Air Force Band

Glenn Miller's reign as the most popular bandleader in the U.S. came relatively late in his career and was relatively brief, lasting only about three and a half years, from the spring of 1939 to the fall of 1942. But during that period he utterly dominated popular music, and over time he has proven the most enduring figure of the swing era, with reissues of his recordings achieving gold record status 40 years after his death. Miller developed a distinctive sound in which a high-pitched clarinet carried the melody, doubled by a saxophone section playing an octave lower, and he used that sound to produce a series of hits that remain definitive examples of swing music…

In September 1925, seven students gathered in Brussels to form the first composers’ collective in Belgian music history – Les Synthetistes – who sought to distinguish themselves from late Romantic style by connecting with contemporary music. A lack of symphony orchestras in Belgium at the time saw them composing and transcribing original works for wind band, and through their collaboration with Arthur Prevost and the Band of the Belgian Guides, a unique canon of original, modern music could be heard on the Brussels concert stages during the interwar period. This recording provides a resounding response to the injustice of this repertoire’s complete neglect today.

For a change, the late 1960s yielded up a supergroup that lived up to its hype and then some. Ginger Baker's Air Force was recorded live at Royal Albert Hall in January of 1970 - in fact, this may be the best-sounding live album ever to come out of that notoriously difficult venue - at a show that must have been a wonder to watch, as the ten-piece band blazed away in sheets of sound, projected delicate flute parts behind multi-layered African percussion, or built their songs up Bolero-like, out of rhythms from a single instrument into huge jazz-cum-R&B crescendos. Considering that this was only their second gig, the group sounds astonishingly tight, which greatly reduces the level of self-indulgence that one would expect to find on an album where five of the seven tracks run in excess of ten minutes…