Editorial Product Review: :This is not the typical example of an artist from another genre jumping on the crowded standards-and-ballads bandwagon. When I Fall in Love instead represents an instrumental stylist busting out of a box to find a much more suitable platform for his craft. These tracks are the fruits of an obvious labor of love for everyone from the featured musicians to the arrangers to the engineers. The arrangers, particularly Billy Childs and Gil Goldstein, give Botti's trumpet a broad-brushed orchestral backdrop that allows him to ...
Editorial Product Review: essential recording:Miles Davis's impact on jazz is almost incalculable. From his early days as a sideman for Charlie Parker, through his groundbreaking Birth of the Cool sessions, to his stunning small groups of the '50s and '60s, through to his electric renaissance, the trumpeter, bandleader, and composer has left a deep mark on all who came after. He is one of jazz's true giants. Sketches of Spain, though one of Davis's most commercially successful sessions, is also one of his most controversial. Re-teaming with ...
Editorial Product Review:Album Description:The New York Times called Pat Metheny’s 1992 Grammy Award-winning Secret Story the most sweepingly ambitious album that the jazz guitarist has yet recorded...a nearly 80-minute world-music suite with symphonic underpinnings. If the album functioned then, in the words of critic Stephen Holden, as part travelogue and part soundtrack for a nonexistent film, then this expanded and re-mastered edition can best be described as the director’s cut. Composer and guitarist Metheny revisited and restored five previously unreleased tracks in the studio over the last ...
Editorial Product Review:Album Description:In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans native son Terence Blanchard has created an impassioned song cycle, A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina), as his third album for Blue Note Records. (Since signing with the label in 2003, Blanchard has released two other critically-acclaimed albums, Bounce and Flow, the latter of which received two Grammy nominations in 2006. This 13-track emotional tour-de-force of anger, rage, compassion, melancholy, and beauty features Blanchard's quintet- pianist Aaron Parks, saxophonist Brice Winston, ...
Editorial Product Review:Album Description:Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington the most important artists in the history of jazz and the two most influential American musicians of the 20th Century. Because of their centennials (1999 for Duke and 2000 for Louis), their great legacy is celebrating a worldwide rennaissnce. And this month, they are the focus and the continum in Ken Burns' JAZZ, a 20-hour documentary to be broadcast on PBS. In April, 1961, these two giants got togethr in a New York studio for their only encounter. Louis ...
Editorial Product Review: essential recording:When Duke Ellington took his orchestra to the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956, the band was in need of an uplift, some humongous event that would revitalize its image in the wake of bebop, hard bop, and so many more jazz currents. Ellington got the lift he needed when he called 'Diminuendo in Blue' with set-closer 'Crescendo in Blue' tacked on the end. Tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves got the nod from Ellington to segue from 'Diminuendo' to 'Crescendo,' and he blew doors. With ...
Editorial Product Review: :From their first work together on the Birth of the Cool sessions in 1949, Miles Davis and Gil Evans forged a unique relationship as great soloist and brilliant arranger. The real opportunity to explore their shared vision didn't come until 1957, however, when Davis had forged a relationship with a major record label able to support it. Though a product of the big-band tradition, Evans was never limited by sectional voicings and riffs. He had an interest in unusual instrumentation and a talent for creating ...
Editorial Product Review: essential recording:Charlie Parker welcomed the opportunity to record standards with a small string ensemble in 1949, and the results are stunning, his liquid alto soaring over the tuneful and only occasionally stiff arrangements. Along the way, he invests tunes like 'I Didn't Know What Time It Was' and 'Laura' with a unique blend of bluesy realism and mercurial improvisation. The CD adds live versions from a Carnegie Hall concert, and there are also two brilliant versions of Neal Hefti's 'Repetition.' The 1947 version has ...
Editorial Product Review: :These 1957 recordings were the first of Miles Davis's collaborations with arranger Gil Evans for Columbia, renewing a relationship that had begun with the Birth of the Cool sessions in 1949. It was perhaps the most important relationship ever forged between a jazz soloist and an arranger, for Evans excelled at finding fresh material (like Delibes's 'The Maids of Cadiz') and then adding subtle voicings and blending unusual instruments to highlight Davis's central voice. Everything Evans does enhances the trumpeter's keen sense of space and ...
Editorial Product Review: :Take George Gershwin's Porgy & Bess, add Miles Davis and arranger Gil Evans, and what do you get? A classic jazz album that--despite the fact that the material has been rendered almost overly familiar due to countless interpretations--still sounds remarkably fresh four decades after its initial release. Miles' soft yet piercing trumpet style is perfectly suited to Gershwin's melancholy melodies, Evans' musical direction of his 18-piece orchestra is impeccable, and their version of 'Summertime' may well be the finest ever waxed. Davis and Evans teamed ...
Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700 offers the best price-to-performance ratio we've seen in a desktop chip. For half the cost of AMD's top-of-the-line chip, you get identical if not superior performance and better power efficiency. AMD surprised us last year with its completely dominant dual-core chips, but Intel regains the crown with Core 2 Duo.
India expects to see rough diamond supplies fall by up to a fourth after the Diamond Trading Co (DTC), the distribution arm of De Beers, cuts down on Indian clients, an industry body said on Wednesday.