Vocal Heroes Vol.1

I Love Disco features some the biggest names including F.R. David, Donna Summer, A-ha, Debbie Harry, Eurythmics and Eartha Kitt to name a few. This albums is guaranteed to get you strutting your funky stuff this festive season.

I Love Disco features some the biggest names including F.R. David, Donna Summer, A-ha, Debbie Harry, Eurythmics and Eartha Kitt to name a few. This albums is guaranteed to get you strutting your funky stuff this festive season.

One album to their name and already they’re releasing a live album? That’s right – Parcels, aka Australia’s coolest quintet and Daft Punk’s protégé’s, released their debut album just a year and a half ago. This new release features over an hour of music recorded live on tape in the legendary Hansa Studios in Berlin, where some of the greatest musicians have recorded albums, including David Bowie (Low and Heroes), Iggy Pop (Lust For Life), U2 (Achtung Baby), the Pixies (Bossanova) and all the albums from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds whilst they were based in Berlin.

With William and Mary duly crowned there was more topical material available than usual, and the Stewards commissioned the best available author and composer to celebrate in ‘a very splendid Entertainment of all sorts of Vocal and Instrumental Musick’. Thomas D’Urfey included the libretto in his Pills to Purge Melancholy, describing it as ‘An Ode on the Assembly of the Nobility and Gentry of the City and County of York, at the Anniversary Feast, March the 27th, 1690. Set to Musick by Mr. Henry Purcell. One of the finest Compositions he ever made, and cost £100 the performing’. Of old, when heroes thought it base was ostensibly a history of York from Roman times onwards, but it also contained allegories of the Glorious Revolution. Despite D’Urfey’s sometimes contrived text, Purcell responds with music of high quality.

That William Parker is a bassist, composer and bandleader of extraordinary spirit and imaginative drive is common knowledge among any with an interest in the progressive jazz scene of the past 25 years or more. What’s become increasingly apparent, though, is Parker’s stature as a visionary of sound and song – an artist of melody and poetry who works beyond category, to use the Ellingtonian phrase. The latest multi-disc boxed set from Centering Records/AUM Fidelity devoted to Parker’s expansive creativity underscores his virtually peerless achievement in recent years.

Authoritative and comprehensive, this 55CD set presents a unique period in human history: a period when brilliant recorded sound on LP & CD, plus radio, TV, film and live all combined to offer huge new opportunities for singers, record labels and producers to expand the audience for classical music.