Yoko Tawanda

Ivan Lins is one of the most treasured and recorded Brazilian composers in the world and a melodist with few equals. The winner of four Latin Grammy Awards, Lins has recorded nearly fifty albums since 1970; they contain countless songs, notably “Madalena” and “Começar de Novo” (To Begin Again), that have become standards in his country. “Love Dance,” cowritten with his longtime arranger, Gilson Peranzzetta, and lyricist Paul Williams, is Lins’s English-language classic. Its performers include Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Mark Murphy, Shirley Horn, Blossom Dearie, Carmen McRae, George Benson, Nancy Wilson, Barbra Streisand, and Quincy Jones, who helped maneuver Lins’s U.S. breakthrough in the early ‘80s.

The sessions for 1980's Double Fantasy were supposed to yield two albums, the second to be released at a future time, but Lennon's assassination tragically halted the project in its tracks. A bit over three years later, Yoko Ono issued tapes of many of the songs planned for that album under the title Milk and Honey, laid out in the same John-Yoko-John-Yoko dialogue fashion as its predecessor…

The most distinctive thing about Double Fantasy, the last album John Lennon released during his lifetime, is the very thing that keeps it from being a graceful return to form from the singer/songwriter, returning to active duty after five years of self-imposed exile…

Yoko Ono's catalog isn't easy to navigate or even define at times. Even when John Lennon was on board as a collaborator – band member, producer or cheerleader – her music could be willfully difficult and stubbornly uncommercial. She's a singular artist, maybe more so than her late husband and his famous band, which makes any tribute to her vast recorded work an uphill charge not exactly suited for the easily intimidated. The 14 brave souls who tackle Ono's music on Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono can't truly replicate her distinctive path, and much of the source material hinges on her artist's right to explore those paths via routes of her choosing. In other words, they're not songs in the traditional sense. There have been some interpretable tracks over the years: "Who Has Seen the Wind?," "Listen, the Snow Is Falling" and "Walking on Thin Ice" are close enough to pop music.

Ubuntu Music is delighted to announce the signing of internationally acclaimed pianist/composer Yoko Miwa, to release her forthcoming album late this year.

The one unreleased item among Apple/EMI's exhaustive 2010 John Lennon reissue campaign was Double Fantasy Stripped Down, a revision of the original 1980 album supervised by Yoko Ono and producer Jack Douglas. The intent of this new mix is to give the recording a greater sense of intimacy, but Double Fantasy isn’t Let It Be: it doesn’t have a heavily bootlegged original early incarnation, it only exists in its final form; it’s not an album that was designed as a raw back-to-basics record, it was constructed as a slick studio affair…

The most distinctive thing about Double Fantasy, the last album John Lennon released during his lifetime, is the very thing that keeps it from being a graceful return to form from the singer/songwriter, returning to active duty after five years of self-imposed exile…

Some Time in New York City… This album was not kicked off with a good start. After John and Yoko moved to New York, they started to get involved in anti-war protests, and protests to get John Sinclair out of prison. All of these were followed with Richard Nixon's attempts to deport John Lennon, which would last for around 5 years afterwards…