Chucho Valdes & the Afro-Cuban Messengers: Chucho's Steps

"If you exclude his formative years with Cuban big bands (Sabor de Cuba of Bebo Valdes, Orquesta del Teatro Musical de La Habana ...), his real major, not only piano but mainly as a composer and arranger, takes off with his dedication to Irakere for twenty years. In the 1990s, after a few albums with singers, he began his recording as head of a quartet, with musical writing and a concept different from Irakere. But Chucho was simultaneously deepening and reshaping the new artistic form to [the] Afro-Cuban component in our music from his spiritual roots. [With] 'Chucho's Steps' in addition, there is an integration of its two last stages, extending the quartet format without being the 'orchestra' format. Most important in this process is to check the emphasis on writing and not just improvisation. It is interesting to note that other great and virtuos[o] jazz soloists today embark on a similar path, including Wayne Shorter, Wynton Marsalis, Herbie Hancock, Randy Weston and even Ornette Coleman" (CD notes by Leonardo Acosta).
View catalog record here!

Lykke Li: Wounded Rhymes

"This Swedish indie-pop warbler has often done a lot with a little — consider the suggestive wisps of melody all over 'Youth Novels' (LL/Atlantic), her 2008 debut — but she’s no minimalist, at least not anymore. 'Wounded Rhymes,' her follow-up on the same label, has thumping drums, Farfisa organs, girl-group vocal harmonies and darkly pealing guitars. It also has songs of desolate stoicism and disconsolate fury. Lykke Li wrote most of them alone in Los Angeles, on the mend from a broken relationship, and she put a lot of hurt into her lyrics. 'All my love is unrequited,' she wails in one Phil Spector-ish set piece. 'Sadness is my boyfriend,' she declares in another. But there’s steel in her delivery. When she spits out the phrase 'I’m your prostitute,' on 'Get Some,' she’s asserting control over her own exploitation. Speaking of which, this album has already yielded a cottage industry of remixes, including an especially brooding entry from Tyler the Creator" (Nate Chinen, "Sad Out West, Rocking Out in Brooklyn," New York Times, 3/4/11).
View catalog record here!

Eleanora Fagan: To Billie with Love from Dee Dee Bridgewater

"Sexy, spunky, sublime, inspired. That's the alliterative wrap on Dee Dee Bridgewater that fully encompasses her contagious appeal as a performer as well as her intrepid approach in fashioning her recordings. She's a risk taker who's perpetually looking around the next bend but with full vision in her rear view mirror of where she's already traveled — from the familiar red earth of Tennessee to the exotic red earth of Mali. ... Dee Dee has consistently embraced the jazz spirit that teems with vibrancy and freedom. 'I want to move forward, just as I've done with each of my albums,' she says. 'To not go backwards, but progress. Constantly.' So, with one foot firm in the past and the other sprinting ahead into the future, for her new album Dee Dee decided to reacquaint herself with an iconic figure of the jazz legacy: Billie Holiday. While she had already paid homage to such legendary musical figures as Horace Silver, Ella Fitzgerald and Kurt Weill ... her musical relationship with Billie went far deeper" (CD notes by Dan Ouellette).
View catalog record here!

The Strokes: Angles

"With 'Angles,' their first album in five years, the Strokes are embracing a new equilibrium, one that weighs each member’s voice more equally. ... The result is an album with 10 highly worked-over songs that are identifiably the Strokes — those counterpoint guitar riffs, Mr. Casablancas’s dyspeptic vocals, with their late-night energy and lyrical self-doubt, a few synths and downbeats for modern measure — but with a distinction. For the first time the material was written not just by Mr. Casablancas, who was absent by design, but by all the members. And it was recorded not in a studio in New York City but in a bucolic setting upstate. They’re not the mature Strokes, exactly — 'If I say that,' said Albert Hammond Jr., the rhythm guitarist, 'it almost sounds so boring, doesn’t it?' — but they’re close. Whatever they are, an audience seems ready. The band has sold out headlining dates at Madison Square Garden" (Melena Ryzik, "Different Strokes," New York Times, 3/13/11).
View catalog record here!

