Leon Thomas became a star on the back of his original cut of The Creator Had A Master Plan recorded with Pharaoh Sanders. This success was consolidated with four studio albums and several live sessions recorded for Flying Dutchman. A year as a member of Santana brought him to the attention of an even wider audience. His yodeling style allied with deep blues roots has influenced several generations of jazz singers, most recently the Grammy Award-winning jazz star of 2012, Gregory Porter. Leon Thomas' music mixed spiritualism with African influences and became important to the acid jazz scene, where he was sampled by Galliano, while his records became sought after collector's items. In recent years the soul crowd has pushed up the value of his 45s Love Each Other and Just In Time To See The Sun. The Creator… pieces together the very best tracks from his five years at Flying Dutchman, including his collaborations with the Pharaoh Sanders band on his debut album, The Creator Has A Master Plan and Let The Rain Fall On Me; later more soul-influenced numbers, and the apocalyptic spiritual jazz masterpiece Shape Your Mind To Die. We have also found a previously unreleased full length version of his live favorite Um Um Um.
Leon Fleisher is considered a living legend among the distinguished American pianists who emerged in the late forties and early fifties. Students travel from all over the globe to work with him or even just sit in on his master classes. The new 23-CD box set, Leon Fleisher: The Complete Album Collection, defines the personal and musical twists of his career.
Leon Ware releases his 12th studio album SIGH, released December 3, 2014 on Kitchen Records
The eleven pieces on this CD of piano music by Pulitzer Prize winner Tania León were composed across a span of almost fifty years, from student works (Rondó a la Criolla, Homenaje a Prokofiew, Preludes 1 and 2) written in the mid-1960s when León was doing post-graduate work at the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory in the municipio of Marianao, La Habana, to going…gone, the brilliant reworking of Sondheim’s “Good Things Going” she crafted in 2012.
Supremely heavy work from organist Leon Spencer – one of his classic jazz funk sessions for Prestige Records, and a record that shows him opening up his sound a bit more than before! The album has Spencer working in a few different lineups – some with small groups that feature Melvin Sparks on guitar and Idris Muhammad on drums – others with some slightly larger instrumentation and even a bit of strings, used in a sophisticatedly soulful style that reminds us a bit of CTI or Kudu backings of the time!
Éric Serra's father Claude was a famous French songwriter in the 1950s and '60s, and, as such, Éric was exposed to music and its production at a young age. His mother died when he was just seven years old. In the early 1980s, Serra met director Luc Besson and was asked to score his first film, Le Dernier Combat (1983). Serra has scored all of Besson's directed films to date, except Angel-A (2005) (scored by Anja Garbarek), and several that Besson has written, such as Wasabi.