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Most Popular Featured Releases

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 October 2021

ECM Records ECM 2681
Format: CD

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At age 81, jazz drummer Andrew Cyrille continues to make music. He’s not just coasting, either. The News, his third release for ECM Records, is challenging and fresh. Guitarist Bill Frisell plays on the album, as he did on Cyrille’s other ECM discs, The Declaration of Musical Independence (2016) and Lebroba (2018). Bassist Ben Street and pianist David Virelles complete the quartet for this album. Street was a member of the quartet on The Declaration of Musical Independence, and Virelles co-led a session, Continuum, with Cyrille in 2010.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 October 2021

Sunset Blvd Records CD-SBR-7003
Format: CD

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When Marshall Crenshaw heard the live tracks from the early 1980s that comprise disc 1 of his new two-CD collection, The Wild, Exciting Sounds of Marshall Crenshaw: Live in the 20th and 21st Century, he was pleased to find that so many of the songs came from his album Field Day (1983), which he describes in his liner notes for this new set as his “ill-fated but legendary second album.”

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 September 2021

Turn-Up Records TU-11
Format: CD

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Rock songsmith Richard X. Heyman has been making music since the mid-1960s, starting out as a drummer. His band, The Doughboys, was signed to Bell Records but their two singles for the label didn’t make a dent in the charts. However, the band continued to play, opening for big name bands and modifying their lineup and style in an attempt to find an audience. When they folded in 1968, Heyman went solo, backing a variety of musicians, including Link Wray and Brian Wilson.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 September 2021

Blue Note Records B003346902
Format: CD

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Detroit-based jazz saxophonist Dave McMurray has crossed genres throughout his career, appearing on record and in performance with a variety of artists, including Albert King, Nancy Wilson, Geri Allen, and Iggy Pop. He was an original member of Was (Not Was), a group that itself resisted categorization, so it’s not surprising that Don Was, a founder-member of the band and current president of Blue Note Records, would bring him to the venerable jazz label. McMurray’s first release for Blue Note was Music Is Life (2018).

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 August 2021

Blue Note Records B003332501
Format: LP

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Jazz guitarist Julian Lage was only 15 when he made his first major recording, on vibraphonist Gary Burton’s Generations, in 2003. He contributed three tunes to the album, which was released the following year, and went on to make three more Burton albums. Lage has appeared on recordings by jazz composer John Zorn, trumpeter Dave Douglas, and many others—he was the guitarist on Charles Lloyd’s 8: Kindred Spirits (Live from the Lobero), released in 2020 to document the concert celebrating the saxophonist’s 80th birthday two years earlier. Lage has led or co-led more than a dozen sessions for various labels, but his latest album, Squint, is his debut for Blue Note Records.

Read more: Julian Lage: "Squint"

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 August 2021

Lester Records/BMG Rights Management (US) 538653062
Format: CD

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It’s been 11 years since the Australian band Crowded House released its last album, Intriguer, but the group’s primary songwriter and singer, Neil Finn, has kept busy. The New Zealander added two solo albums to his discography, Dizzy Heights (2014) and Out of Silence (2017), as well as a collaboration with Australian songwriter Paul Kelly (Goin’ Your Way, 2013). In 2018, he made Lightsleeper with his eldest son, Liam Finn, and joined Fleetwood Mac after the band fired Lindsey Buckingham. Finn also released a digital live album, Live: Solo at the Seymour Centre, 2010, last year as a benefit for Support Act, an Australian charity providing crisis services for performers and other workers in the music industry.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 July 2021

BMG Rights Management (UK) Ltd.
Format: 16-bit/44.1 kHz WAV download

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Chrissie Hynde, the lead singer and primary songwriter of the Pretenders, has sung a few Bob Dylan songs over the years. She appeared with Dylan when he performed at London’s Wembley Stadium in 1984, and sang a stellar version of “I Shall Be Released” at the singer’s 30th anniversary celebration in Madison Square Garden in 1992. The Pretenders have covered “Forever Young” on recent tours, and Hynde has slipped other Dylan tunes into her solo performances.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 June 2021

Exile Productions Ltd./BMG Rights Management (UK) Ltd. 538667900
Format: CD

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Van Morrison has been pretty cranky about the pandemic. He released four songs last year, one recorded with Eric Clapton, in protest of the lockdowns ordered by the UK government. Morrison, like many of his peers, is a firm believer in the value of live music, but COVID-19 has largely kept him off the road. This has given him a lot of free time, some of which he has spent in the recording studio. The result is Latest Record Project, Volume 1, a 28-song collection spread across two CDs.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 June 2021

Universal Music Enterprises B0033090-02
Format: CD

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In 2019, guitarist Peter Frampton announced that the brief tour he was preparing to begin later that year would be his last. He had received a diagnosis of a progressive muscle disorder that, he was told, would eventually limit his ability to play and sing. He released an album to coincide with that tour, All Blues, which took him back to his roots as a guitarist, especially his stint with Humble Pie in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 May 2021

Blue Note Records
Format: 16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC download

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It has been nearly 20 years since Norah Jones debuted with Come Away with Me (2002), a record whose total sales (over 27 million) could have led to a series of similarly pleasant, brisk-selling releases. Instead, she moved more firmly into a challenging singer-songwriter role, subtly altering her approach to songs from album to album, and collaborating with musicians as diverse as Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and producer-musician Danger Mouse.