United Jazz Rock Ensemble The Break Even Point

Featuring some of the finest avant-garde jazz players from Germany and beyond, the United Jazz + Rock Ensemble began life as a loose studio aggregation assembled for a youth-oriented German television show in 1975. Hoping for a contemporary balance between rock and jazz, producer Werner Schretzmeier called upon pianist Wolfgang Dauner, the former leader of Et Cetera, an avant-garde jazz group Schretzmeier had managed until their breakup in 1972. Initially recruiting musicians from his home base of Stuttgart (then a hotbed of avant-garde jazz), Dauner put together a rotating cast of musicians that were at first dubbed the Eleven and a Half Ensemble (after the program's airtime); this group featured guitarist Volker Kriegel (who shared writing and arranging duties with Dauner), drummer Jon Hiseman, trumpeter Ack Van Rooyen, and trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff.

German pianist Wolfgang Dauner (1935) was a reluctant pioneer of free improvisation on Dream Talk (september 1964) by a trio with Eberhard Weber on bass and Free Action (may 1967) by a septet with French violinist JeanLuc Ponty, percussionist Mani Neumeier, Weber and tenorist Gerd Dudek. Fuer (april 1969), by a quartet featuring Eberhard Weber mainly on cello, and The Oimels (july 1969) instead embraced the hippy age with an acid-soul-jazz sound replete with fuzz guitars and sitar. So inconsistent as creative, Dauner flirted with choral music in Psalmus Spei, off Fred van Hove's Requiem For Che Guevara (november 1968), fusion on Rischka's Soul (november 1969), with swing on Music Zounds (february 1970) and with electronics on Output (october 1970), all of them for trios with Weber. Dauner-eschingen (october 1970) repeated the experiment with the choir.

YES, the most successful and influential progressive rock band in the world, will celebrate its prolific tenure at Atlantic Records with the Hi-Res of the studio albums they recorded with the label…

The most successful and influential progressive rock band in the world, Yes will celebrate its prolific tenure at Atlantic Records with a new boxed set that contains all of the albums they recorded with the label. Each one features the remastered sound and bonus tracks that originally appeared in 2003 and 2004, when Rhino's reissued the band's catalog. The collection spans nearly 20 years of music over the course and includes the albums that earned Yes an international following and helped the English group sell more than 30 million albums.

The most successful and influential progressive rock band in the world, Yes will celebrate its prolific tenure at Atlantic Records with a new boxed set that contains all of the albums they recorded with the label. Each one features the remastered sound and bonus tracks that originally appeared in 2003 and 2004, when Rhino's reissued the band's catalog. The collection spans nearly 20 years of music over the course and includes the albums that earned Yes an international following and helped the English group sell more than 30 million albums.

Without doubt, the recordings of Tangerine Dream have made the greatest impact on the widest variety of instrumental music during the 1980s and '90s, ranging from the most atmospheric new age and space music to the harshest abrasions of electronic dance. Founded in 1967 by Edgar Froese in Berlin, the group has progressed through a full three dozen lineups (Froese being the only continuous member with staying power) and four distinct stages of development: the experimentalist minimalism of the late '60s and early '70s; stark sequencer trance during the mid- to late '70s, the group's most influential period; an organic form of instrumental music on their frequent film and studio work during the 1980s; and, finally, a more propulsive dance style, which showed Tangerine Dream with a sound quite similar to their electronic inheritors in the field of dance music.

With her sleek bob haircut (usually with a flower placed just so), vintage fashion sense, strikingly beautiful looks and artfully customized ukulele, Janet Klein might seem at first to be a simple novelty act, a 21st-century hipster "ironically" recreating the subtly naughty looks of a fin-de-siecle French postcard. Then she opens her mouth to sing. There's no Betty Boop hiccups or Mae West-style brassiness in her charmingly original voice. And when she starts to play her ukulele, it's clear that this oft-ridiculed cousin of the guitar is neither prop nor gimmick, but a delightful and under-utilized musical instrument. Bearing an ever-expanding repertoire of, as she puts it, "obscure, lovely and naughty songs from the 1910's , 20's and 30's," Janet Klein is a musical archeologist hiding in the body of an F. Scott Fitzgerald heroine.