The Dry Aaron

Who really killed the Hadler family?

Infinite Woodwinds is the second release in my line of next-gen virtual orchestral instruments. As with Infinite Brass, the goal was to create a collection of expressive virtual instruments that are easy to use and fun to play, allowing for quick results and realistic performances while sounding great out-of-the-box.

Infinite Brass is a collection of next-gen virtual brass instruments that let you play any line exactly as it sounds in your head—right on your keyboard with no keyswitching—and render your performance authentically with a fantastic, clean, modern sound in one of 3 different spaces.

The first family of New Orleans had crossed paths countless times, but banded together in the '70s to play a smooth mix of R&B, jazz, and blues.

Amazon Review by Stuart Jefferson
If you're a blues fan chances are you're already familiar with (if you don't already own) some/many/all of these albums. But if you don't own these sets (or have only a few) this is a good way to own all 20 albums in one nice, neat box. The sound is the same as the individual albums which is very good for the various periods when these tracks were originally recorded. The jackets are fairly thick cardboard and are reproductions of the original covers. The outer box is also of good quality. There's a 34 page booklet that has a few paragraphs on each disc, and track lists, but no detailed liner notes to really put this music into some kind of perspective, but information on these artists and styles is available in various blues books/encyclopedias and on the internet.

Organist Art Neville formed a band in 1966 in New Orleans with his brothers Aaron and Charles on vocals, Leo Nocentelli on guitar, George Porter on bass, and Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste on drums. Billing themselves as Art Neville & the Sounds, they signed to Sansu Enterprises, a label founded by Marshall Sehorn and writer, producer, arranger, and recording artist Allen Toussaint, and minus the vocalists, and now called the Meters, they became the house band for the label, providing backing tracks for releases by Lee Dorsey, Earl King, Betty Harris, and many others, including many cuts by Toussaint himself. The Meters would also track instrumentals that were used as filler tracks on LP releases by Sansu artists, and in time, there were enough of these instrumentals to release an LP in 1969 called the Meters, which Sehorn shrewdly placed with Josie Records because of that label’s connection to its parent company, Cosnat Distributors, at that time the largest East Coast music distributor. The Meters were something special, and their swampy precision practically defined the meaning and template of funk. Two more LPs, Look-Ka Py Py and Struttin’, appeared a year later in 1970 on the Josie imprint. When Josie went bankrupt in 1971, the Meters moved on to sign with Reprise Records and continued to release thundering funk records through the decade before gradually morphing into the more vocal-oriented group the Neville Brothers. This two-disc set collects the Meters' entire Josie catalog, including all three LPs, the A- and B-sides of four singles, four tracks billed to Art Neville & the Meters, and two tracks attributed to Cyril Neville & the Meters. The end result is a joyous and impressively funky survey of this stellar and professional band’s earliest recordings.

This programme features concert music by composers who also wrote film scores for Hollywood. While this was just one string to the considerable bows of Gershwin and Copland, Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman are best known for their music for Hitchcock films (Vertigo, North by Northwest, Marnie and Psycho for Herrmann; and Rebecca and The Paradine Case for Waxman). Centre stage is Gershwin’s Song-book, arranged by the composer for solo piano in order to present the songs ‘as George Gershwin plays them himself’.