Welsman

The sun has set, it’s cocktail hour and you need some sounds to help you settle into the evening. These are those sounds. More than four hours of the very best after-hours jazz around. Whether sultry saxophone, cool singing, muted trumpet or relaxed piano, this Late Night Jazz is the perfect accompaniment to your wee small hours.
Stan Getz, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Carmen McRae, Jimmy Scott, Miles Davis, Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, Kenny Barron and many others.

Rainy Day Moments is a single-disc collection of songs from Savoy Jazz's relaunching of the Jazz for a Rainy Day series that 32 Jazz made extremely popular in the late '90s. The tracks are taken from the large catalog of the defunct Muse label and feature '70s, '80s, and '90s recordings by many well-respected jazz legends and some up-and-coming youngsters, too. This disc gives a good feel for the makeup of the discs in the series. It is a blend of giants like Grant Green, whose "Iron City" is the disc's highlight; Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Sonny Stitt; and lesser lights like Johnny Lytle, Pat Martino, and Carol Welsman. The music is relaxed throughout and the mood is unsparingly mellow. Although the songs date from well-beyond jazz's peak years, the performances are uniformly solid and the disc is a nice collection of mood music.

When the hour is late, but life goes on, the chilled-out grooves of Simply Jazz After Dark ease you into the wee small hours. This meticulously selected 4CD collection of jazz legends in a mellow mood will take the edge off the day and soothe the soul. Includes informative liner notes on all tracks and artists featured.
Count Basie, Stan Getz, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley, Donald Byrd, Ella Fitzgerald, Lee Morgan and many more.

Eddie Higgins started his professional career in Chicago, Illinois, while studying at the Northwestern University School of Music. An elegant and sophisticated pianist, his encyclopedic harmonic approach and wide range of his repertory made him one of the most distinctive jazz pianists to come out of Chicago, gaining the respect of local and visiting musicians for his notable mastery of the instrument. Higgins also had the unusual ability to sound equally persuasive in a broad span of music, whether he was playing traditional swing, exciting bebop or reflexive ballads, providing the tone and stylistic flavor of each styles, as both a soloist and as accompanist…

Miracle is billed as a collaboration between Celine Dion and Anne Geddes, a photographer who specializes in photos of babies, so it shouldn't be a surprise that the subtitle of the album is "A Celebration of New Life." After all, all of Geddes' work celebrates new life, and Dion has been very outspoken in how motherhood has changed her life, so it's only natural that their collaboration is about newborns. Since Geddes is strictly a photographer, "collaboration" may be a misleading title, but Miracle isn't strictly just a music album. Instead, it's a book accompanied with an album, with the images inspired by the songs and vice versa; in the special edition of the album, there's even a DVD of the making of the project, extending it into another realm of multimedia. As a piece of music, it's the quietest record Dion has recorded in a while, an unabashed adult contemporary album that keeps its gentle mood from start to finish, as if it were a prolonged lullaby.