Sonic Theme

The album "Duck" by Aristocrats was released by Boing Music / Cargo. This highly anticipated album showcases the incredible talent and musical prowess of the band, consisting of Guthrie Govan on guitar, Bryan Beller on bass, and Marco Minnemann on drums.

The first volume Legacy’s Miles Davis bootleg series offered audio and video evidence of his second great quintet playing the Newport Jazz Festival in Europe in 1967. Acclaim from critics and fans was universal. This second entry, Live in Europe 1969: Bootleg Series, Vol. 2, showcases almost an entirely different band – only saxophonist Wayne Shorter remains. Bassist Dave Holland, drummer Jack DeJohnette, and pianist Chick Corea made up Davis' road band, and other individuals participated in sessions for Filles de Kilimanjaro and In a Silent Way. These fire-breathing performances offer a band at fever pitch hearing and playing what they knew even then was a new chapter in jazz history.

Widely considered the creative apex of television scoring, Basil Poledouris' sweeping Lonesome Dove remains the most compelling and effective orchestral music ever written for the small screen – it's also the best Western score to appear in any medium in the last quarter century, with an eloquence and slap-leather authenticity all its own. Poledouris' beautifully poignant score captures the fading grandeur of the American West in vivid detail – while its panoramic arrangements evoke the wide-open spaces of a land not yet overrun by highways, skyscrapers, and strip malls, Poledouris is most effective when exploring the rugged yet tender character of the men and women who made the frontier their own. Sonic Images' soundtrack contains roughly one-third of Poledouris' complete four-and-a-half-hour score – perhaps someday a box set will assemble Lonesome Dove's music in full, but for now this highlight reel does the trick.

The two albums, playing the piano and out of noise, present a wide ranging view into the world of this composer, musician, producer, actor, and environmental activist.

Cuneiform's issue of several previously unreleased live recordings from the 1970s editions of the Chris McGregor big band (commencing with the brilliant Travelling Somewhere) has stirred up some powerful memories, especially among Brits and Europeans old enough to have seen the group live. More to the point, it has also served to introduce a whole new generation of jazz fans to the unique qualities of the Brotherhood, which was made up of a multi-racial assortment of South African expats who combined African hi-life, kwela, and township jive with both traditional and avant-garde American big band jazz. Beyond that, the special significance of the group in Great Britain was related to its arrival from South Africa at a time of great musical ferment, when young British (and European) players were absorbing the lessons of American jazz innovators such as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and Sun Ra…