The Stanley Clarke Band featuring Hiromi

This disc received the Grammy award for best contemporary jazz album of 2010.
View catalog record here!

Beyond: Buddhist and Christian Prayers

"In August 2005, His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Abbot Martin Werlen, head of the Benedictine Monastery in Einsiedeln (Switzerland), convened a shared ceremony of interreligious dialogue. They concurred in reminding the audience to cultivate and deepen their own religion and to search for shared values across all belief systems. We are deeply grateful for their wonderful blessings and the inspiration that the two spiritual and religious leaders' statements have given us for Beyond. Their meaningful words inspired the two singers Regula Curti (Christian) and Dechen Shak-Dagsay (Buddhist) to realize a CD with Buddhist and Christian prayers together. A wonderful journey began. Both singers started a quest to understand their own religious traditions and to inspire each other in finding the common truth. ... Inspired by the intense energy and passion of their work, the Beyond team then asked Tina Turner for her involvement. ... Tina's powerful voice, dance and music have given us comfort and courage" (CD notes by Regula Curti and Dechen Shak-Dagsay).
View catalog record here!

Lady Gaga: The Fame Monster

Includes "Bad Romance," winner of the 2010 Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
View catalog record here!

Kirk Whalum: The Gospel According to Jazz, Chapter III

This two-disc set includes "It's What I Do," winner of the 2010 Grammy for Best Gospel Song.
View catalog record here!

Sergio Mendes: Celebration

"Mike Ragogna: Sergio, you have a double disc collection coming out soon titled Celebration: A Musical Journey. Sergio Mendes: Yes. MR: It's going to basically cover your whole career. SM: That's correct, yes. MR: Can you talk about its span a little? SM: It goes back from my first record, back in '66. Then, it goes onto the other records after that. So, it's a lot of songs that I've recorded. It's coming out to celebrate fifty years of my career. MR: By the time this gets printed, you will have already played some anniversary shows at the Geffen Playhouse, but since you've already played a night, can you go into the experience? SM: Yes, we just played last night for the opening, and the whole thing is sold out. It's a lovely theater, people were dancing and standing up, and it was wonderful last night. I think we're going to have a nice run. ... MR: Did any of your old friends like Herb Alpert show up? SM: Yes, yes, actually, yes. Jerry Moss, Herb Alpert--all my old friends--absolutely'" (Mike Ragogna, "Celebrating a Musical Journey," Huffington Post, 3/19/11).
View catalog record here!

Alligator Records 40th Anniversary Collection

"You could say that Alligator Records was born in January, 1970, at a little neighborhood bar called Florence's Lounge on Chicago's South Side. On a Sunday afternoon, a blues fan newly arrived in the city dropped in to check out a gig by a tall, gangly guitarist that everyone called 'Dog.' When I stepped into the crowded little club packed with dancing, drinking, laughing patrons, I was overwhelmed by joyful, raw and energized electric boogie blues. Hound Dog Taylor, perched on a folding chair with a steel slide on the fifth of his six fingers, was pouring out piercing, distorted licks and chords on a cheap Japanese guitar and singing in a high, cracking true bluesman's voice. He was accompanied only by a broken-toothed second guitarist named Brewer Phillips, playing ever-changing bass lines on an old Fender Telecaster, and a gum-chewing drummer named Ted Harvey who propelled every song forward. ... It was simply the happiest music I ever heard, and I knew it had to be recorded" (CD notes by Bruce Iglauer).
View catalog record here!

