For Eels fans, and especially those obsessed with Mark Oliver Everett, the man who created and fronts the ever-changing lineup as well as writing its songs, 2008 kicked off anything but quietly. Despite a mere six studio and one live record in the band's catalog, E and Universal/Geffen have issued what amounts to a truckload of backlog material on two separate – some would say excessive – releases: Meet the Eels: Essential Eels 1996-2006, Vol. 1, a CD/DVD package, and Useless Trinkets: B-Sides, Soundtracks, Rarities, and Unreleased 1996-2006. The latter includes two discs of music and a live DVD documenting the band's 2006 Lollapalooza performance.
Get ready for a whole new approach to Masada music! Expressive and passionate, Basya Schecter, Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, Malika Zarra and Sofia Rei Koutsovitis are four of the most creative vocalists around. Each the leader of a dynamic band of their own, they come together here in an intimate a cappella setting to interpret eleven songs from Zorn's remarkable Book of Angels. With lyrics in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, French and Arabic drawn from Rumi, Fernando Pessoa, The Hebrew Bible and more, the Masada vocal project is perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful installments in the entire Angels series. Dynamic and evocative New Jewish Music from four powerful women vocalists!
For this very special release in The Book of Angels series, Zorn has brought together five of the most acclaimed musicians in modern jazz to perform nine of his most distinctive and lyrical compositions. Truly a jazz supergroup, these five master musicians explore Zorn's beautiful and exotic tunes with profound melodic and harmonic knowledge and a depth of feeling that is a joy to hear. One of the most breathtaking CDs in the entire Masada series—a touch of the sublime from the beautiful new Masada Quintet!
In 2003, six former students from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris founded the ‘Capriccioso’ Ensemble. The group varies in number according to the repertory, but is generally based on the work of six instrumentalists, including violin, viola, cello, clarinet, horn and piano, who recently performed Krzysztof Penderecki’s Sextet.
Henry Purcell's Fantazias for viol consort came late to the game; written in 1680 and modeled to some extent after the work of Matthew Locke, the parade had gone by for the viol consort. Despite the fact that the Fantazias and In nomines stood as Purcell's main achievement in the field of chamber music, they did not appear in print until 1959 and weren't recorded until Nikolaus Harnoncourt waxed the cycle for a Vanguard LP in 1965. By the time of the tri-centenary observance of Purcell's death in 1995, quite a few ensembles had joined the game with new recordings, and that year Jordi Savall and Hesperion XX entered the fray with an Astrée recording so outstanding that it was hard to imagine how one could surpass it.
After the multi-platinum success of Music from the Original Soundtrack and More: Woodstock that accompanied Michael Wadleigh’s documentary film Woodstock (two million copies sold and it spent four consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard charts, and even a Top 20 spot on its R&B chart!)…