Indian

The Sitar Beat series was built with the DJ in mind - collecting some of the wildest, heaviest and most psychedelic Indian Funk recorded and presenting it loud on wax, ready for the turntable.

Paul Bley - Indian Summer (1987) {SteepleChase SCCD 31286 rel 1991}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 351 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 137 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 6 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1987, 1991 SteepleChase Productions ApS | SCCD 31286
Jazz / Modern Creative / Post Bop / Piano Trio

The mid-'80s trios for Steeplechase mark a consistent high point in Bley's now capacious output. …It's only really on Indian Summer that one feels the chemistry is just right. This is one of the pianist's periodic blues-based programmes. Engineered by Kazunori Sigiyama, who's responsible for DIW's output, it registers brightly, essential for music which is as softly pitched as much of this is. The high points are Bley's own "Blue Waltz" and an ironic "The More I See You," in which he works through variations in much the same way as he had on Caravan Suite for the same label, reconstructing the melodies rather than simply going through the changes. It's a fine record by any standards, but it stands out prominently among the later trios.

Gloria Coates - Indian Sounds (Symphony No. 8) (2002) {New World Records 80599-2}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 315 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 182 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 20 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2002 New World Records | 80599-2
Classical / Contemporary Classical

Gloria Coates (b. 1938) is of a modernist generation for whom music is a vehicle for dark, disturbing emotions, for whom the range of musical sounds must be greatly expanded to blast through audience complacency and address the special horrors of our time. At the same time, she is capable, as few members of her generation are, of limiting her materials and welding a work into a single gesture. She realizes, as most serialist and expressionist composers have not realized, how much more intense a piece of music can become when it is narrowly focused, when it does not flutter around to every possible technique, but hammers away within well-defined limits.

Chet Baker - Indian Summer, The Complete 1955 Concerts in Holland (2007) {Dutch Jazz Archive NJA0701}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 181 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 135 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 71 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1955, 2007 Dutch Jazz Archive | NJA 0701
Jazz / Cool / West Coast Jazz / Trumpet

Previously unreleased, historic live recording! The Jazz At The Concertgebouw Series is a stunning discovery! For the first time ever, we get to listen to a series of live concert recordings of top American jazz musicians, made at the world-famous Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in the late 1950s! This incredible CD contains two concert recordings by one of Chet Baker's most interesting groups: the quartet with pianist Dick Twardzik. The concert at the Scheveningen Kurhause was partly recorded and broadcast by the Dutch public radio station AVRO.

Though on the surface Bitter Tears is just another installment in the seemingly endless series of Americana albums that Johnny Cash released in the '60s, it was a more daring collection than any of its predecessors or successors. Where Cash's previous Americana albums had previously concentrated on cowboys and Western pioneers, Bitter Tears is all about Native Americans and their trials and tribulations. It isn't a crass move – it's a sensitive, clear-eyed take on the unfair treatment of the American Indian that uses traditional folk ballads and newly written songs in the same vein. It's stark and moving, his best Americana album of the '60s.

Friedemann - Indian Summer (1987) {Narada Equinox CD-3002}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 233 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 104 Mb | Cover | 5% repair rar
© 1987 Narada Equinox | CD-3002
Jazz / Contemporary Instrumental Music / Guitar

The album which in 1987 took the musical world by storm and paved the way for a new style of music, later to be called »New Instrumental Music«, is still gaining many new fans today. The guitarist's North American debut is an engaging mix of styles and instrumental colors. Standard guitars and keyboards are enhanced by Chinese hammer dulcimer, harp, vibes, marimba, and lots of percussion.

The Indian Queen was one of Henry Purcell's final works and may in fact have been left unfinished at his death. Defining the state of the text is complicated by the fact that the work is a so-called semi-opera, a defunct form that mixed spoken dialogue, singing, and dance; the function of the surviving music isn't always totally clear. For those reasons, the work hasn't often been recorded. Many of the individual numbers are splendid examples of Purcell's style, with his sparkling ensemble dances and exuberantly rhythmic major-key tunes that seem to shake off dour minor introductory sections.

Purcell’s fourth and last full-scale semi-opera, The Indian Queen, is often passed over in favour of its longer and more rounded predecessors, especially King Arthur and The Fairy Queen. The reasons are plentiful: Thomas Betterton, with whom Purcell collaborated, never finished his reworking of an early Restoration tragedy and even if he had torn himself away from his business interests in 1695, Purcell would not have been alive to set the remaining music for Act 5. As it happened, Henry’s brother Daniel set the masque from the final act after Betterton had hired an anonymous writer to finish his adaptation. No one can deny that neither verse nor music achieved the heights imagined in the original collaboration; given the quality of the masques in Purcell’s large ‘dramatick’ operas (including Dioclesian, of course), there is an undoubted sense of anticlimax.