Art Ensemblee

Modern Art is the prelude recording for Art Farmer prior to his partnership with Benny Golson in the Jazztet, and also foreshadows the classy, tasteful inventiveness that group brought to the modern jazz world two years after this 1958 session. Pianist Bill Evans is in here, just before his pivotal work with Miles Davis on the classic album Kind of Blue, and was the table setter for McCoy Tyner's membership in the Jazztet. Brother Addison Farmer on bass and the great drummer Dave Bailey round out this sterling quintet that specializes in playing music with a subtle approach, which is neither tame nor conservatively lazy. Included on this date is the great Junior Mance tune "Jubilation," perfectly understated in a light gospel, soul-jazz, tuneful melody with both horns wonderfully matched up in balanced unison, side by side.

This 1958 release, recorded the same year as Art Blakey's canonical album Moanin', bears little resemblance to that more famous release. While the personnel on Holiday for Skins features some of the finest players of the hard bop era (including drummer Philly Joe Jones and trumpeter Donald Byrd), the music on the album draws its inspiration directly from African and Latin folk forms. This is especially evident on tracks like "The Feast" and "Aghano," which feature circular drum patterns and chanting from the bandmembers. Tunes like "Mirage," however, blend these exotic sounds with a more straightforward bop vocabulary, resulting in the set's most engaging moments. As one of the more adventurous dates from Blue Note's '50s period, Holiday for Skins is an intriguing listen.

Art Books covered a variety of topics including paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, decorative arts, antiquorum, ceramics, porcelain, photography, netsuke, sculpture, fashions, architectural and ornament drawings.
From ancient times to the present day a large collection of 558 volumes.

Art Tatum (1909-1956) is one of the most important jazz pianists of all time, a role model even for Generation Y players like Christian Sands, born in 1989. Along with Earl Hines, Tatum was the style-setting pianist and a link between the early pioneers of jazz, such as Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and James P. Johnson, and the bebop greats of modern jazz, all of whom were inspired by Tatum's modern sense of harmony. Charlie Parker is said to have worked as a dish washer in a club for weeks only to get closer to and more familiar with Tatum's playing…

The Art of Noise‘s 1987 album In No Sense? Nonsense! is reissued as a two-CD deluxe edition in November 2018. Gary Lagan had left after In Visible Silence leaving Anne Dudley and J.J. Jeczalik to continue as a duo. Dudley recalls, “At that time, we were meeting new people, doing adverts and films and things. There was lots of new input. These adverts generated other new tracks. They would evolve and we’d agree they were good ideas. And we’d ask each other what would happen if we did this, this and this? So that kept everything evolving.” The reissue features newly-remastered audio including bonus seven-inch and 12-inch mixes including collaborations with Paul McCartney (the Art of Noise ‘Spies Like Us’ remix) and Duane Eddy (‘Spies’). Additionally, there are 22 unreleased recordings from the sessions, taken from the original master tapes.

For a while back in the early ’80s Trevor Horn, Anne Dudley, Gary Langan and J.J. Jeczalik were just another group of musicians messing around with ideas in the studio. When journalist and copywriter Paul Morley (working with their record company ZTT at the time) presented an eight page manifesto defining the band and their guiding principles, The Art of Noise was born. Morley became a critical part of the The Art of Noise, contributing ideas, song titles and taking control the band’s image and the presentation of the records. Considering themselves an art-meets-pop project, a ‘hit’ record was not really on the agenda, but that is what happened in May 1984 when Close (to the Edit) hit the UK top ten…