The Queen

This album, cut live at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall in July of 1970, was the first Strawbs album to be released in the United States. It didn't do much in the U.S., but it did chart in England, and the original concert also got Rick Wakeman his first front-page coverage in the British music press, owing to his bravura performance on the solo piano spot, "Temperament for a Mind." The group is trying really hard here to make the jump from folk to folk-rock. They still play a lot of acoustic music, and some of it is surprisingly diverse, but this is a fairly successful album bridging the gap between the acoustic Strawbs combo of their first incarnation and the harder, more strident folk-rock stylings that followed on From the Witchwood, with hints of progressive leanings.

Dinah Washington - The Queen Sings Jazz (1999) {EPM Musique ‎159482 rec 1943-1948}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 126 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 131 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 26 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1943-48, 1999 EPM Musique / Jazz Archives ‎| 159482
Jazz / Vocal Jazz / Standards

It was around 1954 that some big cheese in the recording industry began squeezing Dinah Washington's music into delineated columns labeled "blues," "jazz," and "pop." While these categories might have been useful for certain marketing purposes, such artificial boundaries may in fact create more confusion than clarity. Anybody who has listened to a lot of Dinah Washington knows that even under the most impossibly square or over-arranged circumstances this woman was always a jazz singer at heart. Her approach to the blues, jazz ballads, or lightweight pop tunes was uniformly dazzling, her presence so arresting and substantial as to outweigh a full dozen run-of-the-mill vocalists from any given genre.

A multi-talented producer of music for films, television, and video games, Iranian-German composer Ramin Djawadi honed his considerable talents alongside contemporaries like Klaus Badelt, John Debney, Harry Gregson-Williams, and Steve Jablonsky while working for veteran composer Hans Zimmer's Remote Control Productions film score company. He worked as an assistant to Badelt before venturing out on his own with the RZA-assisted score for director David Goyer's Blade: Trinity (2004)…