Ridsa Boum Boum

When Benin-born guitarist/vocalist Lionel Loueke appeared at this summer's Ottawa International Jazz Festival, he was a real highlight amongst the entire group of stellar young players in trumpeter Terence Blanchard's band. His solo spot, where he used looping and harmonizing devices to create a veritable mini-orchestra with just one voice and guitar, illustrated how technology can be used to create something natural. Jazz Luddites regularly rail against the use of electronics to tarnish the "pure nature of jazz, but Loueke clearly doesn't subscribe to such a narrow view. Technology is only as good as the hands it's in, and an increasing number of artists are finding ways to utilize it to stretch the shape of jazz. Loueke came relatively late to the guitar.

Enigma is a German musical project founded in 1990 by Romanian-German musician and producer Michael Cretu. Cretu had released several solo records, collaborated with various artists, and produced albums for his then wife, German pop singer Sandra, before he conceived the idea of a New Age, Worldbeat project. He recorded the first Enigma studio album, MCMXC a.D. (1990), with contributions from David Fairstein and Frank Peterson. The album remains Enigma's biggest, helped by the international hit single, "Sadeness (Part I)", which sold 12 million units alone. According to Cretu, the inspiration for the creation of the project came from his desire to make a kind of music that did not obey "the old rules and habits" and presented a new form of artistic expression with mystic and experimental components.

Michael Crétu's attempt at fusing everything from easy listening sex music and hip-hop rhythms to centuries-old Gregorian chants couldn't have been more designed to tweak the nose of high art, a joyously crass stab straight at a mainstream, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. The result is something that shouldn't exist, but in its own way results in as much of a cultural scramble and explosion as anything Public Enemy were doing around the same time, crossing over the Euro-disco and new age spheres with style…

The wait will not be very long now … After the success of his first album, "Tranquille", Ridsa finally comes back! On Twitter the singer announced the good news, which his fans had been waiting impatiently for months. We now know the name of this opus, "Libre", as well as the release date, April 14th.

Platinum Collection is a triple-disc set that contains one disc of Enigma’s greatest hits, one disc of remixes, and one disc of “The Lost Ones,” brief instrumental snippets that were used as source material and ideas for full-length tracks…

On An Overgrown Path, Leoš Janáček’s 15 pieces-spanning piano cycle, is here presented in a reshaped guise, arranged for string orchestra and interpreted by the Camerata Zürich under lead violinist Igor Karsko’s direction. This is the premiere recording of the orchestral adaption. In this programme, Janáček’s cycle is bookended by Josef Suk’s Meditation on the Old Czech Chorale St. Wenceslas and Antonín Dvořák’s Notturno – pieces that are thematically connected to the folkloric elements found in Janáček’s composition. French writer Maïa Brami wrote poems to accompany the new arrangement of On An Overgrown Path, and their recorded versions, spoken by the writer herself, are included on the album, contextualizing the cycle with inventive analogies to Janáček’s life.