The Normal

Dave Stewart's second album with the Spiritual Cowboys expanded the musical ideas of their debut, although it was slightly less focused and pop-oriented than its predecessor. Dave Stewart and The Spiritual Cowboys was an English band, formed in 1990 after frontman David A. Stewart's departure from Eurythmics. Chris Bostock from JoBoxers, Jonathan Perkins, Olle Romo and Nan Vernon were later joined by Martin Chambers from The Pretenders and John Turnbull from Ian Dury and The Blockheads. They made two albums: the self titled Dave Stewart and the Spiritual Cowboys and Honest. Their live stage act is characterized by spiritual icons and a unique double drum kit played by two drummers.

The general trend in recordings of Renaissance polyphony has been toward typing music to specific surroundings: royal festivities, religious feast days, and the like. This collection by the Huelgas Ensemble goes in the other direction, providing three CDs' worth of music ranging from the medieval era to Anton Bruckner, with most of the pieces falling into some stretch of the High Renaissance. The music was recorded, beautifully, in a Romanesque church near Dijon in 2018, and the program is unified loosely by a set of general guidelines for the selections at that event: the music emphasized "unknown repertoire, undeservedly obscure composers, and experiments that fall outside the scope of the normal concert season."

When in the summer of 2017, Mariusz Duda was finishing the fifth studio album of his solo project, Lunatic Soul, he had already known that it would have a supplement. It was supposed to be a mini album complementing the music journey he had embarked on while creating "Fractured". Soon it turned out that working on a few ideas he had put aside absorbed him so much that, as a result, we are getting a brand new Lunatic Soul album called "Under the Fragmented Sky" mere months after the previous one and exactly 10 years after the project's debut release.

Suzi Quatro is a performer as famous for her image as her music; Quatro was rock & roll's prototypical Bad Girl, the woman in the leather jumpsuit with the enormous bass guitar (well, it looked enormous, given that Quatro is only five feet tall), looking sexy but ferocious as she banged out her glam rock hits in her '70s glory days. Quatro is a woman who titled one of her albums Your Mamma Won't Like Me for a reason. But there's more to Suzi Quatro than all that, and she seems determined to show off the full range of her 50-year career in music on the box set.

Jimmy Heath Sextet - The Thumper (1959) {Riverside OJCCD-1828-2 rel 1994}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 259 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 96 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 8 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1959, 1994 Riverside / Fantasy | OJCCD-1828-2
Jazz / Bop / Hard Bop / Saxophone

Jimmy Heath at age 33 made his recording debut as a leader on this Riverside session which has been reissued on CD in the OJC series. The hard bop tenor-saxophonist is in superior form, contributing five originals (of which "For Minors Only" is best known), jamming with an all-star sextet (including cornetist Nat Adderley, trombonist Curtis Fuller, pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath) and taking two standards as ballad features. The excellent session of late '50s straightahead jazz is uplifted above the normal level by Heath's writing.

Live in Amsterdam, Holland - Concertgebow, September 17, 1969. This is a more complete recording than the normal FM braodcast ROIO's of this show and hence it is some 10 minutes longer and does not have the interruptions to the programme that the FM version has. 'The Man and the Journey' were one of Pink Floyd's early concept-shows performed the first time April 14, 1969 in Royal Festival Hall, London. The event was titled 'The Massed Gadgets Of Auximenes - More Furious Madness From Pink Floyd'.

Ginger Baker's mid-'70s profile took another unexpected turn following Cream's blues-rock blood and thunder and his Afro-beat matchups with Fela Kuti. He formed this straight-ahead power trio with the guitar- and bass-playing brother team of Adrian and Paul Gurvitz, who'd briefly lit up the '60s U.K. charts as Gun (of "Race With the Devil" fame). Such a step might have seemed subversively normal for Baker, but he and the brothers had an undeniable chemistry; not surprisingly, their debut album is a self-assured, aggressive affair. "Help Me" and "I Wanna Live Again" are punchy and succinct; so are the hard-driving instrumentals "Love Is" and its funkier cousin, "Phil 4."