Paul Stemets

Two classic easy-listening albums by famous French orchestra leader/arranger/composer Paul Mauriat, originally released in 1976 and 1973 on the Philips label, together on one CD and remastered from the original analogue stereo tapes for Vocalion's trademark crystal-clear sound.

Why aren't there more recordings like Fly Away Little Bird? Perhaps it's because there aren't more musicians of this stature. The studio reunion of the legendarily experimental Jimmy Giuffre 3 in 1992 was reissued in 2002 on the French Sunnyside label and is a radical departure from anything the trio had done in the past. These studio apparitions of the band are their most seamlessly accessible while being wildly exploratory. In addition to the consummate improvisations and compositions by Giuffre (title track, a redone "Tumbleweed"), the tender meditations by Steve Swallow ("Fits" and "Starts"), and the bottom-register contrapuntal improves by Paul Bley ("Qualude"), this is a trio recording that uses standards such as "Lover Man," a radically and gorgeously reworked "I Can't Get Started," "Sweet and Lovely," and "All the Things You Are" to state hidden textural possibilities inside chromatic harmony. There is never the notion of restraint in the slow, easy, and proactive way these compositions are approached.

Allusion to the digital world though it may be, there's a sweet, elegiac undercurrent to the title of Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full, an acknowledgement that it was written and recorded when McCartney was 64, the age he mythologized on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released almost exactly 40 years before Memory…

Paul Weller didn't play many dates in support of his 2018 album True Meanings. Not counting his summer festival appearances, which were all delivered prior to the album's September release, he gave just five concerts: two in the Netherlands, one in Belgium, and a two-night stand at London's Royal Festival Hall in October, where he played with the support of a full orchestra. Those two dates are the basis of Other Aspects: Live at the Royal Albert Hall, a double-CD accompanied by a DVD. Weller deliberately avoided familiar material for these concerts. All of True Meanings save three songs is performed (the mid-album sequence of "Bowie," "Wishing Well," and "Come Along" is absent) and he eschews crowd-pleasers from both his solo career and the Jam in favor of moody, lush reworkings of "Tales from the Riverbank" and "Private Hell."