The Reactivitz Early Reflections Form85 2019

Bennie Maupin's Cryptogramophone label follow-up CD to Penumbra both parallels and provides a departure from that excellent effort. What is similar is the softer tone Maupin is displaying in his far post-Headhunters days, refined by experience and cured though wisdom. The music Maupin plays on this beautiful effort is even more subdued, as he collaborates with an ensemble of relatively unknown musicians from Poland. If you've been hearing recent efforts from Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko and his ECM recordings with the teenage pianist Marcin Wasilewski and his trio, you hear stark similarities. But further, the recently reissued Maupin epic Jewel in the Lotus, which was also on ECM, is quite different than this ECM sounding project. Old may in fact be new again in some respects, but in this case, new is really new. Maupin offers so much appealing music within the undercurrent, starting with the delicate but paced "Black Ice" and the waltzing title track with Maupin on soprano sax. Separate flute and piano lines are woven into a more somber waltz "Tears," or the sparse, spacy, long "Spirits of the Tatras" with dynamics patiently rendered up and down with lots of piano from Michal Tokaj, who rivals the crystalline musings of Wasilewski on the entire album.

Dakota Staton was a jazz and R&B singer very much in the mould of Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, whose style was sultry and sophisticated but who was extrovert and funky enough to share an R&B stage with the likes of Fats Domino and Big Joe Turner. She paid her dues on the jazz club circuit before signing to Capitol and released a number of singles and claimed Down Beat magazine's Most Promising Newcomer award before recording her No. 4 hit album The Late, Late Show in 1957. This great-value 55-track 2-CD set comprises all her recordings released as singles from her debut in 1955, along with all the tracks from her first four albums The Late, Late Show, In The Night, Dynamic and Crazy He Calls Me. It features performances with some noted musicians and arrangers, including Nelson Riddle, George Shearing, Harry Sweets Edison, Jonah Jones, Hank Jones, Van Alexander, Toots Thielemans and Al McKibbon. It's a comprehensive presentation of her studio work during the first and probably most significant era in her career, and a great showcase for the talent of a noted vocal stylist.

Whitesnake‘s 1984 album Slide It In will be reissued as a 35th anniversary ‘ultimate special edition’. The album includes the hits ‘Love Ain’t No Stranger’ and ‘Slow An’ Easy’, both of which went top 40 in the USA at the time. The ‘ultimate special edition’ includes six CDs and a DVD and features remastered versions of both the UK and US mixes of the albums as well as new 35th anniversary stereo mixes, unreleased live and studio recordings, music videos, concert footage, and a new interview with Whitesnake founder and lead singer, David Coverdale.

Shostakovich's film music, and before that his incidental music for the stage, has gotten a bad rap as unadventurous music he wrote when he needed to ingratiate himself with the Communist regime. For some of it, the characterization rings true, but not for all of it, and these early works – one a set of stage incidental music and one a film score of 1935 – are delightful. Both are world premieres, although a suite from The Bedbug, Op. 19 was performed by Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra many years ago. It's a biting, bumptious, satirical work straight out of the highly creative early Soviet scene that Stalin brutally stamped out.

From the pioneering string bands and old-time banjo maestros to country music’s first superstar Jimmie Rodgers, this Rough Guide features many of the trailblazing artists who paved the way for the country music explosion to come.