Gottlieb Garvo

Gottlieb Muffat was the most important Viennese harpsichord composer of the 18th century. He inherited and developed a compound style that fused high Italian Baroque with the lightness of the French school. From his father, Georg – one of the greatest organ and orchestral composers of his own generation – Gottlieb absorbed a gift for ballet movements. This is the third and final volume in Naoko Akutagawa’s series of Muffat’s Harpsichord Suites.

Offramp is the third album by the Pat Metheny Group, released in 1982. It won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Fusion Performance. The album contains the popular ballad "Are You Going with Me?". Offramp is the first studio album on which Metheny used a guitar synthesizer, a Roland GR-300 controlled with a Roland G-303 guitar synthesiser controller. The guitar synthesizer became one of Metheny's most frequently used instruments. "Offramp" is also the first Group album to feature vocals, which became a fundamental component of the band's sound.

Chuck Owen's Florida-based and Grammy-nominated Jazz Surge is back in the saddle with another series of impressive musical portraits, Whispers on the Wind, whose genesis harkens back to Owen's childhood in windy Omaha, NE, and whose inspiration derives in part from the works of three contemporary authors: Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King (the last, as Owen writes, from King's Dark Tower series). To help cast the spell, Owen uses a number of instruments not generally associated with big-band jazz including violin, dobro, steel guitar, harmonica, accordion and hammered dulcimer (the last two played by Owen himself).