Whose Your City

Forty-fifth anniversary box set release from The Velvet Underground & Nico featuring the latest remastering. Set consists of 6 discs includes 29 unreleased tracks in a 92-page hardcover book packaging with a sticker of banana. Japanese edition features the high-fidelity SHM-CD format (compatible with standard CD player). The set includes both stereo and mono versions of the album "The Velvet Underground & Nico" (Disc 1-2), as well as Nico's 1967 solo debut CD "Chelsea Girl" (Disc 3), a studio session at Scepter Studio recorded to acetate, and unreleased recording footage from rehearsal at Andy Warhol's Factory in January 1966 (Disc 4), and a live show from Columbus, Ohio (Disc 5-6).

Jennifer Higdon is a masterful colorist whose music is immediately appealing, full of energy and dash, but also with lyrical movements that grab you and hold your interest with their variety and melodic freshness. She can be brassy and bold like William Schuman and lushly Romantic like Samuel Barber, to mention just two American predecessors her music calls to mind. She also has a strong profile of her own, as we hear in City Scapes, a musical portrait of Atlanta that captures the bustle of a metropolis on the move. It's centerpiece, "river sings a song to trees," is wonderfully paced and engrossing. Concerto for Orchestra is a grand workout for a virtuoso band, teeming with solo turns that can tax all but the best musicians, and passages that spotlight sections of the orchestra with opportunities to strut their stuff. It's a brilliant piece brilliantly played by the Atlantans. Add Telarc's usual terrific sound and this disc becomes a must for fans of accessible modern music.

Simple words, and yet that was the way Ornette Coleman summed up the reason behind his quest in music: a manifestation of the pure joy of sound and rhythm. And if the music of Ornette Coleman continues to move us today, it's because it drives its roots deep down into the rural blues of America's south, causing the emergence of a free and carefree jazz whose melodies form a vibrant, lyrical celebration of the moment. Ornette Coleman, incidentally, was a musician whose fervent admirers have included great artists of immensely varying styles, from Lou Reed to John Zorn and Leonard Bernstein, or David Cronenberg, Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, Patti Smith, Claude Nougaro and Pat Metheny, to name only those.

The original Max's Kansas City 1976 pioneering punk club album, extended with an extra 30 tracks and historical notes. Max's Kansas City is the legendary New York City nightclub that became the focal point for the city's hip artistic community from the late 60's until the early 80's. In its initial period it was famously often populated by Andy Warhol's Factory crowd, and played host to new artists such as the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, the Stooges, Bruce Springsteen and countless others. It became a base for jet-setters, glam rockers and celebs, until the scene faded and it shut its doors at the end of 1974. Reopened in 1975 under new management, Peter Crowley was hired as music director. The new young bands he booked helped spawn, in tandem with CBGBs, the New York City punk scene. In 1976 Peter compiled a studio album of acts associated with the club, 'Max's Kansas City 1976', to help promote the club.