Modern Cuisenist

This box is a musical treat for all jazz fans, as no less than 20 original albums by the Modern Jazz Quartet are released here on ten CDs…

Robert Paterson’s The Four Seasons consists of four song cycles, with a total of twenty-one songs, for four different voice types: soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass-baritone. Each voice type represents a different season: Summer Songs (soprano), Autumn Songs (mezzo-soprano), Winter Songs (bass-baritone), and Spring Songs (tenor). The four critically-acclaimed singers on this album, soprano, Marnie Breckenridge, mezzo-soprano, Blythe Gaissert, tenor Alok Kumar, and bass-baritone David Neal have worked closely with Paterson, and gave the world premieres of these works with American Modern Ensemble, one of America’s most beloved new music ensembles.

Great album by the top Japanese jazz players of the time (Sadao Watanabe, Akira Miyazawa, Hideto Kanai, Takeshi Inomata, Eiichi Fuji…).

Great album by the top Japanese jazz players of the time (Sadao Watanabe, Akira Miyazawa, Hideto Kanai, Takeshi Inomata, Eiichi Fuji…).

Before the world even had a chance to hear the Modern Lovers, Jonathan Richman had already moved on. Richman founded the group in 1970 with bandmates who would go on to acts like the Cars and the Talking Heads, and in the early '70s, they recorded some truly electric demos that would help define a sound later understood as punk. These recordings wouldn't see wide-scale release until long after the first iteration of the band broke up, and by the time of Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, Richman had dropped the angst and anxiety of his proto-punk beginnings in favor of a far friendlier, quieter, and more innocent style. Ironically, the 1976 debut album of Richman's revamped, gentler Modern Lovers arrived just one month before the proper release of the earlier version of the band's recordings, emphasizing how drastic of a change had occurred. While the raw excitement of the early pre-punk Modern Lovers was groundbreaking, there's an equally revelatory quality in the softness and vulnerability of what followed.