Happy Painter

Happy Endlings is TJO’s twentieth album. Artistic director of the project is Ole Morten Vågan, who composed the material, plays bass on the album and who co-produced it with Midtnorsk Jazzsenter. Vågan’s connection with TJO is longstanding – he played on the albums We Are (2005), Wood And Water (2008) and What If? (2009). He is best known for his genre-bending, Frank Zappa-informed quintet, Motif. Happy Endlings is, in a way, Motif’s modernistic but tradition-savvy music dialled up on a bigger canvas – a canvas that resonates with the vast, apocalyptic images of the nineteenth century English Romantic painter John Martin, particularly works such as The Last Man, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion and The Destruction of the Pharoah’s Host.

Cook craveable comfort food favorites and find joy in your kitchen's happy little accidents with this one-of-a-kind cookbook for Bob Ross fans and aspiring chefs of all ages.

Frédéric Chopin was the most famous composer of Polish origin in the history of Western concert music. He was a progressive who revolutionized the harmonic content, the texture, and the emotional quality of the small piano piece, turning light dance forms, nocturnes, and study genres into profound works that were both daring and deeply inward. Born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin to a French father and a Polish mother, probably on March 1, 1810, he was a native of Zelazowa Wola village west of Warsaw.

We continue our highly popular and successful America’s Greatest Hits series as we work back through the 1950s, now reaching the point at the turn of the decade, this time with an expanded 4-CD edition to sit alongside the existing single CD 1950 edition (ACRCD176) originally released in 2006 before we introduced the 4-CD format in recent years. This great-value 104-track collection comprises every record which charted in the Top 15 of the Billboard Best Sellers and Honor Roll Of Hits and the Top 10 in the Cash Box chart during 1951. It omits certain records which peaked in 1951and which have already appeared in our America’s Greatest Hits 1951 collection and some which were big hits in 1949, and had already peaked, so will appear in that collection. As with all these collections it features all the biggest hits of the year and all the biggest names in American pop of that era, at a time when the USA was emerging from post-war austerity into a more optimistic decade but was about to become embroiled in the Korean War, and it very much captures the spirit of the times. It also includes a number of lesser known records which are not heard very often and which have not been readily available on CD. As always, it includes a substantial 15,000-word booklet with a commentary on every track, and it’s a must for collectors of our completist chart-based anthologies.

Often credited as early architects of the San Francisco sound, the Beau Brummels found success right out of the gate with their 1964 debut single, "Laugh, Laugh." With its autumnal folk-pop jangle and moody melodic hooks, the song bore enough resemblance to the burgeoning British Invasion that many fans mistook these young Americans for invading Brits. Defined by the partnership of Sal Valentino (vocals, tambourine) and Ron Elliott (guitar, vocals, songwriter), the influential group went on to notch a small clutch of mid-'60s hits like "Just a Little" and "You Tell Me Why," while anticipating both the folk-rock and country-rock genres ahead of better-known bands, especially the Byrds. By the late '60s, the Brummels' mainstream popularity had all but died, and yet they went on to release their two best albums in 1967's enchanting Triangle and its 1968 follow-up, the eclectic, countrified Bradley's Barn. A pair of reunion albums were made in 1975 and 2013, but they failed to match the exceptional quality of the group's original 1960s run. That is the period covered here on the exhaustive eight-disc set Turn Around: Complete Recordings 1964-1970, from archival deep-divers Cherry Red Records. Generously padding their five Autumn/Warner Bros. records is an absolute banquet of singles, demos, alternate mixes, and assorted rarities that reveal every facet of the band, from their Baroque and psych-pop leanings to the tight beat-folk of their early days. As the label boasts, this truly is the last word on the Brummels. More often than not, the music is excellent and it's easy to see why the band is still held in such esteem after all these years. ~ Timothy Monger

Three CD set. First-ever complete career anthology of highly-regarded late '60s UK psychedelic band Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera. Includes mono and stereo versions of much-loved 1968 debut album plus their post-Elmer follow-up LP, several studio out-takes, demo versions, non-LP singles and a revelatory 50 minutes of BBC session tracks (the bulk of which have never been released before), Long Nights Of Summer features a new 6000 word essay on the band and many rare images.