The Band Islands

In the spring of 1966, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears represented a genuinely new sound, as fresh to listeners as the songs on Meet the Beatles had seemed two years earlier. Released just as "California Dreaming" was ascending the charts by leaps and bounds, it was the product of months of rehearsal in the Virgin Islands and John Phillips' discovery of what one could do to build a polished recorded sound in the studio – it embraced folk-rock, pop/rock, pop, and soul, and also reflected the kind of care that acts like the Beatles were putting into their records at the time. "Monday, Monday" and "California Dreamin'" are familiar enough to anyone who's ever listened to the radio, and "Go Where You Wanna Go" isn't far behind, in this version or the very similar rendition by the Fifth Dimension.

Joe Sample is the golden boy of American fusion-jazz, but his recent project Children of the Sun is not as sunny as the title might imply. Stimulated by a visit to the Caribbean island of St. Croix, he started to look particularly into the subject of slavery – a part of his own family history. Sample has been planning this project since 1995, and will bring his composition to the Berlin audience with the NDR Bigband (the Hamburg Radio Big Band), arranged by Jorg Achim Keller.