Total Girl – September 2021

Backwards and Forwards: The WEA Recordings 1984-1995 is a forthcoming nine-CD box set that collects the music of Aztec Camera via five studio albums, B-sides, live recordings, remixes and rarities.

Avid Jazz continues with its Four Classic Albums series with a re-mastered 2CD set release from Joe Williams complete with original artwork, liner notes and personnel details.
“A Night At Count Basie’s”; “A Man Ain’t Supposed To Cry”; “Everyday I Joe Williams was born Joseph Goreed in Georgia 1918 but was raised by his mother and grandmother on the south side of Chicago. His early years were spent singing gospel in church choirs and he began his professional solo career in 1937. Joe played with many of the big bands of the era including Lionel Hampton and Jimmy Noone as well as touring with Coleman Hawkins in 1941. From 1954 to 1961 Joe was to play with the man whose name he is perhaps synonymous with, the legendary Count Basie…

This recording is released on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the death of Antonio Giannettini (1649-1721), a composer almost unknown today, who musically can be placed on a level with Stradella and Pasquini, generally regarded as the pinnacle of late 17th century Italian music. Giannettini received his training from Sebastiano Enno, Carlo Grossi and probably from Giovanni Legrenzi in Venice. He worked at St Mark's Cathedral from 1674, first as a singer and from 1677 as an organist. In 1686 he was appointed maestro di cappella at the court of Modena, a position he was to hold until his death in 1721.

This October, Simply Red will release Remixed Vol. 1 (1985-2000) a two-CD collection of their hit singles in remixed form from the band’s first 15 years.

Manchester UK’s Space Afrika make music of what they term "overlapping moments" - oblique mosaics of dialogue, rhythm, texture, and shadow, half-heard through a bus window on a rainy night. "Honest Labour", the group's first full-length since 2020's landmark "hybtwibt?" mixtape, expands the project's palette with classical strings, shimmering guitar, and visionary vocal cameos, leaning further into their enigmatic fusion of ambient unrest and cosmic downtempo. It's a sound both fogged and fragmented, at the axis of song craft and sound design, born from and for the yearning solitudes of life under lockdown.