After spending nearly nine months as a guest of the Texas penal system, veteran rocker David Crosby emerged from his incarceration sober and brimming with ideas that had previously been stunted due to decades of substance abuse. In many ways Oh Yes I Can (1989)—Crosby’s second solo effort during his two-decade-plus career—is a musical rebuttal to his equally vital debut effort, If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971). Even the album’s title appears to indicate his newly achieved success and freedom from the haze that so indelibly influenced the earlier compositions.
Lucky Peterson live in full effect on CD and DVD at last summer's Marciac festival in France, featuring Joe Satriani as special guest on the final track. Born in Buffalo close to New York, Lucky Peterson - a singer, guitarist and organist - is one of the most authentic agents of blues music; he s familiar with its oral tradition and history and can also play and sing it like no other. Mixing his own compositions and inspired covers (of tracks by Stevie Ray Vaughan, Wilson Pickett and even Johnny Nash), he has decided to treat our eyes and ears to a live recording on which he blends blues music and an unstoppable sense of groove.
Bastille Musique presents its first release »Claude Vivier: Kopernikus« in a brilliant SWR studio recording by the Opera Factory Freiburg, the Holst-Sinfonietta and Klaus Simon (conductor). Besides the CD containing Vivier’s masterful chamber opera from 1980, which he called opéra-rituel de mort, the lavish package includes a 64-pages trilingual booklet (EN, FR, DE) and three photo leaflets with previously unpublished pictures of Claude Vivier as well as the artists during a staged performance.
EU-only five CD box containing a quintet of albums from the late Austrian '80s hitmaker. This set contains his first three studio albums - Einzelhaft (1982), Junge Roemer (1984) and Falco 3 (1985) - plus two posthumous releases: Falco Symphonic and Donauinsel Live.
Good news for pianophiles everywhere that Grigory Sokolov has, as DG put it, now signed an exclusive contract. This is of course not taking him into the studio or anything as workaday as that. No, he has allowed them to release a live recital from the 2008 Salzburg Festival. But let’s not knock that: it’s difficult to imagine just how much negotiation that must have taken. Comparisons are irrelevant (except perhaps with himself): this is Sokolov we’re talking about. But in this cult of celebrity, his very aversion to the notion has turned him into one – a bit like Glenn Gould in an earlier era…