Faith Muse

The New York City-based, Bangladesh-born Khan serves as program manager for the UN, contributing to peace and conflict operations throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East. During the six-week trek abroad, he wrote the twelve songs for the album, recording the conceptual ideas on his laptop using a folding guitar and a simple keyboard that he travels with in his backpack. After experimenting with rock, pop, world music and soul-jazz over the course of his first four albums, Khan believes that composing the music for “Next Train Home” took him in a creative direction that led to his self-discovery as an artist in search of a “home.”

Unlike other labels subjected to exhaustive multi-disc retrospectives like this whopping ten-disc Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records – The First Fifty Years, Warner Brothers never embodied a scene or sound: they've always embodied what a major label should be – a dominant force that chronicles and dictates the sound of the mainstream. Coming out at the tail-end of 2008, when the influence of major labels is on a slow steady decline, Revolutions in Sound can be seen as a portrait of a time that's beginning to recede into the past: a time when there was such a thing as mass entertainment, when the pop audience all shared a common bond of hit records they either loved or rallied against. Perhaps the greatest things about this monumental box set is that it captures that colossus while also illustrating that for a while, majors did take risks. Of course, Warner was the riskiest of all the majors, never held back by an anti-rock & roll sourpuss like Mitch Miller, who struggled to keep CBS out of the tumult of the '60s (this with no less than Bob Dylan as the label's flagship rock artist). Instead, Warner embraced the underground, recording some of the strangest to shake out of the '60s, and that adventure fits a label that turned to rock & roll to help establish themselves as a real player at the turn of the '60s.

Heavenly Sweetness Presents We Are Ten! The Birthday Presents album 10 original hits and the original artists. Includes tracks by Cotonete, Blundetto / Ken Boothe, Roger Raspail / Vincent Ségal, Edmony Krater / Live-I, The Mule and more.

Days Like This is the twenty-third studio album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison, released in 1995. It is a diverse group of songs offering a variety of moods and styles. It ranked No. 5 on the UK album charts and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. His daughter, singer-songwriter Shana Morrison performed duets with her father on two tracks, "You Don't Know Me" and "I'll Never Be Free". "Ancient Highway" was nine minutes long and contained the words "praying to my higher self/Don't let me down". It is said to be the one song on the album where he comes closest to following his muse. The title track has continued to be a popular song in concert to the present day.

Abou-Khalil's music uses elements from Arab music traditions, together with many jazz, rock and classical references, particularly to the school of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, which itself broke ground in terms of introducing new global influences. Other influences include Frank Zappa, Bela Bartok, and such unexpected musicians like the Mighty Sparrow and Lord Kitchener from Trinidad. Jazz elements are present in most of his recorded work, for instance in the use of the acoustic pizzicato bass, generally played by recognized jazz musicians like Steve Swallow and Glen Moore. At the Beijing Jazz Festival of 2003 he performed to great acclaim accompanied by tuba and clarinet as well as the percussion he has always favoured.

On this CD for CPO the United Continuo Ensemble together with the tenor Jan Kobow presents secular songs and sacred arias by Johann Krieger taken from his collection Neue musicalische Ergätzlichkeit. Krieger’s musical language ranges from simple choral pieces through to virtuoso coloratura songs. We have combined these fascinating and multifaceted pieces with sonatas from Philipp Friedrich Buchner’s Plectrum Musicum.