Oregon Music

A 1992 CD reissue of their 1979 album, among their only releases ever issued by a major label. It was characteristically free-wheeling and eclectic, with long stretches of classical, Asian, African, and jazz coming together, and the group mixing structured ensemble work with surging free solos. - by Ron Wynn, AMG

Recorded at State Recording House GDRZ, Studio 5, Moscow, Russia in June 1999. The Moscow double-album is brilliantly conceived and executed. McCandless' compositions “Round Robin” and “All That Mornings Will Bring” sound as if they were written for this kind of expanded palette. Towner's “The Templars” (once again a visit to the medieval) is magnificent, spacious and emerges with great pomp and circumstance at the hands of quartet and orchestra. Moore's “Arianna” is completely reborn at the hands of the musicians of the quartet and the orchestra. “Icarus”, Towner's classic piece, which made its debut performance with the Paul Winter Consort and the symphonic orchestra at Indianapolis in 1970 comes alive with myth and legend, tone, texture and melted wax, here on Moscow. “Spirit's Of Another Sort”, “Anthem” (from Towner's solo album of the same name), “Firebat” and “Zephyr” are newly recast gems, but the album also belongs to “Free-form Piece For Orchestra and Improvisers”.

City Music is an airplane descending over frozen lakes into Chicago. City Music is riding the Q Train out to Coney Island to smell the ocean and a morning in Philadelphia where greats cranes reconfigure the buildings like an endless puzzle. City Music is a quiet afternoon moment on a bench in Baltimore, a highway in Seattle at night where the distant houses look like tiny flames and a bottle of red wine being drained on a bridge in Paris. City Music is a bus pulling into St. Louis at dawn where the arch looks like a metal rainbow reflecting the days early sunlight…. City Music is also the new album by Kevin Morby. Full of listless wanderlust, it’s a collection inspired by and devoted to the metropolitan experience across America and beyond by a songwriter cast from his own mould. As he puts it: “It is a mix-tape, a fever dream, a love letter dedicated to those cities that I cannot get rid of, to those cities that are all inside of me.”

For the 200th anniversary of Clara Schumann’s birth, Isata Kanneh-Mason takes us on a journey through the composer’s extraordinary life with her stunning debut album on Decca Classics. Isata will be joining forces with an all-female line-up to champion the significance of women musicians throughout the years, and their influence on the classical musical canon. The recording features Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, written at the age of fourteen, performed by the composer at Leipzig Gewandhaus two years later under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn.