Baroque Pop

This four CD Box Set presentation comprising all four of the original Harpers Bizarre albums; “Feelin’ Groovy”, “Anything Goes”, “The Secret Life of Harpers Bizarre”, and “Harpers Bizarre 4”, augmented by single A & B sides in chronological order of release.

A trawl through the wonderful career of the hugely underrated Harry Nilsson takes a chronological look at his back catalogue. Pretty much every classic you would ever need is here - Everybody's Talkin', Me and My Arrow, Without Her, Without You, One… the list goes on. Naturally there is a concentration on Harry's most successful work Nilsson Schmilsson with all but one track of the entire album included. There are some delightful hidden classics too with hard to find tracks included, but perhaps too little concentration on his later career. Nevertheless, this is a superb retrospective.

Witness to revolutions in jazz and pop, Margo Guryan earned her place in the songwriting pantheon and then some. That she was largely unknown for decades is not the stuff of crushed dreams, but a result of her own choices and priorities. From humble beginnings to the peaks of her 1968 baroque pop masterpiece Take a Picture and the collected Demos to the recent viral ubiquity of “Why Do I Cry”, Words and Music captures the entirety of Guryan’s career, featuring 16 previously unreleased recordings and a 32-page booklet telling the whole story.

On their new album "Baroque in Blue", Eckart Runge & Jacques Ammon explore the field of tension between two musical epochs and genres that are separated by more than 200 years. Baroque and jazz have much more in common than one might think at first glance: walking basso continuo, the joy of spontaneity and, last but not least, the high art of improvisation.

On his debut album, Cabinet of Curiosities, Jacco Gardner showed himself to be the best kind of revivalist. He didn't just unearth the paisley-clad bones of '60s psychedelia, he added a clean perfectly arranged modern feel that made the record sound timeless and up-to-date as well. Like that record, Hypnophobia sounds like a freshly polished psych-pop rarity that was rescued from some musty vault, with loads of Mellotron-colored songs ("Outside Forever") and stately ballads ("All Over") to keep the psych-pop hordes satiated. This time out there's a little more folk-pop in the mix, with tracks like "Brightly" and "Face to Face" having some Brit folk in their brightly strummed guitars and swirling Mellotrons.

Yoshikazu Mera - Baroque Arias
Yoshikazu Mera (countertenor) / Bach Collegium Japan / Masaaki Suzuki (conductor)
EAC+LOG+CUE | APE: 290 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: BIS # BIS-CD-919 | Country/Year: Sweden 1998
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque, Vocal

]Yoshikazu Mera born May 21, 1971, in Miyazaki, Japan, is a Japanese countertenor. His range is three and a half octaves. Originally wanting to become a pop singer, Mera now primarily sings classical music from the West but also classical Japanese music. He appears frequently as a soloist with the Bach Collegium Japan, which under its conductor Masaaki Suzuki performs Baroque music. His 1998 recital disc "Nightingale" on Sweden's BIS Records was a major success in Japan.

Two CDs containing talented guitarist, comedian and writer Mason's five albums for Warner Bros Records, dating from 1968 to 1971. Originally featured on 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour' US TV show, 'Classical Gas' as performed by Williams became a US No.2 hit and a Top 10 hit in the UK and Canada. Williams has had a varied career, from recording with Mannheim Steamroller to bluegrass with Byron Berline, to writing comedy for 'Saturday Night Live'.