Marie Flore Tutto Passa

On the last of her fully satisfying '60s releases, Buffy Sainte-Marie combined a strong assortment of original songs with a judicious selection of traditional folksongs and two Joni Mitchell covers (including "The Circle Game")…

2010 collection from one of Canada's foremost musician, singer and songwriter. Buffy Sainte-Marie was first noticed on the Folk circuit in the mid '60s. Since then, she has been involved in Country, Rock, soundtracks (winning an Oscar for writing 'Up Where We Belong'), and presented Sesame Street for five years…

This is one of the most scathing topical folk albums ever made. Sainte-Marie sings in an emotional, vibrato-laden voice of war ("The Universal Soldier," later a hit for Donovan), drugs ("Cod'ine"), sex ("The Incest Song"), and most telling, the mistreatment of Native Americans, of which Sainte-Marie is one ("Now That the Buffalo's Gone"). Even decades later, the album's power is moving and disturbing…

Sainte-Marie's final effort for Vanguard never received its due, as it lacked the hit singles of its predecessor, Moonshot. However, to many fans, Quiet Places contains several classics…

Producer extraordinaire John Morales returns to BBE Music, celebrating the life and work of R&B / soul legend Teena Marie with a double album full of brand new remixes, lovingly crafted from the original studio tapes, entitled ‘Love Songs & Funky Beats’.

Popular throughout the 1960s and '70s, Marie Laforêt is a French pop singer who garnered fame initially as a film actress during the early to mid-'60s. Born Maïténa Doumenach to parents of Armenian heritage on October 5, 1939, in Soulac-sur-Mer, Aquitaine, France, she made her film debut in 1960 in the René Clément drama Plein Soleil, a big-screen adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. Plein Soleil not only launched the acting career of Laforêt; it also made a cinema star of actor Alain Delon. In the wake of her showbiz breakthrough, Laforêt was offered one role after another, notably beginning with Saint Tropez Blues (1961) and La Fille aux Yeux d'Or (1961).

One may be surprised to hear in this recording the Sonata Op. 108 in D minor for cello and not for violin as Brahms conceived it. But, purists be damned, transcription in the 19th century was common practice, if only to facilitate the dissemination of works at a time when sound recording was not yet available! Indeed, didn’t Brahms himself transcribe his two Clarinet Sonatas Op. 120 for viola? In the present recording, Marie- Claude Bantigny has chosen simply to play the violin part an octave lower, without modifying the piano part in any way (unlike Paul Klengel in Op. 78), which allows the score to be heard practically in its original conception, like the same Lied that would be sung by a soprano or a bass baritone.

Buffy Sainte-Marie has always been a good deal more versatile as a musician than most people realize, roaming through folk, blues, country, pop, and even pioneering electronica on her various albums, always using her Cree ancestry as an anchor, and very few singers have dealt with cultural polemics as intelligently as she has. Perhaps because of her restless drive to try new forms, Sainte-Marie's albums are often woefully (but endearingly) erratic and inconsistent, but each contains hidden gems, and while her eerie, vibrato-laden singing style can sound affected at times, her drive to constantly pull her agenda into new musical territories is inspiring. Running for the Drum is her first new album in 17 years, and while it probably won't change anyone's attitudes about her work, it wonderfully spotlights all of the musical themes, forms, and concerns she's pursued in the past four decades. The album opens with a pair of Native American rockers, "No No Keshagesh" and "Cho Cho Fire," that draw on Native American drum rhythms, and both are fiery and invigorating. She revisits one of her finest early songs, the beautiful and haunting "Little Wheel Spin and Spin."

From neighbouring Spain to the Orient, passing by eastern lands, the second big wave of exoticism which reached its summit between the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, unquestionably stimulated by numerous universal exhibitions organised in Europe, greatly influenced the writing of occidental composers in search of a new language, including many french composers, thirsty for new sonorities and looking to leave the academism of the past behind them. For Maurice Ravel who, excepting his one and only tour to the United States, had never undertaken a long journey to a far-away country, preferring to stay at home surrounded by small trinkets, most of which only held any value for their owner, finding inspiration in music from other countries or in literature which evoked unknown lands in a new aesthetic was not only a way of escaping the real world but also of creating his own universe, inhabited by imaginary characters where the "swiss clockmaker" could control everything, as he did with the cut-out stars in the shutters at his house in Monfort-L'Amaury which served to recreate a starlit night when the master, a victim of insomnia, managed to catch a few minutes of sleep in the middle of the day…