Robert Blanché

With her sleek bob haircut (usually with a flower placed just so), vintage fashion sense, strikingly beautiful looks and artfully customized ukulele, Janet Klein might seem at first to be a simple novelty act, a 21st-century hipster "ironically" recreating the subtly naughty looks of a fin-de-siecle French postcard. Then she opens her mouth to sing. There's no Betty Boop hiccups or Mae West-style brassiness in her charmingly original voice. And when she starts to play her ukulele, it's clear that this oft-ridiculed cousin of the guitar is neither prop nor gimmick, but a delightful and under-utilized musical instrument. Bearing an ever-expanding repertoire of, as she puts it, "obscure, lovely and naughty songs from the 1910's , 20's and 30's," Janet Klein is a musical archeologist hiding in the body of an F. Scott Fitzgerald heroine.

With her sleek bob haircut (usually with a flower placed just so), vintage fashion sense, strikingly beautiful looks and artfully customized ukulele, Janet Klein might seem at first to be a simple novelty act, a 21st-century hipster "ironically" recreating the subtly naughty looks of a fin-de-siecle French postcard. Then she opens her mouth to sing. There's no Betty Boop hiccups or Mae West-style brassiness in her charmingly original voice. And when she starts to play her ukulele, it's clear that this oft-ridiculed cousin of the guitar is neither prop nor gimmick, but a delightful and under-utilized musical instrument. Bearing an ever-expanding repertoire of, as she puts it, "obscure, lovely and naughty songs from the 1910's , 20's and 30's," Janet Klein is a musical archeologist hiding in the body of an F. Scott Fitzgerald heroine.

"Rock Of The Westies" is the 10th studio album by English musician Elton John, released in October 1975. As with "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy", "Rock Of The Westies" debuted on the US Billboard 200 chart at #1, the only two albums at that time to have done so. It was also successful (albeit to a lesser extent) in the artist's home territory of the UK, where it reached #5 on the UK Albums Chart. Robert Christgau ranked it as #7 on his list of the best albums of 1975. The title is a play on the phrase "West of the Rockies", the album having been recorded at Caribou Ranch in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

Composing over 150 works for piano and voice over a period of 44 years, the songs of Francis Poulenc remain consistently popular to concert audiences the world over. Varying in their individual style and character in a way that defies generalisation, Poulenc set his music to a wide range of French poetry – both ancient and modern, and from the serious to the surreal.

Saxophonist Art Pepper's career was in its final comeback phase in 1979 when he accepted producer John Snyder's invitation to record an album on his fledgling Artists House label. A West Coast jazz star in the '50s, Pepper had suffered from bouts with drug abuse and subsequent incarceration that left him largely marginalized by the '70s. However, after going through rehab and meeting his wife and manager Laurie Pepper, he enjoyed a fruitful late-career resurgence.

Marcelo Raúl Álvarez is an Argentine lyric tenor who achieved international success starting in the mid-1990s, and at the end of the twentieth century, become an international opera star. This release from Sony Classical features the works of Massenet, Offenbach, Donizetti, Gounod, Verdi, Meyerbeer, and Rossini.