Ana Moura: Coliseu

"In the beginning was Amália Rodrigues. That singer so dominates the modern history of the fado, Portugal’s soulful, guitar-based national song style, that during a 60-year career brought to an end only with her death in 1999, her name became virtually synonymous with the genre. ... But during the past decade or so there has been an explosion of new voices, most of them female, as well as the renovation of a genre that had come to seem hidebound and resistant to change. A so-called novo fado, or new fado, movement has catapulted the genre into the 21st century, opening a space for bold experiments with repertory, instrumentation and ways of singing. Outside Portugal the fadista (as a practitioner of the genre is called) most evident of late is the 31-year-old Ana Moura, whose smoky contralto has drawn the attention of the Rolling Stones and Prince and who has just released a live CD called 'Coliseu'" (Larry Rohter, "Carving Out a Bold Destiny for Fado," New York Times, 3/27/11).
View catalog record here!

Bright Eyes: The People's Key

"[Conor] Oberst is about to release The People’s Key, the first Bright Eyes album since 2007’s Cassadaga, a swirling operatic opus that was (mostly) critically admired for being as opulent and baroque as his early work was spare and delicate. ... The new album is rich with slick, glitzy keyboards courtesy of Nate Walcott, the third member of Bright Eyes. 'To me, this is not an eighties record, but that’s definitely the palette of sounds we’re drawing from,' says Oberst, who worked with the band to untangle and simplify their sound. ... 'The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life in general, is confusion,' he says. 'The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you’re going to find out you’re wrong—that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions.' Fans will recognize another familiar thread in The People’s Key, that of living in a world that can at times be horrifying" (Lizzy Goodman, "The Ballad of Conor Oberst," New York, 2/14/11).
View catalog record here!

Herbie Hancock: The Imagine Project

This album's title track "Imagine" with Herbie Hancock, Pink, Seal, India.Arie, Konono No 1, Jeff Beck, and Oumou Sangare won the Grammy award for best pop collaboration with vocals.

View catalog record here!

Ingram Marshall: September Canons

"In an interview, New Yorker critic Alex Ross, author of a history of 20th-century music, The Rest Is Noise, was quick to put Marshall on a short list of the most neglected living composers. ... For the first-time listener seeking an introduction to Marshall's musical output, probably the best survey on disc of Marshall's music would be September Canons (New World Records, 2009), which traces his music from ... 1976 experiments on Indonesian Flute (Gambuh, written for the composer to play with live electronics) all the way up to 2002. The excellent liner notes — by local scholar, oboist and frequent Marshall collaborator Libby Van Cleve — describe it as an 'archaeological dig, flowing in reverse chronological order,' and like a dig or a core sample, it gives a cross-section of his evolving techniques" (Daniel Stephen Johnson, "Musical Mycophile: The Unsung Genius of Ingram Marshall," New Haven Advocate, 3/24/11).
View catalog record here!

Jennifer Hudson: I Remember Me

"The challenge for Jennifer Hudson — a pure singer who is not yet a real songwriter — is to find material that measures up to that massive voice. For her second album, which improves upon 2008's Grammy-winning self-titled debut, she has the best songwriters and producers that money can buy. And with Whitney Houston still as the model, they deliver the diva goods. While the R. Kelly ballad 'Where You At' may be somewhat underwhelming as a first single, there are much better contributions from Stargate (the you-go-girl anthem 'I Got This'), Ne-Yo (the old-school slow jam 'Why Is It So Hard') and Alicia Keys (the piano- and snare-drum-lifted 'Angel'). The latter also kicks in two soul-disco throwbacks, 'Everybody Needs Love' and 'Don't Look Down,' that allow the sometimes stiff Hudson to cut loose and have some fun. Hey, a girl's got to shake that hot new bod!" (Chuck Arnold, "Music," People, 4/4/11, p. 53).
View catalog record here!

