Work Songs

Echoes of the past meet visions of the future on "Work Songs", the follow up to Jaimeo Brown Transcendence’s arresting 2013 self-titled debut. From recordings of prisoners in Mississippi to stonemasons in Japan, the album brings renewed life to historical work songs through a mixture of powerfully evocative samples and new recordings. Comprised of drummer/producer Jaimeo Brown and guitarist/producer Chris Sholar, Jaimeo Brown Transcendence deftly weaves together the acoustic and the digital, compellingly connecting jazz and blues with contemporary rock, hip-hop and electronic music.

Negro Work Songs And Calls is a 1977 collection of songs a negro man used to sing while on the job, either to himself or to one another to make sure the job gets done but to clear their sanity from the power of the property overseer. A part of The Library Of Congress Archive Of Folk Culture, this was reissued in 1999 by Rounder.

Jaimeo Brown Transcendence's 'Work Songs' resurrects stories of workers and prisoners worldwide in a call to action during tense times in America, on an album that deftly fuses the acoustic and the digital, compellingly connecting jazz and blues with contemporary rock, hip-hop and electronic music. Jaimeo Brown Transcendence is the product of long-time collaboration between Brown and co-producer/guitarist Chris Sholar (who won a GRAMMY® Award for his work on Kanye West and Jay-Z's Watch the Throne). Both emerging from a generation that appreciates the jazz in hip hop, the artists with whom this duo has collaborated with speaks for itself. Brown, as drummer, has sat behind the skins for Stevie Wonder, Carlos Santana, Q-Tip, Carl Craig, Kenny Garrett, Geri Allen, and Bobby Hutcherson, among others. Sholar's work as guitarist and producer has spanned the likes of Beyonce, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Frank Ocean, A Tribe Called Quest, Robert Glasper, D'Angelo, Just Blaze, Common, Dr. Dre and more.

Blues Routes is a resonant almanac of blues styles and blues-related music and musicians including: Memphis barrelhouse and Harlem parlor piano players; blues guitarists from the Delta and Piedmont, San Francisco and Chicago; Kansas City and New Orleans jazz masters; hambone call-and-response and Mardi Gras Indian chants; Texas jump blues and Louisiana Creole zydeco; minstrel and jazz banjomen; street go-go bucket-drummers and railroad track-lining gandy dancers. In this fin de siècle collection, the diversity of American blues and blues-influenced styles and the unity of their African ancestral heartbeats can be heard in great performances recorded live at the influential Folk Masters concert and radio series.

An impressive bundle of Norway's foremost soloists, together with the Broadcasting Orchestra, is behind this recording by Helge Iberg's great work: SONGS FROM THE PLANET OF LIFE.

This recording is a marvel of perfection on several levels, starting with the performance itself, which most artists would be happy to release as a defining work of their careers. There's not a wrong moment anywhere, and the audio is technically perfect as well. And as an album, it does much more than capture an evening's work it also reclaims a major part of Bobby Whitlock's legacy in his own name. Recorded live at Whitney Chapel Centenary College in New Jersey, Whitlock (in partnership with Kim Carmel) performs the songs that he wrote or co-wrote for Derek & the Dominos, plus other chronologically relevant compositions and some newer ones.

Man @ Work is the eighth studio album by Scottish Australian singer Colin Hay, released by Compass Records in July 2003. The album is a career-retrospective for Hay: he is best known as the lead singer for the 1980s Australian pop band Men at Work, and roughly half of the songs on this album are Hay's solo studio renderings of works from the Men at Work catalog, while several others are remixes or re-recordings of material from his solo albums. Some songs are almost identical to the original recordings (e.g. "Be Good Johnny") while others are complete reinterpretations (e.g. acoustic versions of "Down Under" and "Who Can It Be Now?"). The album concludes with a version of "Down Under" recorded with the group Wild Clams.