Music as a Mirror of History

Puerto Rican music in New York is given center stage in Ruth Glasser's original and lucid study.

The extraordinary career of superstar Lorrie Morgan, one of the biggest and best selling female artists in country music history, is celebrated on this very special anthology that finds Morgan revisiting her greatest moments as well as covering a handful of country classics and more!

There are masterpieces of music history that are simply forgotten for a while before they are rediscovered in a later era as a mirror of one's own sensitivities.

There are masterpieces of music history that are simply forgotten for a while before they are rediscovered in a later era as a mirror of one's own sensitivities. The reasons for this forgetting are manifold - in the case of Paul Dessau's fairy-tale opera Lanzelot, they are probably clearly political.

The adventurous trombonist and composer Roswell Rudd made a decided shift in direction on his first RareNoise Records release as a leader by embracing jazz standards he has loved and played throughout his long and illustrious career. Accompanied by the brilliant pianist Lafayette Harris, upright bass virtuoso Ken Filiano and soulful vocal sensation Fay Victor, the 81 year old jazz master delivers with rare potency and poignancy on the aptly titled "Embrace".

Nippon Modern is the first intensive study of Japanese cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, a period in which the country's film industry was at its most prolific and a time when cinema played a singular role in shaping Japanese modernity. During the interwar period, the signs of modernity were ubiquitous in Japan's urban architecture, literature, fashion, advertising, popular music, and cinema. The reconstruction of Tokyo following the disastrous earthquake of 1923 highlighted the extent of this cultural transformation, and the film industry embraced the reconfigured space as an expression of the modern. Shochiku Kamata Film Studios (1920-1936), the focus of this study, was the only studio that continued filmmaking in Tokyo following the city's complete destruction.

Princely India in the 1930s and 40s enjoyed a golden age which already seems immeasurably distant from the thriving, modern nation of today. These were halcyon days of bejewelled and eccentric Maharajas; life in marble palaces mirrored in lakes or in mighty stone fortresses on craggy hills; tiger hunts on elephant back and elephant hunts on horseback; and lavish house parties ringing with the sound of polo and music and laughter….