Free Association: Code 46

"U.K. ambient alt-rock unit Free Association was founded in 2003 by Belfast DJ/composer David Holmes. Programmer/guitarist Steve Hilton and vocalists Petra Jean Phillipson and Sean Reveron fill out the lineup. The ensemble was nominated for a European Film Award in 2004 for the soundtrack to Code 46, featuring Samantha Morton and Tim Robbins. Among Free Association's film credits: Out of Sight, Analyze That, and Ocean's 11/12. Collective collaborations include Danny DeVito, Steven Soderbergh, Badly Drawn Boy, Depeche Mode, Massive Attack, Moloko, Isaac Hayes, Pet Shop Boys, and Dirty Vegas" (Phil Ramone and Danielle Evin, "Dog Ears Music," Huffington Post, 3/25/11).
View catalog record here!

Tito Puente Masterworks Live!!!

"The repertory movement came slowly to Afro-Latin music. ... You might know about the projects spearheaded through the last decade by Arturo O’Farrill ... and by Wynton Marsalis. ... One that’s still a bit under the radar is the Manhattan School of Music Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, led by the drummer Bobby Sanabria. A new record, 'Tito Puente Masterworks Live!!!,' released by Jazzheads, suggests much hope about transmitting the work of bandleaders like Puente through new bands, players and arrangements. In a live set from 2008 the group burns through songs like 'Cuban Nightmare,' 'Mambo Buddha' and 'Ran Kan Kan,' spurred by Mr. Sanabria’s conducting and yelling. ... You could, of course, just seek out the originals, and you should. But this is something worthy unto itself: a performance that hangs together by a band that’s kicking in the stall. " (Ben Ratliff, "Playlist," New York Times, 3/27/11).
View catalog record here!

Neil Young: Le Noise

"The rock icon Neil Young’s latest album, 'Le Noise,' is a band-less guitar blast; he’s on a solo tour this spring that passes through Avery Fisher Hall" ("Night Life: Spring Preview," New Yorker, 3/28/11).
View catalog record here!

Pinetop Perkins & Willie "Big Eyes" Smith: Joined at the Hip

"In 1969 in Buffalo, N.Y., a wiry, middle-aged chain smoker sat in on piano during a jam session and earned a spot in the band of legendary bluesman Muddy Waters. By then, Pinetop Perkins had already performed with the likes of Sonny Boy Williamson and slide guitarist Robert Nighthawk. ... 'Muddy came by, and heard him jamming, and he liked what he heard. The rest is history,' said Willie 'Big Eyes' Smith, who was a drummer in the band. By the time he and Waters hooked up, Pinetop was in his 50s and 'had more energy than us younger folks did,' Smith said. That verve kept him playing the blues and collecting Grammy Awards until shortly before his death from cardiac arrest Monday at his Austin, Texas, home. He was 97. ... Perkins won a Grammy in February for best traditional blues album for 'Joined at the Hip: Pinetop Perkins & Willie "Big Eyes" Smith.' That win made Perkins the oldest Grammy winner, edging out late comedian George Burns, who was 95" (Shelia Byrd and Jim Vertuno, "Pinetop Perkins Dead," Huffington Post, 3/21/11).
View catalog record here!

Timothy Andres: Shy and Mighty

"I got introduced to his music through Bob Hurwitz at Nonesuch Records, who gave me a score of 'Shy and Mighty,' a collection of pieces for two pianos. Timothy does something as a composer that I’ve never been able to do myself. He can create characters in music that you see and feel. For instance, there’s a piece called 'How Can I Live in Your World of Ideas?' ... It’s a conversation between the two pianos, where one character seems to have these ideas about classical music, about history, about occidental stuff, and then the other one is insisting that there’s another way to go. They’re combating and then they start meeting, coming together, in this way that’s very modern and kind of jarring, not like anything I’ve heard. It’s squarely tonal music, not post-Schoenberg in the sense of avoiding functional harmony. One minute it’ll have a gesture of Brahms, and then at other times ... something that sounds like rock" (Brad Mehldau speaking to Nate Chinen, "Playlist," New York Times, 2/27/11).
View catalog record here!