Leon

This new studio recording contains three works for piano and orchestra that virtuoso pianist Orion Weiss and conductor Leon Botstein first performed in concert at the Bard Music Festival. Together, the three works span almost a century of musical Romanticism and are as different from one another as the generations they represent. In each piece, the virtuoso genre becomes a means by which the composer responds to a specific source of inspiration – in the first case (Korngold), a performer and family friend who had suffered a horrendous tragedy, in the second (Rimsky-Korsakov), a venerated old master, and in the third (Chopin) a melody from a beloved opera.

On the follow-up to the mind-blowing Spirits Known and Unknown, singer, multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and composer Leon Thomas decided to take a different track. Far from the sparely orchestrated ensembles of the previous works, Thomas loaded this set with jazz luminaries such as Roy Haynes and Billy Cobham, Billy Harper, Donald Smith, James Spaulding, Sonny Morgan, Ernie Royal, and many others as well as a backing chorus of female voices. Side one is the up-tempo jazz ride, as Thomas and company rip through a host of his own tunes, such as the scatted post-bop of "I Am" and the nearly bar-walking blues of "Come Along." But the side is graced by an absolutely stunning read of Milt Jackson's "Bag's Groove," with Harper leading a five-horn section…

The late Leon Thomas was a vocalist who has proven to be influential among jazz and blues saxophonists, guitarists, and pianists, who've admitted their debt to his innovation. However, though there are many vocalists who have benefited from his style as well, he is seldom acknowledged for his highly original - and idiosyncratic - contribution to them. One can only speculate as to why, though Thomas' full-throated style which employed everything from yodels to Joe Turner-ish growls and shouts may have been too wide for anyone to grasp in its entirety without overtly sounding as if they were aping him. Blues and the Soulful Truth is among the artist's most enduring performances, either as a leader or sideman…

SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce the fourth volume in Leon McCawley’s much-praised series of Franz Joseph Haydn’s Piano Sonatas.

Virtuoso keyboard music of the early 16th century: Léon Berben plays works by Antonio de Cabezón on one of the oldest organs in the world, the Gothic organ of St.Andreas in Soest-Ostönnen.

Leon Thomas' debut solo recording after his tenure with Pharoah Sanders is a fine one. Teaming with a cast of musicians that includes bassist Cecil McBee, flutist James Spaulding, Roy Haynes, Lonnie Liston Smith, Richard Davis, and Sanders (listed here as "Little Rock"), etc. Thomas' patented yodel is in fine shape here, displayed alongside his singular lyric style and scat singing trademark. The set begins with a shorter, more lyrical version of Thomas' signature tune "The Creator Has a Master Plan," with the lyric riding easy and smooth alongside the yodel, which bubbles up only in the refrains. It's a different story on his own "One," with Davis' piano leading the charge and Spaulding blowing through the center of the track, Thomas alternates scatting and his moaning, yodeling, howling, across the lyrics, through them under them and in spite of them…

There is such joy and power to the music heard on this CD that it is difficult to believe that Big Leon Brooks passed away before the record was released. This is a reissue of an LP from the B.O.B. label and it features Brooks at his best. One of the top blues harmonica players based in Chicago in the '50s, Brooks had drug problems and quit the music business altogether in 1957. Nineteen years later quite by accident he returned to playing blues and he was busy for a few years before heart problems caused him to scale back before his death. On Let's Go to Town his gruff vocals are effective and the backup musicians (which are usually guitarist Louis Myers, bassist Bob Stroger and drummer Odie Payne, Jr.) are perfect for this mixture of blues and jump tunes, and the set has plenty of variety in the blues idiom. This is a perfect last testament for Big Leon Brooks, a great if underrated bluesman.

Life and Love is an album by singer and songwriter Leon Russell. The album was recorded in Russell's new studios, Paradise Studios in Burbank, California, and produced and written by Russell. The album was first released as a vinyl LP, 8-track tape and cassette tape by Paradise Records and Warner Records in 1979, and re-released on CD in 2007 and 2012. Russell used electronic drums on this album for the first time, courtesy of Roger Linn who had invented the Linn LM-1, a pioneering version of the drum machine, making Russell an early user of this new instrument. Roger Linn started a company Moffett Electronics to sell his electronic drums at the same time as Leon's Life and Love album in 1979.

Joan Cabanilles worked for most of his life in Valencia, whose magnficent cathedral was a reminder of that trading city's glorious past. Organist Léon Berben plays an organ not in that cathedral, but an instrument in Basque country from the middle of the eighteenth century. It's a magnificent choice, and this collection of Cabanilles organ pieces would be worth the money for the graphic design alone. Check the booklet cover reproduction of the screaming faces painted on some of the organ pipes, for a start. Annotator Miguel Bernal Ripoll, whose words appear in English, French, Spanish, and German, writes that "Cabanilles appears like a Janus-headed deity with one face turned toward the past and the other definitely towards the future.

On the follow-up to the mind-blowing Spirits Known and Unknown, singer, multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and composer Leon Thomas decided to take a different track. Far from the sparely orchestrated ensembles of the previous works, Thomas loaded this set with jazz luminaries such as Roy Haynes and Billy Cobham, Billy Harper, Donald Smith, James Spaulding, Sonny Morgan, Ernie Royal, and many others as well as a backing chorus of female voices. Side one is the up-tempo jazz ride, as Thomas and company rip through a host of his own tunes, such as the scatted post-bop of "I Am" and the nearly bar-walking blues of "Come Along." But the side is graced by an absolutely stunning read of Milt Jackson's "Bag's Groove," with Harper leading a five-horn section…