: the double-platinum second album, This Fire; her hit singles “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone” and “I Don’t Want To Wait,” her Best New Artist Grammy and an additional six Grammy nominations; or becoming a Grammy-nominated producer and founder of her own 675 record label. But Harbinger signaled Cole’s dedication to breaking the silence of generations of women and giving voice to those left behind by history.
Group Theory: Black Music is a stunning new statement from South African drummer and composer Tumi Mogorosi. Standing in the lineage of South African greats such as Louis Moholo-Moholo, Makaya Ntshoko and Ayanda Sikade, Mogorosi is one of the foremost drummers working anywhere in the world, with a flexible, powerful style that brings a distinctive South African inflection to the polyrhythmic tradition of Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Art Blakey. Since his international debut on Jazzman Records in 2014 with Project ELO, Mogorosi has been in the vanguard of the South African creative music scene’s burgeoning outernational dimension, taking the drummer’s chair in both Shabaka Hutchings’ Shabaka and The Ancestors formation and with avant-garde noiseniks The Wretched.